The flight, end to end.
Highfloor runs flights as a managed service. The methodology below is what every campaign moves through — discovery, channel mix, venue selection, creative, flight, and reporting.
A Highfloor flight runs through six phases. Discovery scopes the brief and the constraints. Channel-mix design weights bar TV, programmatic, and rideshare against the brief. Venue and audience selection builds the inventory list — with compliance review for cannabis and legal. Creative gets built or adapted for sound-off, full-screen, fifteen-second placement. The flight runs on a twelve-week standard cadence, longer for verticals where year-round coverage fits. Reporting runs weekly with full-flight reviews at end-of-cycle. The methodology below covers each phase.
What's the goal, what's the constraint, what's the geography.
Every flight starts with a fifteen-minute call. We get the vertical, the market footprint, the existing channel stack, and the bottleneck the brand is actually trying to solve. We don't run a discovery deck. We listen, we ask the operating questions a media buyer asks, and we leave the call with enough context to scope a flight against real economics rather than a generic agency template.
What we're looking for: the case mix or product line that drives the brand's marginal revenue, the geography where that revenue is concentrated, the existing budget envelope, and the regulatory or compliance constraints that will shape what we can run. For cannabis brands that means state-by-state advertising rules. For legal verticals that means each state's bar association framework. For hospitality and events it's the seasonality and the event calendar.
Bar TV is the spine. Programmatic and rideshare layer around it.
Highfloor sells three channels — bar and restaurant TV, programmatic display, rideshare in-vehicle screens — and almost every flight uses some weighted combination of all three. The channel mix decision is driven by the brief, not by what's easy to sell.
Bar TV anchors the flight when the brand needs the audience to see the spot in a venue context — cannabis, hospitality, nightlife, restaurants, dating-and-social. Programmatic carries the daytime awareness layer and runs against the audience on phones during the day. Rideshare fills the eight-to-twenty-two-minute conversion window between bar and bedroom for the verticals where after-hours coverage matters — DUI defense, nightlife, hospitality, late-night brand recognition.
We don't pitch the maximum-channel proposal. We propose the channel mix the brief actually calls for, and we'll cut a channel out of a campaign if the math doesn't justify the spend.
Where the flight runs is half the work.
Bar TV inventory is a venue list problem before it's a creative problem. The same fifteen-second spot performs differently in a high-end cocktail lounge than in a mid-tier sports bar than in a late-night entertainment-district venue. We build the venue list against the brand's audience and geography, not against whatever inventory is most available to fill.
For regulated verticals — cannabis especially — venue selection runs through compliance review against each state's audience-composition rules before the flight ships. Most adult-use cannabis states require documented venue audience composition above a 21+ majority threshold (often 71.6%, sometimes 85% or 90%); we don't run a venue that can't clear that bar.
Programmatic targeting parameters get built around the same audience signal — geo-fenced placements where it matters, audience interest where the brand has a profile, dayparted reach where the case mix dictates a window. Rideshare placements get scoped by metro corridor and daypart, weighted to the windows where the vertical's intake data actually converts.
Sound-off, full-screen, fifteen seconds. Lands in three.
Bar TV creative is a different brief than broadcast TV creative. The TV is in a venue with the venue's own audio playing — sports, music, ambient. The placement runs sound-off, full-screen, and the audience is glancing up between conversation. The creative has to work without sound and has to land its core message in the first three seconds.
We provide creative production guidance to every flight. Existing brand-standard creative often works with light cuts; net-new creative for the channel benefits from a brief built specifically for sound-off attention. For regulated verticals (cannabis, legal) we coordinate compliance review with the brand's counsel before the flight ships. Required disclaimers, prohibited claims, and per-state rule variations all get reviewed upstream of the buy.
Programmatic and rideshare creative inherits from the bar TV spot — same brand frame, same primary message, format-shifted for the placement type. Multi-format consistency is what makes the channel mix work harder than any single channel on its own.
Twelve weeks is the standard. Some run year-round.
A standard Highfloor flight is twelve weeks. That's the length most of our verticals need to see directional signal — long enough for foot-traffic attribution and call-volume tracking to register the channel, short enough that the brand can adjust the channel mix or budget at the end of the cycle without committing to a year of spend.
Some verticals run year-round. Personal injury law and DUI defense both work as continuous-coverage flights because the prospect's intake window doesn't track a seasonal calendar — the case happens when the case happens. Nightlife and events run in cycles aligned to the event series. Cannabis and hospitality typically run twelve-week sprints with renewal decisions at the end of each cycle.
We weight the flight cadence against the brand's actual conversion windows — the dayparts the case mix or product mix already converts hardest, the seasons where the brand's revenue is concentrated, the regulatory windows that dictate when certain creative can run.
Weekly cadence. Real numbers. Honest reads.
Every flight reports weekly. Channel-level impressions and frequency, venue-level proof-of-play for bar TV, geo-fenced foot-traffic attribution where the brand has a retail footprint, call-volume tracking integrated with the firm's intake system for legal verticals, and the brand's own conversion data overlaid on top of the flight cadence.
We don't paper over weak weeks. If a venue list is underperforming, we say so and rotate. If a daypart isn't converting, we shift weight. If the channel-level economics aren't supporting renewal, we'll say that too. The brand should leave the engagement with a clearer read on what works in their vertical, not a deck that papers over the numbers.
End-of-flight, the brand gets a full performance review. What worked, what didn't, what the next-cycle changes would be if the flight extends. Most flights do extend. The ones that don't usually had a brief mismatch we should have caught earlier — and that becomes the lesson for the next round.