How the UK's leading digital billboard network uses Zoho Campaigns—part of the Zoho suite—to operate at scale

The Company

Alight Media is the UK's leading digital billboard network measured by audience reach. Founded in 2019, the company has grown rapidly to a team of approximately 90 and today operates digital and paper out-of-home advertising units spanning more than 205 towns across the UK. Every month, an estimated 33 million people (nearly half the UK's population) see an Alight Media screen.

The company operates several types of advertising formats: large-format D48 digital billboard units, smaller D6 digital units, bus shelters, and freestanding units—plus some digital and some paper. Alight Media also holds a major partnership with Stonegate Ltd, the UK's largest pub landlord, managing advertising across 3,600 digital screens in approximately 700 venues with the "Dwell by Alight" place-based network.

A crucial part of Alight Media's story is the fact that their growth strategy was built on differentiation from day one. Alight Media deliberately expanded into towns and regions with little or no existing digital billboard presence—a positioning that defines both their commercial offer and their communication challenge.

Marketing approach

Alight Media serves multiple distinct sales channels, each with different buyer profiles, lead times, and deal sizes. Their national team works with large, recognizable brands alongside specialist agencies, where campaigns can involve significant spend across many screens and involve longer lead times. Their agency channel covers a range of deal sizes, and their direct B2B channel moves quickly; clients may need availability confirmed the same day and a booking turned around within hours.

Communicating effectively with such a varied audience, from national brand teams to local business owners, requires a marketing approach that's both consistent in brand and flexible in execution.

The challenge

When Alight Media launched in 2019, the business operated like most fast-moving startups: spreadsheets for everything, separate systems for different teams, and no central source of truth. As the company scaled rapidly from a handful of people to a 90-strong organisation, the limitations of that approach became increasingly costly.

The sales team, development team, and operations team each worked from their own systems. Information had to be re-entered manually across platforms (a very time-consuming process). Invoicing through Xero, for instance, required exporting campaign booking data to a spreadsheet and manually re-entering it. Frame and screen data—critical to Alight Media's ability to sell inventory—was held across disparate spreadsheets and paperwork, making it difficult for the sales team to quickly confirm what was available, live, or under construction.

On the client communications side, the growing business needed a way to communicate professionally, consistently, and at scale, without creating a bottleneck on design or technical resources. In short, the challenge was to build the infrastructure that could support a business growing at the pace Alight Media had set for itself, both operationally and in how it presented itself to the market.

The solution

After evaluating several leading CRM platforms, Alight Media chose Zoho CRM for one defining reason: customization. The out-of-home advertising industry has intricacies that off-the-shelf solutions simply don't account for, from the way inventory is sold (share of voice, impressions-based, and plays-based deals) to the multiple screen types, landlord relationships, and regulatory requirements. Zoho's flexibility enabled Alight Media to shape the platform entirely around how their business actually works.

Working with Zoho Partner Target Cloud, Alight Media built out a highly customized CRM environment that now underpins the entire business. Key components include:

• Custom modules: Developed specific modules for frames, billboards, LED screens, and bus shelters, each holding the specific data fields relevant to that asset type.
• Custom frame picker widget: Gives the sales team real-time visibility into screen availability and updates instantly when a frame's status changes.
• Two-way API integration with SPACE: Connects with the industry-wide platform that all UK media owners use to list screen inventory, ensuring Alight Media's CRM is always the single source of truth and that new frames go live as soon as they're built.
• Zoho Sign integration: Enables the team to generate and send booking confirmation documents for signature directly from within opportunity records.
• Xero integration widget: Automates invoice generation from campaign data, splits invoices across campaign bursts, and enables finance teams to review and send directly from within Zoho CRM.
• Zoho Creator "Specs" application: Pulls live data from the CRM and is integrated with the Alight Media website, enabling clients and prospects to search for screens by postcode or area overlaid on Google Maps.
• Zoho Forms: Used for capturing new customer details in the field and pushing data directly and cleanly into the CRM in real time.

Alongside this operational infrastructure is Zoho Campaigns, which Alight Media uses to manage client and prospect communications. The platform's easy drag-and-drop editor enables the team to design and send professional newsletters without specialist design input. They can copy and update templates to maintain visual and brand consistency across sends without adding production overhead, and the built-in reporting gives them visibility into deliverability and engagement performance.

Benefits and ROI

Zoho Campaigns has also fundamentally changed how Alight Media communicates with its customers. The shift to a fully integrated Zoho environment has transformed how Alight Media operates across every function of the business. They use Zoho Campaigns as their newsletter and outreach platform and maintain regular, professional communications with clients and prospects across all three channels.

Before adopting Zoho Campaigns, the business lacked a consistent communication channel. "We use Campaigns to send monthly newsletters to our clients to keep them informed on both industry developments and company updates," Gillian says. "It has also enabled us to share expert advice and insights with our SME partners, particularly around running effective outdoor campaigns, while also helping us connect with new prospective clients."

That structured approach yielded highly measurable results across their core channels:

• SME Partner Newsletter: Sent monthly to over 2,200 SME partners, achieving an average open rate of 27.8%.
• Media Agency & Specialist Newsletter: Sent monthly to 250 media agency and outdoor planning specialists, achieving an average open rate of 23%.
• Structured Nurturing: Allowed the marketing team to establish a more structured and engaging approach to long-term client communications.

Looking forward​

Alight Media has built a technology foundation that is designed to scale with the business. As the company continues to expand its screen estate across the UK—adding new towns, new formats, and new venue partnerships—the Zoho infrastructure will grow with it. New frames feed automatically from CRM to SPACE and to their client-facing website—meaning the system becomes more valuable with every screen that goes live.

For the communications function, Zoho Campaigns will continue to be the platform through which Alight Media maintains regular contact with its growing client and prospect base, which keeps the brand visible and the message consistent across all three sales channels. Looking ahead, the team plans to leverage the platform for more targeted client outreach, expanding its use beyond regular newsletters.

To learn more about Alight Media, visit their website.