BillboardHub: Digital Boost Helps Advertising Start-up Grow with AI Automation

BillboardHub founder Guillaume Ross is an ad guy. After years working as both a buyer and a seller, Ross saw an opportunity to serve everyone from small advertisers to advertising agencies as a billboard aggregator.

Five years after launching, BillboardHub serves customers across Canada. However, the company’s steady growth and customer demand quickly outpaced Ross’ manual processes. For many campaigns, BillboardHub would get requests involving dozens of vendors, countless emails, and hours of manually inputting data into spreadsheets.

It was inefficient, prone to error, and causing Ross’ business growth to stall. That’s what brought him to the Digital Boost program, which employs a two-step approach to AI integration: the first consisting of an assessment to determine current capabilities and identify opportunities in the areas of cybersecurity, data management, and artificial intelligence (AI). The second phase supports the implementation of solutions identified during the assessment phase to improve the company's productivity, security risk, and innovation. Digital Boost 3.0 offers funding support to offset some of the costs while working with local technology providers.

The Digital Boost program began with a comprehensive assessment of BillboardHub’s needs, conducted by NorthBound Advisory, a Saint John-based consulting firm and Digital Boost Solution Provider.

NorthBound Advisory identified that while BillboardHub’s mission was clear, it needed to simplify the buying and selling of billboard space through a centralized platform, the behind-the-scenes workflow was not as seamless. BillboardHub’s sales team was buried in repetitive tasks, such as confirming availability of billboards, generating quotes, and coordinating with vendors, all of which was done manually.

The company needed a solution that could standardize pricing and product definition, automate vendor communications and approvals, provide real-time visibility in the sales funnel and deal progress, and eliminate bottlenecks without the need to hire more staff. It needed to switch its manual system into a sleek and scalable sales process that could automate growth.

NorthBound Advisory began with a data deep clean, using AI-enabled processes to transform hundreds of inconsistent pricing rows into a structured product catalogue with unique SKUs for every billboard in its online catalogue. This enabled Ross and his team to quickly create accurate, automated quoting and get it out to the customer seamlessly.

Next, NorthBound Advisory built a custom automation engine for BillboardHub that now serves as the company’s “sales central nervous system.” This powerful system identifies all vendors tied to a deal, generates tailored quotes and purchase orders that highlight billboard details and net earnings, and automatically sends the documents via email and SMS for approval. All communications are logged in a centralized hub, while the system collects responses and flags only exceptions for review by a member of the sales team.

Thanks to the Digital Boost program and NorthBound Advisory, what used to take Ross and his team hours to complete, now happens seamlessly, providing precise, error-free information that the BillboardHub team can confidently pass on to clients.