A heavy footprint of breweries, distilleries, and restaurant groups.
Chicago's hospitality scene runs at a scale and a variety that few U.S. metros match. Bar TV is the channel where new-product launches and new-location openings reach the audience already standing in the venue.
Chicago-area hospitality advertising — Illinois breweries, distilleries, restaurant groups, hotel properties. Bar TV across the venues that carry the SKU plus target accounts the brewery's sales team is working, weighted to Bears Sundays and weekend dinner dayparts; programmatic for the trade pull-through window. Distribution velocity through Illinois distributor data.
Chicago's hospitality industry sits on top of three demand patterns we run flights against. The first is the craft beverage tier — Chicago has one of the deepest craft brewery and craft distillery footprints in the Midwest, and new-product launch flights for those operators run through our network at high frequency. The second is the restaurant group expansion across the metro and the collar counties — Chicago restaurant brands open new locations across the city, the close suburbs, and out into the western and northwestern suburb growth corridors. The third is the destination travel layer — Chicago feeds the broader Midwest travel calendar, and resort and hospitality groups across the region run booking-window flights through Chicago as a feeder market.
The brewery launch flight in Chicago has a recognizable shape. Eight weeks. Bar TV venues selected against the brewery's existing distribution map plus the target accounts the brewery's sales team is actively working into across the metro and the collar counties. Programmatic running parallel as the awareness layer. The flight ramps up programmatic first to build the awareness floor, then bar TV comes on heavy starting in week three and runs hot through the trade pull-through window.
New-location flights for Chicago restaurant groups follow a different shape. Twelve weeks. Tight five-to-seven-mile radius around the new location, weighted toward dinner and late-night dayparts in the bar and casual-dining venues feeding the residential catchment. The radius is wider than what we run in Boston because Chicago's residential geography is less walkable and the catchment for a new restaurant draws from a wider geographic ring. Suburb openings — Naperville, Schaumburg, Oak Park, Evanston — run against an even tighter venue list inside the immediate radius.
Destination travel flights run against the Midwest booking calendar. The audience planning a Wisconsin Dells trip, a Michigan lakeshore weekend, or a Lake Geneva booking is sitting in a Chicago bar four-to-eight weeks before they book. Bar TV in Chicago during that window converts cleanly to bookings tracked at the property level, and the cross-state booking pattern is one of the most reliable hospitality flight types we run in this market.
Programmatic stacks across all three flight types as the daytime awareness layer. Rideshare is situational and strongest for restaurant and hotel openings in the dense downtown and near-northwest corridor where the post-dinner-and-event ride window aligns with the new-location catchment.
Recent: a Midwest-regional craft brewery running a coordinated launch for a new IPA across Illinois and Wisconsin, combining bar TV placements during sports dayparts in the Chicago-area venue list with a parallel programmatic awareness layer running through the trade pull-through window. Distribution velocity tracked the flight closely and the SKU held its handles through the post-flight period.
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.
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