Indeed it doesn’t take too much to use a simple idea to win. Instead of having to block annoying ads on your smartphones or computers, Egypt’s startup Adzily has just raised $12.2 million to mount screens across restaurants and several other places to bring the ads into your face. The Cairo-based indoor advertising platform Adzily also claims to be the first of its kind in Middle East & North Africa. This would be the first external investment round raised by Adzily and one of the largest-ever raised by an Egyptian startup.

Here Is The Deal 

• The $12.2 million investment came from Al-Tharawat Private Investment Holding Company (Private Wealth Investments), a Saudi investment company.
• Adzily plans to use most of their investment to fund the expansion of its network of screens across Egypt and Saudi.
• Unlike Egypt, Adzily will face stiff competition from giants like Al-Arabia that have their screens in some of the biggest malls in the country.

“In Saudi, we’re initially focusing on cafes, restaurants, and gyms — the places where there’s no competition before we go to malls and place our screens there,” Ahmed Ashoor, co-founder of Adzily said. 

• The startup that currently counts Apple, LG and Egypt’s government among its clients is only targeting multinational brands, for now, Ahmed said. 

“We receive a lot of requests every single day from businesses who have seen our screens and are interested to buy ads on it but we’re being selective about who we want as advertisers early on.”

A Look At What Adzily Does

Founded last year by Ahmed Ashoor, Mostafa Hendawy, Mostafa Kamshish, and Mohamed Ossman, Adzily is a network of digital ad screens spread across cafes, restaurants, and gyms, that runs ads.

According to Ahmed Ashoor, co-founder and CEO of Adzily, who has co-founded and led different other startups: 

“Adzily is something like Google Ads but instead of publishing the ads on websites, we publish them on screens located in different areas in Egypt & rest of MENA. So the brands don’t only reach the audience they want to target but also get some very useful insights.”

The targeting options available on Adzily allow brands to target consumers that are at a specific location (city, area, neighborhood) or at a specific chain (e.g. Pottery Cafe). The brands also have the option to choose a specific type of audience and time for their ads. The advertisers can also add call to action (CTA) to their ads in form of QR codes and few other things made using Adzily dashboard (for advertisers).

The startup claims it currently has 200 screens installed in different cafes and restaurants in Egypt including Cafe Supreme and Pottery Cafe (both of which have a large network of branches), and plans to add 1,000 more screens in the country in the next three months and add take the number of total screens to 5,000 in Egypt in 2020. More than half of these screens will be added in Cairo and the rest in other parts of Egypt.

Startup Adzily also plans on expanding to Saudi with this investment, with plans also to install 5,000 screens in different cities of Saudi in 2020 and add another 5,000 in 2021. 

Out-of-Home advertising which is also known as outdoor advertising, as an industry, has been struggling all around the world including the Middle East & North Africa largely because of brands spending a big part of their advertising money on Facebook and Google ads. According to information available on Statista (that they have apparently sourced from different online sources), the outdoor advertisement expenditure has decreased by over 65 percent from its peak of $1.53 billion in 2014 to $529 million last year.

The internet ad spend on the other hand has been increasing in the region and is expected to reach $1.31 billion by 2021.

Egyptian startups are rounding off this year in big numbers. From everything like kids ride sharing to Swvl to Fawry, this year has seen investment concentrated not just in one sector.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world