Wowtto, a company connecting drivers with local businesses, has launched its on-car smart sticker advertising services in six English towns after successful trials in Lithuania. However, its CEO Laurynas Jokubaitis says the company wants to digitalize outdoor advertising by introducing digital screens that drivers would attach to their rear windows next year. And further innovations are also on the agenda.

Hi Laurynas. So what is Wowtto and how has the business been so far?

Laurynas: We are an advertising marketplace company that connects drivers with local businesses. In the UK, we pay car owners £50 a month for simply driving where they always do with smart stickers on their vehicles and an app turned on. It’s a new efficient way to advertise for small and midsized businesses.

For local drivers, it’s a chance to get easy extra income just for attaching stickers to their cars and keeping an app turned on as they drive their usual daily routes. For business owners, it’s a cost-effective and simple way to boost visibility and word-of-mouth in the community.

We have been doing great since our launch in the beginning of this year in Lithuania. We have a pool of 10K drivers across the country, and more than a dozen of business customers, including returning ones. Neste Oil and Lietuvos Draudimas, part of PZU, are among our business customers, to name just a few. Last week, we began operating in Bath, Chester, Guildford, Stevenage, Rochester and Lewes in the UK. These are medium-sized cities in British terms, and yet they’re often neglected by major advertising networks.

While the stickers we mail to our pool of registered drivers have been doing great in Lithuania, we’re still testing our processes and understanding the needs of SMEs. Our eventual mission is to digitalize outdoor advertising with digital screens and stickers so we can offer businesses unrivalled opportunities to efficiently promote themselves whilst contributing to local economies at the same time.

How does your service work from drivers and business perspectives?

Laurynas: We have an ever-increasing pool of drivers in each of the towns where we operate, and we can start a campaign within 2-3 weeks of receiving a client order. Then we mobilise the necessary drivers and send each of them 3 to 5 easy-to-apply stickers for their vehicles. We then monitor and analyse their routes based on pictures and app use data.

Could you then elaborate further on the digital screens?

Laurynas: We have already made a fully working prototype of a digital inside screen that drivers would attach to their rear side windows. We're also building an ad delivery platform and we plan to launch our first campaings next year in Vilnius, Lithuania. This will open yet unseen opportunities for SMEs to advertise – they will be able to target particular streets, times and audience, to set daily budgets, to be flexible. It will remind of Google or Facebook targeted advertising, just outdoors and much cheaper than current outdoor advertising. Just imagine a driver driving his usual routes and having ads displayed and changed in real time according to the time of the day, audience or the location he's riding through. This will also allow our partner drivers earn much more than 25 EUR we currently offer in Lithuania or 50 GBP in the UK – we might be talking hundreds of euros/pounds per month.

You see, current outdoor advertising is limited in terms of its reach, flexibility, data, targeting opportunities, and it is also expensive. Of course, there are fixed digital outdoor displays, but we’re working on a mobile digital solution and a location, time, and audience-based ad delivery platform.

What’s next then?

Laurynas: The sticker product has been doing so far and we’ll test inside screens next year. However, our further goal is building flexible screens that would be easily attachable to the side of a car as opposed on an inside screen. This would translate into larger advertising space (up to five outside screens as opposed to two inside displays) and more opportunities for advertisers to innovate and to be visible. We already have an early prototype of this product.