With its first DOOH-powered charging station installed in Richmond Hill last week, Jolt has officially launched in Canada.

First announced in April, Jolt offers Canadians free EV charging, which is subsidized by integrated DOOH advertising. Although it wouldn’t share a specific timeframe, the plan is to install 5,000 charging stations in Canada.

“Our focus and plan are to identify quality locations that can bring value to all of those involved – whether that’s our advertising partners, governments, landowners, or EV drivers,” Louise Downs, head of marketing and communications, at Jolt tells MiC. “Priority is densely populated urban areas, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary.”

Brendan Dillon, country manager at Jolt adds that the audience viewing the DOOH are “high-value EV” users, and that the boards are positioned at high-traffic roadside locations. The company also collects first-party data via its app, which consumers download in order to charge their vehicles.

The company wouldn’t comment on which advertisers have signed on for the launch, except to say that it is live in all programmatic platforms. The company will be doing its own ad sales for the Canadian market. Dillon, who was most recently VP of digital and programmatic at Outfront Media, will be managing the sales side and starting to build and scale out that team as the roll-out continues across the country.

Jolt first launched in Australia and is now that country’s largest free EV charging and DOOH network, as well as in New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

“Canada as a country and its government on all levels have ambitious and dedicated goals to make it a sustainable community – needing more than 200,000 EV chargers to be installed by 2030,” says Downs. “Jolt provides level 3 free and fast charging for these cities. We cover full install and maintenance costs and actually provide the cities or private landlords an annual lease fee, so it is a revenue generator for cities and landlords.”