- The coronavirus caused Waze’s revenue to plunge by roughly 60%. But as cities begin reopening, the navigation app has started to pitch advertisers to return to its platform.
- Waze’s business is starting to pick up again, with app usage up 30 percentage points to around a 44% decline in miles driven. It’s also built new tools like “Location Personality” ads to attract advertisers.
- Business Insider obtained slides from a pitch deck that Waze has been using to sell the platform to retailers. The deck touts Waze’s latest ad format and shows how Waze is poised to capture consumers’ evolving purchasing habits.
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The coronavirus caused Google-owned Waze’s revenue to plunge by roughly 60%. But as cities begin reopening, the navigation app has started to pitch advertisers to return to its platform.
At the peak of the pandemic in early April, the number of miles driven on the Waze app dropped 71% as people stayed indoors, said Waze’s global head of sales, Suzie Reider. This combined with hospitality, retail, consumer packaged goods and restaurant clients cutting ad budgets caused advertisers including Starbucks and McDonald’s to flee from the platform.
Waze’s business is starting to pick up again, with app usage up 30 percentage points to around a decline in miles driven of about 44%. It’s also built new tools to respond to clients and users’ changing needs, such as “Location Personality” ads that let businesses show if they are offering drive-through or curbside pickup, and fuel integrations that let people make contactless payments at fuel stations through the app. So its sales team has been actively pitching brands, Reider said.
“The approach that our sales organization took right from the beginning was that while campaigns are paused, relationships are not,” she said. “As the world is starting to move again, we’re seeing all kinds of positive signs for our business again.”
Business Insider obtained slides from a pitch deck that Waze has been recently using to sell the platform to retailers. The deck pitches Waze’s latest ad format and makes the case that Waze is poised to capture consumers’ evolving purchasing habits. It encourages advertisers to use Waze to communicate near-term changes in their operations, adapt to changes in the mid-term, and understand changes in consumer behavior in the long run.
