Highfloor
Boston area · Restaurants & Delivery

Walkable density rewards a tighter radius.

Boston's inner ring is one of the most walkable urban catchments in the country, and a five-mile radius around a new restaurant location captures more meaningful audience here than the same radius would in a sprawling Sun Belt metro.

Boston-area restaurant and delivery advertising — new-location flights for chains opening in the dense urban corridors and the suburb extensions through Brookline, Newton, and Quincy. Bar TV weighted to dinner and late-night dayparts within the five-mile radius around the conversion location; programmatic for daytime; rideshare situational for delivery hot zones.

Boston's restaurant geography rewards radius flights more than most markets we run. The inner ring through Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, the Back Bay, the South End, and Jamaica Plain is dense and walkable enough that a three-to-five-mile radius around a new location captures real audience density — not just impressions. A new restaurant opening in Somerville reaches a meaningful share of its catchment through bar TV in the dozen-or-so high-traffic venues within that radius.

The new-location flight pattern in Boston is twelve weeks, three-to-five-mile radius, dinner-and-late-night dayparts in the bar and casual-dining venues feeding the residential catchment. The flight starts the week before the opening and runs through the trial-and-repeat window. Programmatic stacks on top during the daytime hours bar TV doesn't cover, weighted geographically against the same catchment.

Same-store comp campaigns weight differently in Boston than in our other metros. The college-cycle pattern — September move-in, May move-out, summer trough — affects same-store performance for restaurants in the inner ring at a scale that most national chains don't account for in their default media mix. Comp campaigns we run for Boston restaurant groups weight heavier on September-through-November and February-through-April than the equivalent flight would in Phoenix or Chicago.

Delivery platforms in Boston run against a different audience composition than in our other metros. The student-and-recent-graduate density in Cambridge, Somerville, and Allston-Brighton is the highest-converting catchment for delivery in the metro, and platform flights here weight heavier on those neighborhoods than the metro-wide demographic baseline would suggest. Bar TV in those corridors reinforces the platform's brand familiarity with the audience that converts hardest on the platform's app install or repeat-order flow.

Rideshare is situational. Strongest for delivery platforms during the late-night ride windows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday across the Cambridge-Allston-Seaport-Back Bay corridor, where the post-bar ride window converts to a delivery order within the next two hours.

Recent: a regional fast-casual chain running a twelve-week Boston-area new-location flight across the restaurant corridor surrounding a new Somerville store, weighted toward dinner dayparts at sports bars and casual dining venues within a four-mile radius. Comp-store performance held above projection through the trial window and into steady state.

Walkable corridors
Cambridge · Somerville · Brookline · Back Bay
Common flights
New location · same-store comp
Strongest dayparts
Dinner · late-night
Footprint
3–5 mile radius around the store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What does Highfloor Media actually do?

Highfloor sells three coordinated ad surfaces — a curated bar and restaurant TV network, programmatic display, and rideshare in-vehicle screens — to brands reaching active, social, out-spending audiences. We operate across Phoenix, Boston, and Chicago and specialize in regulated and conversion-window verticals: cannabis, legal, nightlife, hospitality, dating, and restaurants and delivery.

What does a campaign cost?

Pricing depends on inventory size and footprint. Small-inventory placements in very specific corridors or single-venue clusters start in the hundreds of dollars. Full regional dominance flights — multiple venues across an entire metro, layered with programmatic and rideshare — typically run in the five-figures-per-month range. Custom quotes within one business day.

How fast do campaigns go live?

Most flights launch within two to three weeks of insertion order. The path is: brief and compliance review (week one), creative review and trafficking (week one to two), in-flight (week two onward). Rush turnarounds are possible for non-regulated verticals.

Do you handle creative?

We provide the format spec and review every creative before it ships. We do not produce creative end-to-end as a default service, but we partner with brands' creative teams or external production partners and have produced cuts from existing brand assets where the brief calls for it.

How is performance measured?

Weekly venue-level and daypart-level reporting is included on every flight. For verticals where conversion measurement matters — cannabis, legal, hospitality — we add foot-traffic attribution within a five-mile radius of conversion points, branded-search and call-volume halo measurement, and category-specific metrics like draft-handle pull-through or ticket velocity.

Where does Highfloor operate?

Phoenix, Boston, and Chicago are the priority operator-controlled markets. The bar and restaurant network extends across thousands of venues nationwide, and programmatic and rideshare layer on top of that footprint per campaign.

What's the typical flight length?

Twelve weeks is standard. Some campaigns run year-round (especially legal and same-store comp restaurants). Event-driven campaigns run eight to twelve weeks, weighted toward the lead-up window. The flight length is built around the brief, not a default contract.

Opening a Boston-area location? Run the radius flight.