If you walked down Wabash Avenue in the South Loop or Fulton Market Street in the West Loop, you’d come across digital messages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about precautions people should take during the Covid-19 pandemic.
And these digital displays, which entail engaging graphics and videos, are powered by a new Chicago startup that’s aiming to change the way brands find advertising space.
Visual Feeder, founded by siblings Eddie and Yaxi Yang, connects landlords with brands that want to use their vacant retail window space for digital, street-level ad campaigns. The ads are displayed in windows using projection mapping technology, and the end result is a full motion ad in high-traffic commercial real estate locations.
“These vacant spaces can stay vacant for a very long time up to, on average, over a year,” Eddie Yang said.
Visual Feeder landed ride-sharing giant Lyft as its first client a couple years ago, displaying a three-month ad campaign for the company in Wicker Park and Lincoln Park. Visual Feeder later partnered with Adidas and helped it find vacant retail window space in Fulton Market for a shoe campaign.
Additionally, Visual Feeder has worked with the organizers of New York Fashion Week to display brand ads around the city.
“We know that the future of advertising will be engaged as an experience,” Yang said. “Advertising is definitely moving more into an experience manner.”
Visual Feeder was originally launched in 2018 as a creative agency, designing installations for brands.
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“I come from an art background, creating different visual content,” said Yang, who studied design and visual communications at Columbia College Chicago. “Going to Columbia, I really got into 3D animation and special effects.”
Last year, Visual Feeder pivoted to its current model, connecting property owners to brands as a way to help them make income on an otherwise vacant space. The startup works with real estate brokers to find property owners with vacant retail space, and advertising rates for brands fluctuate depending on the location and size of the property. The startup operates a revenue-share model in which landlords receive 25-30 percent of the ad cost, and Visual Feeder keeps the rest.
Depending on the client, Visual Feeder helps brands design the ads that are displayed. Other times, brands design ads themselves and use Visual Feeder to find the available window space. The startup also provides its clients with real time analytics collected through sensors installed on the display that track when and how long campaigns are being viewed.
Besides working with individual brands, Visual Feeder has also begun working with shopping malls. The startup inked a partnership with the 900 N. Michigan shops on the Magnificent Mile to help the shopping center make extra ad revenue on its vacant spaces.
So far, Visual Feeder has raised $120,000, which it received from being accepted into the Techstars Chicago accelerator. The program hosted its first virtual demo day last month due to the coronavirus pandemic, which Visual Feeder participated in.
“We definitely missed out on a live demo day,” Yang said. “But we were also able to reach a lot more people.”
Techstars was originally founded in Colorado in 2006 and launched a Chicago operation in 2013. It provides startups with capital, mentors and networking opportunities. Through connections Yang made in Techstars, he said he was able to solidify a partnership with commercial real estate firm CBRE.
“It was really great,” Yang said. “It’s all about the connections.”
