Every now and then we like to highlight a new IAB Australia member that we think our community will find interesting. Today we meet billups. Written by James Poole, Senior Programmatic Manager at billups.
1. Please give us some historical background to the company.
billups was founded in 2003 with a clear objective: to bring greater accountability to Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising. At a time when most media channels were becoming increasingly measurable, OOH remained difficult to quantify and optimize. billups saw an opportunity to change that by combining OOH planning and buying with data, analytics, and measurement.
Over the past two decades, that approach has shaped the company's growth. Rather than following the traditional agency model, billups has expanded by investing in technology, data, and specialist expertise that strengthen its ability to plan, measure, and optimize campaigns.
Since 2023, the company has welcomed Outsight, TAC Media, OOH Labs, and Billie Media, expanding its presence across Belgium, Canada, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. The acquisition of Billie Media marked billups' entry into the ANZ market, bringing together local market expertise with billups' global technology and measurement platform.
Technology continues to play a central role in the business. billups has developed patented audience targeting and measurement capabilities, launched audrai™, its AI-powered recommendation engine, and introduced products such as the Airport Dashboard to help advertisers better understand campaign performance in airport environments. The appointment of the industry's first Global Head of AI, alongside continued expansion across Southeast Asia, reflects billups' ongoing investment in the future of OOH.
Today, billups operates across more than 20 markets as an independent, founder-led OOH managed services company. By combining local market knowledge with global technology and analytics, the company helps advertisers make more informed decisions and deliver measurable business outcomes.
2. Tell us a little bit about your company's mission and vision.
billups' mission is to make Out-of-Home advertising as measurable, accountable, and data-driven as every other media channel.
We believe advertisers should have the same level of transparency, optimization, and performance measurement from OOH that they expect from digital media. That's why we combine planning, buying, analytics, and measurement into a single managed service that helps clients understand not only where their campaigns run, but the business outcomes they generate.
Our vision is to position OOH as a core performance channel within the modern media mix while preserving what makes it unique: its ability to create shared, real-world experiences at scale.
As an independent, founder-led business, we're able to focus on long-term innovation and client outcomes rather than the priorities of a holding company or private equity owner.
3. Do you have a particular "hero product" or service that you are most proud of?
Our flagship offering is billups Analytics™, the proprietary platform that powers how we plan, measure, and optimize Out-of-Home campaigns.
The platform combines patented audience modeling, mobile movement data, and location intelligence to help advertisers understand who has the opportunity to see a campaign, not simply how many vehicles or pedestrians pass a location. It considers factors such as visibility, viewing angles, audience behaviour, and attention to provide a more accurate picture of campaign performance.
For advertisers, this means smarter planning, audience-based measurement, attribution, and the ability to optimise campaigns using real-world performance data. Interactive mapping and visualisation tools also make it easier to compare markets, evaluate creative performance, and demonstrate business outcomes.
By bringing greater transparency and accountability to OOH, billups Analytics™ helps clients make better investment decisions and has contributed to raising the industry's expectations for measurement.
4. What area of digital do you personally work in and how do you hope to enhance this within your business?
I work in Programmatic Out-of-Home as Senior Programmatic Manager and APAC Lead at billups. My focus is growing programmatic trading across the region by helping agencies and advertisers adopt more automated, audience-led ways of buying OOH.
I work closely with media owners, demand-side platforms (DSPs), and technology partners to expand programmatic opportunities while demonstrating the commercial value of data-driven buying. As audience data and OOH inventory become more closely connected, advertisers have greater flexibility to reach the right audiences without sacrificing the scale and impact that make the channel unique.
Looking ahead, I want to continue building programmatic maturity across APAC by strengthening partnerships, expanding marketplace opportunities, improving pipeline visibility, and supporting local teams as programmatic becomes an increasingly important part of the media mix.
5. Please tell us what, as a child, you wanted to be when you grew up?
I always wanted to work in digital out-of-home, so that worked out well.