Echo Poster
An ERP for a Berlin OOH agency: from quote through signature to campaign and depot, with AI-prepared location analysis.
About the project
Out-of-home advertising differs from online advertising in one thing: selling is not enough, somebody has to go there. A poster goes up somewhere, an LED bike rides a route, a promotion team stands out on a square. Behind every campaign there is a depot, a piece of equipment and a person who has to be present.
Echo Poster is a Berlin agency doing exactly that: posters, digital outdoor surfaces, large formats, guerilla and street promotion in Germany and Europe. We build the system that holds all of it together.
Where the chain broke
The usual trouble is neither in sales nor in delivery, but between the two. The deal is closed in the CRM, the signed quote travels by e-mail, somebody writes the campaign into a spreadsheet, and the depot finds out by phone that 10 items are needed next Tuesday.
Each step works on its own, it's the handovers that slip: that's where information gets lost, where deadlines drift, and where it turns out the day before a campaign that the equipment promised is in another city.
One system from quote to delivery
What we built is an ERP that carries this chain end to end: a quote becomes a signature, a signature becomes a campaign, a campaign has equipment and a depot attached, and every step stays in the same system.
The depot part is what you would suspect the least from the outside. If you have only ever seen the advertising side of a poster, this half was invisible. A piece of equipment is not simply there or not there: it is somewhere, with someone, and if it moves elsewhere the person it is taken from has to approve that. On paper this is admin; in practice it's what decides whether a campaign starts on time.
Where AI comes in
In 2 places, and neither is spectacular, but both genuinely earn their keep.
One is analysing the surroundings of advertising sites. The value of an outdoor surface is not decided on its own but by what is around it: the few things nearby that tell you who passes through. Somebody used to do that work by hand; now AI prepares it and a human decides on it.
The other is more prosaic: translating rate cards. They work across several markets, and the same offering is needed in several languages. This is the task type AI genuinely does well, and that people find boring and error-prone.
I think that is the right ratio. AI works where it prepares and translates, and the decision stays with the person accountable for it. I wrote about this under AI-based process automation.
The gap between the systems
If your company lives in several systems, the most expensive fault is not inside any one of them but in the gaps between them. Look at whether an order's path at your place can be followed in a single place, or whether something has to be typed in again at every boundary.
And if that sounds familiar, look at the entsorgo story as well: there the same realisation grew a webshop into an ERP.