CELect students help iSite with media pricing strategy

iSite Media, a St-Louis-based startup, has tapped into an incredible advertising market: men’s and women’s restrooms.

The company places digital display advertising in sports stadiums both above urinals in the men’s rooms and around the women’s restrooms.

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Sarah Podolsky, BSBA 2019, wrote this blog post on behalf of the CELect program.

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Now established partners with Mizzou and Enterprise Center, our Olin Business School team was eager to join the project in helping iSite Media’s pricing strategy.

To start, the team had an initial meeting downtown at T-Rex with iSite Media COO Chuck Donaldson III. Chuck shared his enthusiasm for this untapped market and was excited to see how our CELect team could add value. We were lucky enough to even get a tour of the new installations in the Enterprise Center.

After a great kick off, our team got to work with a competitive pricing analysis. We sought to understand both how other competitors are pricing their advertising and also the value-add of iSite Media.

We immediately recognized that iSite Media differentiates on two levels. First, it offers concrete impressions: The placement of advertisements above urinals ensures undivided attention from the audience. Second, a sports stadium offers a great, identified target audience for many advertisers. We decided to keep these two differentiators top of mind as we began our competitive analysis.

Using our team’s diverse background—a mix of BSBAs and MBAs with a range of business experience in different fields—we were able to gain a holistic understanding of the project. We first looked internally at the pricing of other stadium advertising and discovered that the average CPM was quite high for much fewer concrete impressions. We got to a similar conclusion for external advertising (i.e., billboards and social media advertising).

This CEL project with iSite Media has been an incredible way to get hands-on experience in both consulting and entrepreneurship. Our final research paper will outline exactly how we hope to add value to iSite Media and our suggested pricing strategy for both the short and long-term.