In The Pit: The Journey of Building Your Personal Brand hosted by Swell.ai Founder, Cody Schneider (Appearance on In The Pit Podcast)

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Originally aired on the In The Pit podcast with Swell.ai co-founder, Cody Schneider, in this episode, Cody interviews Tim Rowe, Host of OOH Insider and goes under the hood of How OOH Marketing and Advertising works and inside the growth engine that powers the OOH Insider podcast, a Top 100 Apple Podcast.

We discuss the importance of learning the skills required to produce and grow a podcast, including content creation and marketing and emphasize the significance of having good distribution for content above everything else. Overall, the episode provides insights into the world of OOH advertising, podcasting and the strategies for success with both.

Connect with Cody here https://www.theoohinsider.com/guests/cody-schneider/

Key Moments

[00:00:09] Podcasting challenges and growth.

[00:04:58] Dominating attention in physical spaces.

[00:07:12] Billboard campaigns targeting specific audiences.

[00:12:05] Terrible show notes and SEO.

[00:13:57] Detaching from perfectionism.

[00:19:59] YouTube shorts viewership strategy.

[00:23:20] Explosive YouTube growth.

[00:25:37] Building media brands with AI.

[00:28:43] Podcasting changing lives and businesses.

[00:33:19] The magic of billboards.

[00:36:20] Growing social accounts through algorithms.

[00:38:46] Cheap and effective advertising.

[00:42:49] Ramen profitable?

[00:47:13] AI and people with lots of tabs.

[00:53:03] Deterministic measurement and market feedback.

[00:56:12] The power of niche media.

Mark your calendars! OOH Insider LIVE! NYC on February 11, 2024 - details to follow, stay tuned.

Transcript

Swell AI Transcript: https://shorturl.at/flFV9

Cody Schneider: Yeah, it's fun, right? Yes. I'm stoked to have you here.
Tim Rowe: Dude, I'm stoked to be here.

Cody Schneider: Yeah. Okay. So right before I hit record, you were telling me you're like out of podcasting entirely. And then you were just like, figured out kind of these workflows to do it. And this, you know, kind of automated the content production process. What did that look like talking through that?

Tim Rowe: Totally, because when I started this podcast, we actually just hit four years. And anytime I use we it's the figurative we and that it's just me. I'm just one person. So I'm just a man. I'm just a man. And with a podcast about billboards nonetheless. So it's not like there was ever this Joe Rogan ask available mass audience. I knew that it was always going to be a small audience. But what I didn't know was one, just how hard it is to do a podcast, right? Like doing a podcast and learning how to do a podcast. That's its own skill set. in itself. And then on top of that, if you want to grow said podcast, you also have to learn how to become like a growth marketer, and be able to put all of that together to unlock the value from the podcast from your guests from all the conversations that are going on.

Cody Schneider: So yeah, it was probably the classic content marketing, like challenge is like people like, oh, I just make content and it's like, that's like, that's, you know, 50% of this. Right. Um, a lot of the times I, I don't know, I always add, like, I always advocate for this, but like, It's better to make hacky, shitty content and have good distribution than to have really good polished content and have no distribution because it's going to make zero impact. You see this all the time, right? It's just some kid that is recording on his iPhone and it's a TikTok, right? It does more business impact than anybody that does production or gets in a studio, etc. Okay. For me too, because this is, I mean, we've talked on Twitter and stuff, but we haven't talked in IRL yet. So tell, tell me, tell me a little bit about like what you do. So you're in the, you're in, I mean, you do billboards, you're in this space. It's called an out of, out of home marketing or am I?

Tim Rowe: It's a terrible category, right? It's OOH. If you ever see that acronym flying around, that's what it is. OOH stands for out of home. Anytime you see OOH in your head, just say out of home. No one says OOH. So there's like the friendly community pro tip. Now everyone's a pro. You just say out of home anytime you see the acronym. But it is. It's anything. It's a billboard. It's a wrapped bus. It's a bus shelter. It's a sign above a urinal. It's anything you come into contact with in the physical world.

Cody Schneider: Amazing, amazing. Okay, so that makes total sense. The thing that I'm curious about is like, is it mainly just billboards? Or like, what is that? What does that look like? What's kind of the landscape of this? And I know we have a ton of questions from Twitter, I'll probably get into that. So I want to get it. My kind of my roadmap on this is like, I want to learn a little bit about billboards. I know shit, right? Like my background's digital. That's all I really have a deep understanding of. Um, the physical stuff is the only thing I've really done is like direct mail. Um, but I, I want to learn about like what, you know, your world is. And then from there, I wanna hear about how you are basically like growth hacking YouTube shorts, because that will just get into the meat of that content. And then from after that, we have all these questions that people have about this world and this space. And I think going in that direction might be super interesting. Does that sound good?

Tim Rowe: Cool. That sounds awesome.

Cody Schneider: Awesome, man. Hell yeah. Okay, so it's billboards. Is there any other kind of like big, like, you know, what are the other, the physical spaces that people are buying through, like doing these ad buys through?

Tim Rowe: Billboards is gonna be the most largely recognizable, no pun and all pun intended, take that however you want. That's most of the money that's spent on out of home is on traditional large format roadside billboards. And it's actually, it's interesting because out of home has a long tail more similar to Facebook. in that 80% of the revenue comes from outside of the top 100 advertisers. It's small and local businesses that make up the lion's share of out-of-home spending. That's Joe's Pizza. That's the nail salon downtown. It's onesie-twosie billboards for small and local businesses make up the backbone of out-of-home. Inventory-wise, it's mostly billboards. But then when you get into the big cities and metropolitan areas, it becomes really an exercise in understanding people, understanding attention, understanding movement. How do people move through physical spaces? And then how can I dominate their attention when they're there? So if that's inside of a subway, it could be subway cards.

Cody Schneider: So you're almost mapping that? That's super interesting, actually.

Tim Rowe: The really, really interesting thing is, and it always has been, but the real world is now more deterministic than the internet because with privacy laws, with iOS 14.5, when those things went into place, out of home had been using data sets from commercial real estate and retail intelligence. What's interesting is the data collected for those use cases isn't impacted by privacy laws for data collecting information about ad targeting online. So now you can sit down with an advertiser and say very confidently, oh, you're chewy and you want to target PetSmart customers in the Chicago DMA. Here's exactly what roads they take to get to and from PetSmart. Here's where they spend time during their day. Here's where the other places that they're going. So now you can create a campaign that's really targeted. combine billboards, combine some place-based media kiosks at the mall, et cetera, direct mail, insert and zip codes. Now you've got a full funnel approach that makes a lot of sense and you are super efficient doing it.

Cody Schneider: I never thought about it like that, like full step. Also, it makes total sense. I mean, everybody's talking about this right now, but like third party cookies and like, I think everybody's trying to figure out like, how the hell do I track a anything I'm doing, right? Like coming, you know, it'll all kind of change in 2024. But it's super interesting to me that it's like this thing that's been here for forever, it's going to stay there for forever. And it's actually going to be maybe even more accurate. Like the ROI is less measurable, but the accuracy of like knowing that media buy is happening or like that data is more accurate, which is crazy. So I had a quick question, actually. I'm seeing people or brands do this more and more now where they almost say like, they're thinking about the digital media attention that they can get from this billboard. So they're trying to say something ridiculous so that basically some people take it and they post it to social, right? And so then they get all that impression reach. I feel like the Super Bowl has turned into that as well, where it's like, what's the most ridiculous thing we can say? But the smaller scale of this is this billboard. I know, you know, an example off the top of my head that I can think about is like some of these work from home companies and they put the billboards up when you're, when you're, for Apple employees, when they were like driving to Apple and it's like, like tired of the commute, like work, you know, work from home or, you know, they had something basically that was like specifically targeting them. Are you seeing campaigns like that happen more often? Like, could you talk to me about that?

Tim Rowe: Yeah, it's funny actually that the kind of work from home, uh, worked with a brand called Robin and good. Okay. Um, I'll just reset there. Um, it's funny, but the, the, the work from home, uh, theme, I worked with a company called Robin and they have an app that helps employees know, Hey, which teams are coming into the office today? Who's got which conference room booked out. And they did a billboard campaign in Boston and we, we picked high traffic, like really dense sitting traffic bumper to bumper roads. that poured in from the burbs into downtown and what was funny was on one of the morning news updates, the helicopter was hovering next to the billboard. And that was the backdrop for the person reading the traffic report was the billboard campaign targeting the work from home input. So there's the earned media factor where the campaign is the content. And whether that's virtual or whether that's doing a billboard where there's lots of people sitting in traffic, it's becoming more of a tactic and how do I, how do I take this content from my real world campaign and parlay that into my best performing content in my other proven tactics?

Cody Schneider: That's super interesting. It's almost like guerrilla marketing is like flowing over into it. Like what you traditionally would do where it's like they, you know, I'm just thinking about like Adidas and they're projecting up like their logo on. something, right? That was like this whole way to kind of get this attention. But now in this age of social media and like how quickly we can basically create this media content and it's so abundant. It's like, how do I do this thing that like people will share? And I feel like that is going to become more and more of like a creative's role is like, what is this thing that gets that share to happen, that earned media to happen? So anyways, super interesting. I just, I remember reading about that. And so I wanted to get kind of your take on it, but Okay, change of pace. Talk to me about YouTube. I know you've been just gaming YouTube shorts and I want to hear what's been working. Educate the people, man. Lay it out.

Tim Rowe: All right. I'm going to, I'm going to, so, and this is to kind of tie off on the question that you'd asked where in the open about potentially walking away from podcasting, there's not a huge, huge audience. That's like salivating over out of home billboard related content, though. I think it's very interesting. And the conversations are similar to this. It was mid-summer and Cody Schneider hits my feed on Twitter. And I'm like, who is this guy talking all these things? And as I started to follow along with your journey, I think that you had just launched Draft Horse and Swell was on the way and really, really early on. And I like to consider myself someone who's beta tolerant. So as soon as it was available, I jumped into Swell because one of the big challenges that I've had in growing a podcast is, back to those two early things, you've got to learn how to do a podcast and then you've got to learn how to grow it. Well, doing all of like the written stuff is actually it's a total conflict of being a podcaster, right? We communicate in one of two ways. We either we're writers or we're speakers like this. These are just two accepted facts. So that's that was really hard for me to sit down and be like, OK, I'm going to write show notes. and titles. It's a nightmare.

Cody Schneider: I mean, that's where the origin of this came from. Yeah, man. It's, I mean, so like where this all came from originally was like, I was doing some consulting for an early stage startup and like the best way to build brand when you just like raise the seed round and nobody knows who you are is you make a podcast and you get it in front of your entire target audience, right? And that like overnight, so like we took the founders and like one of the founders, one of the founders was a host. Right. And so we took them from like, nobody knows who they are. And 12 months later, like people are recognizing her at conferences and like trying to come talk to her because like the whole industry listens to this podcast. Right. There was like 30,000 people on their email list. I mean, it's just this incredibly impactful way to like get brand from zero to one. Right. Um, but anyways, yeah. Like what we saw is really the, like the post-production sucks. All of the good, like that's where all the value comes from though. Like terrible show notes. Like you just don't get downloads. Like it's just like a part of it from like a podcast SEO standpoint. And there's a lot of argument around that from what the data I've seen, it's valuable, right?

Tim Rowe: No kidding. That's interesting.

Cody Schneider: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. A lot of people. Yeah. We don't, we won't go deep on that, but the repurposing is like, that's the magic, right? It's like, I can do a one long form piece of content and then I can shop it up for into my whole week's worth of stuff. And it's like, I mean, we, and we see people do this all the time where it's like, okay, cool. Like I record a site fireside chat. We're going to do it with this, this exact thing. Right. It's like, I'm going to record a fireside chat or talk to an industry expert. We're going to then chop it up into like five different LinkedIn posts, like you know, make 21 different tweets and I'll do clips across all of my social media channels. We'll do a blog post. And suddenly it's like, I have all the content. And as a founder, all I had to do was sit down for 45 minutes and maybe, you know, have an hour of mental energy to create that out, like the output, the actual content repurposing now using these AI tools like swell. So anyways, just brain jumping this thing, but it's crazy to me that like, this is now possible. Like I used to have to have like 10 people on a content team when I worked, you know, Like 100% we could do this and it would take hours like hours. Yeah. And now it's like, you know, I have a scheduling app and I met AI is doing all the repurposing. I touched it up with some human elements maybe. And like, that's, that's it. That's my whole process. And the rest of it is like spent on other things. Right.

Tim Rowe: So I think that's where people, people lose it is, is they're, they're, they're focused on, I've got to make this perfect output and this perfect product. And you're viewing it through the lens as, as yourself. Once you can detach from that reality and understand that, wait, the bar should be for yourself. Is this content that I would listen to? Would I watch this podcast, listen to this conversation? set that bar for yourself and then for the content detach yourself from reality and and and that was the big unlock was understanding that wait this is a distribution game i've got at that point almost four years now four years of content about a topic that no one else has gone this deep on. Like kid that it's the Stanford MBA of out of home. A Stanford MBA takes 85 hours. There's like 200 plus hours of content about out of home advertising from not not Tim Rowe. It's not me blabbering. It's people that are way smarter than me. They've been doing it for way longer time. So for my own growth curve, like the, the, the learning curve within the industry was so accelerated. I don't even know how to like compute that kind of the story that you shared about the founder and being kind of recognized at industry events and things like that. I'm relative to my industry legacy folks 2030 40 year careers with the same companies getting the gold Rolex getting recognized at the big industry trade shows. I've been in here for four years and that whole time I've been doing a podcast out of home because like you I was a digital marketer and then I saw the impact of out of home show up in Google Analytics. I'm like more people need to know about this stuff. So specifically my workflow, this is, this is what I do. I record an episode. I have a little bit of a different workflow today than I had, you know, a few years ago and just recording an episode. But generally I do like a meet and greet before the episode. And we come, come up with a vibe check, a vibe check. Yeah. Is this going to be good? Cause sometimes it's not. You know, like there's there is some there's value to going through the struggle, right? There's value to going through those really, really hard ones. But once you get to the point where you can say no to people, learn how to say no to people, because that's maybe been one of the best things for this kind of next chapter of growth for me is turning people away because you do get to a level where you have critical mass and now other people want to be in your shit. They just want to be near you and you have to become very protective of that. You still have to be a platform that enables growth community and do all of those things, but just the same. Now you have an obligation to the community to protect from outsiders, um, that might be trying to get in for whatever their self-serving purposes are. So it becomes this, this balancing act, but in terms of creating the finished product. record an episode, it's generally about 35 minutes, we do that inside of Riverside. I export the episode from Riverside, and then I do two things. I upload it to YouTube, just to get that, like, I use YouTube as free storage, really, and for part of my workflows. I'm not a man of independent wealth or, you know, means anything like that, so I'm trying to find any arbitrage that I can. YouTube is my storage center, so I download it from Riverside, I upload it right away to YouTube. From YouTube, I copy-paste that link into Swell, and I copy-paste that link into Opus, and then I wait for Swell to render. So I've timed this before. Actually, if you go to theohinsider.com forward slash workflow, you can go there and steal this whole workflow completely for free. All the resources are there. Copy paste the link from YouTube to Swell to Opus. Once Swell does its job and all of that great content is there, I go in and I grab those keywords. And I wasn't doing this initially, but I was like, how can I get better clips out of Opus? So then I went in and I grabbed the keywords out of Swell. I copy paste the keywords from Swell into Opus. So now Opus knows what to look for inside of that 35 minute episode or so. From that, there will be about 15 to 20 clips. I just go through, I think you use the word soundcheck, just go through soundcheck them. Make sure that they sound, Opus is good too, because it gives you like a score. So if it's below a certain score, I'm like, oh, I'm not getting a 62. I'm like, that is still failing, even if that was my average through high school. So I'm looking for the best clips. I generally get like 10 to 15. All the hard work is done for me, right? The show notes, key timestamps, moments, quotes, all that stuff's well is done. Now I've got 15 clips to kind of edit. I don't do a lot of post-production for my podcast itself. I add an intro, I line up the music bed. Done. That's it.

Cody Schneider: That's the finished product episode. I have a hook at the beginning, and then it's like, who we're talking to today, brought to you by, and then I just jump right into it. For me, it's like the big, we just saw a consumption piece where it's like, I want them in the content in under 60 seconds. Right. Yes. Like everything. Like I have them hooked in the first 15 seconds. I have 15 seconds of like who we're going to be hearing from like 15 seconds CDA and at that like CTA. And then at that point, it's like right into the content because like we've we've just found like you have that is the window basically to get somebody like hooked into the podcast. And then of course you got to get, you know, bring bangers like throughout the whole thing. But anyways, just so, so you have these clips now and you take them and talk to me. So, I mean, you just, I think you, uh, DME, it was like two weeks ago and you're like, yo, I'm getting just ridiculous views on YouTube shorts right now. Talk to me about that. And like what you've done there, because that's just like, I think everybody's trying to figure this out right now. So.

Tim Rowe: Everybody's trying to figure it out. I was trying to figure it out too. And that's getting back all of the time, getting back all of the time from not having to do all of the mundane tasks we just talked about. It's given me new capacity to realign and shift focus. So I sit in my living room, my desk is in my living room, and the living room TV is right next to me. I have a 10-year-old son who watches a lot of YouTube shorts on the living room TV. So I'm sitting here and I'm watching him and I'm watching him watch the YouTube shorts and I'm watching the ones that he skips through. And then I'm watching the ones that he watches and then he'll watch a loop. He'll watch them on three, four times over and over again. And there's, there's commonalities between all of them. Sometimes it's clearly AI generated content. It's just AI reading a description about what's happening in a scene. So I started asking him, I'm like, what. Why do you keep watching these clips? Or what is it that's interesting about these clips? So I'm using my 10-year-old for market research on YouTube Shorts. And what I noticed was that there was a common structure to them.

Cody Schneider: I'm trying to give you one of those, but we're not having luck. I mean, I heard you.

Tim Rowe: You can borrow I know I might just rent mine out just son as a service. There's the new sass. You can you could ask him questions about YouTube him and his friends market research. But the thing that I started to realize is, it's all it's the jump cuts. It's the zoom in zoom out. It's the funny gifts. So I thought, okay, if I can make this workflow work for me, I am going to reinvest my time into the clips. So now my entire focus of the podcast production is getting to the clips. And I spend about five minutes finishing each clip inside of V.io. And I don't go crazy. I use the same music. If you can check out my content on any socials, it's the same music in every single video, right? Because you watch TikTok and it's like, why is this same stupid song trending on every video? I don't know. You don't give a shit as a consumer. Why do I give a shit as a producer? My goal is consumption, right? My goal is distribution for the sake of consumption. So I stopped overthinking those things. Same music bed in every single one. Same bumper outro in every single one. Interesting thing about adding the bumper outro, I'm not saying it's only because of this, since I started adding it, direct traffic up 150%. Insane. What's that outro like?

Cody Schneider: Is it just like a go here?

Tim Rowe: It's like a three second animated typewriter effect that goes the oohinsider.com. at the end with a black background. So you watch to the end, you're getting my URL just just absolutely water torture drip, drip, drip right into your face.

Cody Schneider: And because the goal is consumption link, they're actually going and like googling the brand name. Correct.

Tim Rowe: I'm training them. I'm training them to remember the URL the way that I need them to remember it. Holy shit. Cody like I like I'm not trying to like pump you up like yourself. You'll want I can I can go back to go back to in growth. We trust episode one that whatever week that was that culmination of what was happening in the universe for me. I was about to get out of podcasting. Right. I've seen I you could follow my Twitter and see some of the clips and tweets that I share about the YouTube growth. It's been explosive. Like every single day, I think for the last week and a half, I've been averaging twenty five thousand plus views a day. And it's not just solely on my B2B content, but it's, it's on things that I'm recognizing don't have a means of distribution otherwise. There's a lot of, um, CGI generated kind of virtual out of home, you know, a dragon or a Jersey hanging over the London bridge and things like this. I realized these clips are getting shared kind of like around the out-of-home industry circles. And I'm sure for the brands, they're resonating with their base. But where else are these things being distributed? So I'm just adding those to my distribution flow as well. And guess what? I've added 90 new subscribers in the last three weeks. This is insane. Are they going to come back and consume all my B2B? I'm just looking at it right now.

Cody Schneider: Oh, yeah. You see it? Yeah. Yeah, it's like a B2B. I mean, again, you're in a B2B. I mean, that's crazy, right? And like, if you close one of these deals from an inbound for this, I mean, the customer lifetime value is probably stupid. Like, so it's, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I I think that's the thing that people don't realize. It's like, yeah, I got a thousand views, right? But if the ad buy is 1.5 million, you're going to take a 10% rake. It's like, cool. One of those pays for the whole thing existing. So it's like, make 10 of those happen in a year. It's funny, I've been talking to people about this more and more of like, if I was 22 right now, and I had no idea like what to do with my life, and I was like, how do I make money on the internet? The first thing I would do is I would go start an agency that's powered by AI. I would do like clip making or something, right? Where it's like, and then I would cold email and cold DM every podcast in the US that's published something in the last 30 days, right? There's like 300,000 of them. and I'd get the 10k MRR. And then what I would do is that I would go make a podcast about something like the content marketing podcast or whatever. And I would go and I'd blow that up. And then I'd build these media brands because I'm thinking about your industry. So I was just talking to a friend She's in the supply chain management space and she built a network basically. So she started her own thing and then she built a network and she's now selling ads on this network that she basically is administering to the entire supply chain software industry. And I'm asking her, I'm like, how are you doing with this? And she's like, Cody, the money is stupid. And like, you know, last time I saw her, it was at like a conference, right? And she's just like, I'm talking just laced up with like gold, like just like jewelry. Like I'm like, something has changed, right? And what I'm realizing is like these, I was like, are there competitors in the space? And she's like, it's just me. They like, they have one option to buy audio ads on, right? These software companies. But I had the whole industry listening to this. So like, of course they're gonna come here. And so what I'm trying to say is you can build these multi-million dollar media companies right now as just a solo creator if the niche has money and isn't super competitive. On this thing, we're just talking about marketing stuff, right? But there's totally 100% an opportunity where it's like, I'm focusing on founders and I'm focusing on marketing people. They typically have budgets. So it gets to a place where I can sell ad spend on this and it basically subsidize itself. I hire a producer, it does the whole thing. I imagine you're thinking about the same thing. But anyways, just brain dumping these things that I'm seeing right now where it's like, you couldn't do this two years ago in the same way. There's 0% chance. And now is the opportunity for it if you're building these agencies and then building these media companies on top of it as well.

Tim Rowe: And those rules, like you said, two years ago, I have a four-year-old podcast. Four years ago, I was selling billboards in Eastern Pennsylvania. I thought my audience was the 11 other people sitting in the sales room on Monday morning. Honest to God's truth, that's who I thought I was helping. I thought, what better way to synthesize myself than to record conversations with other people smarter than me and share them with my colleagues? The podcast is now listened to in over 100 countries. It consistently cracks. This to me makes no sense. Consistently cracks the top 100 US business news on Apple podcast. It's about billboards, right? Consistently, the number of advising opportunities that have popped up, I'm moderating a panel at advertising week. all because of this podcast. Four years ago, selling billboards in Eastern Pennsylvania, it has completely changed my life. I think David Senra from the Founders Podcast refers to podcasting as the modern printing press, and those rules are being written right now. Four years ago, there was no one talking about, hey, grow a podcast because it could change your life or change your business. Today, everyone's like, yeah, start a podcast. Right. But the, the, the barrier to entry has never been lower. The bar, I think from a, from a expectation standpoint, from your audience has never been higher. That doesn't necessarily mean quality or go buy the most expensive. Good content.

Cody Schneider: And people get hung up on that and it drives me insane, man. It's like, you can have shit audio, but if I drop how to basically game YouTube shorts and show you, oh, I did a little paid ad spend that goes to my channel, and suddenly all of my shorts are going viral, right? Like, which I know we're going to talk about at some point. But like, that is what people, like, it doesn't matter if it sounds like it was recorded on a potato. If the content is good, people will be there.

Tim Rowe: Absolutely. And that, I can't say that this is the reason why, but I can say very confidently since adding a small amount of paid budget behind YouTube, it has accelerated everything that I do. And what I mean by small, I mean $2.50 a day, a day. I'm a solo creator. I don't have a budget, right? So, and this, Cody, I also stole this from you. You had tweeted something about a targeting strategy on YouTube And I was like, oh, you know what? I'm going to take my best performing organic shorts. I'm going to retarget everyone who's watched any of my YouTube content in the last year. I'm going to retarget anyone who's been to my website. And I'm going to retarget anyone who's on my email list. And there's a lot of there's a lot of cold emails in that email list. That is something else that I picked up through this through this last three, four months is that, wait, I can grow these things in lots of little ways. And those lots of little ways create that compound stacking. Right. And then when you do, when you step back 30, 45 days later, I've been doing a podcast again for almost four years. It's only been the last 45 to 60 days that I've seen the the growth and it's because of the intentional focus the things that we're talking about right now. And that workflow, the AI enabled workflow gets me I'm so stoked. I'm so stuck. Here's some relative context, and I'll break down the economics on this because I think about these things too. I was at a startup, and they helped me out. They subsidized support for the podcast. And we had a social media agency and a production team. And the startup was spending $5,500 a month so that I could have my time back to talk to customers and make the company money. But $5,500 a month was the nut to produce the podcast. That was the clips, the copywriting, the distribution, all the stuff. What I do today All in, the meet and greet, the recording of the podcast, post-production, distribution, email, all my socials. It's five hours per episode. So here's how it breaks down. It takes me five hours to create a 35-minute piece of finished content. For every seven minutes of content that I create, it generates a day and a half worth of consumption. Every seven minutes of new content I create generates 36 hours of consumption. The way I think about creating and distributing content has completely changed. I only think about distribution and consumption. So when I finish a clip and I upload it to YouTube, I never touch it again. I write all my YouTube descriptions to look and feel like social posts. And then I use another AI tool to distribute on custom schedules to all of my social channels. That's it. That's the, that's the magic. And I like talking about billboards.

Cody Schneider: So it's, it's, it's amazing. So, um, okay. So two, two things I want to, I want to come back to the billboard thing, but first, so these ads you're running, you're there. locally on YouTube. So you're remarketing to people on YouTube. So I want to break this down a little bit because I'm starting to do testing on this. I'm going to start talking about public. Basically, I'm just going to blow up a YouTube channel in public and just like record. Yes. But the strategy is basically what we've seen. And I'm seeing this more and more with anything that is for you page content. So content that's being just kind of distributed when you don't know the origin or the source, like you're not connected through a social graph. But what happens is that you basically, when you do paid, you're introducing somebody to a profile. Okay. And depending on the algorithm, it's going to distribute content to you if you engaged with that profile. So again, I'm going to talk, well, first let's talk YouTube. And then I'm going to talk what I've just seen on Instagram, and this is going to apply in some way to every, every algorithm, but. So on the YouTube side, when you're doing this remarketing ad like you're talking about, when they touch your profile and you consume any of that video, basically YouTube is saying, hey, this person likes this type of content. The next time they come into the app, look at what gets shown for you on your For You page. Right. It's going to be stuff that's relate like it's going to be videos that are from that channel that you just engaged with. So when you're paying that 250, what you're really doing is you're getting top of funnel introduction to the channel. And then they're basically going to like read. They're going to they're going to bubble up more of that content to people the next time they come back. All right, so that same idea, let's apply it to Instagram. And this is the data I'm seeing. So I do some work in the music space. And so my friend's a country music artist, and we grew up together and stuff, so long story short. But basically, we grow his Instagram. That's one of our strategies. So we do engagement ads with a call to action to go and follow his account. So it's like literally an at symbol, right? And then a certain percentage of people click that they go to the Instagram and they follow. Okay. So at one point we were getting like 30 cents. I don't know what the data is right now, but at one point we were getting like 30 cents followers on Instagram. So it's like, cool. Like I take a grand and that turns into 3000 followers, right? Incredible. So The byproduct of this is we started to see the graph go like logarithmic, right? So it started like it went exponential and I was like, well, how's this doesn't make any sense. But the epiphany that hit me when we started talking about this YouTube thing is that basically the people are getting introduced to his profile and suddenly now reels and the explore page, it's taking his stuff that he's posting organically and it's starting to push it to them to the next time that they come back to the platform because they're trying to get more engagement. Right. And so they're just constantly testing that. So again, top of funnel, touch a profile, and then you get into this flywheel of that, of that channel or sorry, of that, of that user profile, basically like distributing it through the algorithm. And I'm starting to see this across every, every social, like, I think Twitter is the same thing that's happening. So it's like, they come, they touch your profile and then they start like, and people have told me this, it's like, I engage with one of your tweets. And then every time I log into Twitter now, Like it's on my For You page, it's a Cody Schneider tweet, right? I'm like, okay, well that only makes sense if they're touching my profile and then it basically is creating this flywheel. So anyways, just brain dumping these things that we're seeing and how I'm thinking about growing these social accounts right now.

Tim Rowe: It's super interesting because we mentioned you on a little bit earlier, but running a Twitter strategy right now, that's just dumping, dumping, dumping cheap traffic onto the website. Right. And, and, and my goal is to create those viral loops of, I just, you liked this. Here's more. Would you like more? Would you like more of the thing that you already ate? Right. Here's more. Ripping ripping ripping free basically free traffic. I think the CPM broke out to like point zero zero zero One it's it's almost practically free. The clicks are one-tenth of one penny right now one-tenth of one pet like There's nothing that cheap today is literally Yon talking about this.

Cody Schneider: He's getting one cent signups for his new app It's called the end It's literally like I'm a dude. So he's doing these ads that are like global and for impressions, but he's getting like 0.001 cent clicks. And so it's getting a 10% conversion sign up. And he's basically not letting the ad leave the learning phase. So on Twitter right now, there's this glitch where basically it's like, if you have, you run the ad, there's like this four to five day learning phase where it gives you all this free impressions to try to learn the person that's most likely to click. So in, or like most likely like the right, the right audience. Right. Right. So he's layering these ads so that it's like four to five days and then it stops and then four to five days and it stops and four to five days. And so he just told me he's like now he's layering multiples of these simultaneously. So imagine I'm spending 10 or I spin up 10 different campaigns. They run for four to five days and then I stop them. immediately after I spent 10 different campaigns running for 45 days. He's spending one, again, $1 a day on this, and he's getting 100 signups. Literally, the podcast talks about, the one that just went live today talks about this. I'm over here and I'm like, this is ridiculous, right? Imagine that same thing we're talking about by growing a profile, growing a channel, et cetera.

Tim Rowe: Yeah, and I don't it's, it's interesting to see it come out in the wash, right? Because I don't care, right? I've spent $4 and 50 cents, and I've gotten like 3500 clicks or something insane. It doesn't even make sense. it's all going into my retargeting funnel, right? So if they are real, and they want to engage, then then, you know, YouTube's gonna figure all that out for me, I don't have to worry about it. The traffic so damn cheap, I don't care. Keep going, going, going. But what's interesting is all of mine is pointing back to the podcast website. I can see, yeah, I can see that people are listening, and watching and taking action and engaging with the content. So I don't I just the over complication of these things. I was talking with a friend at a conference last week. And he is an executive at one company advises a few others. He's like, What are you up to these days? And I told him I said, you know, what I realized is that it's me doing this for other people that, that this is where I can add a lot of value for the folks in our space. And he goes, Wait, you don't have a team doing that for you? I said, I said, I said, you think I've got a budget for a team, man? I'm eating ramen. Like, what do you like?

Cody Schneider: How do you but it was interesting. Talk to me about this. Yeah, like, so is that on? I mean, I imagine that's on roadmap. Now. It sounds like the last three to four months have just been stupid, like on growth side. So

Tim Rowe: Totally growth focused last four months and the monetization has been interesting, right? So when you have a product behind it, if you work at a company, if you are a founder, if you have a direct product behind it in the B2B space, I think it's an easy understanding. The traditional creator playbook for niche B2B podcasting doesn't necessarily apply. Hey, I'm just gonna run an affiliate deal or I'm gonna… So figuring out those economics is certainly challenging. I'll give you kind of the direct application. When I was at high growth startup, 24 months, we went zero to $10 million and 60 cents on the dollar went to somebody within the podcast ecosystem. partner, uh, agency, uh, media publisher. So it was very, you could see it. You could see very directly like, Oh, here's the money flow from this podcast. Now in this chapter for myself, I'm, I'm understanding that there's, there's different strategies, right? So one of the things that I'm working on right now is through partnerships is through a FinTech partnership. So if you run a bunch of ads online and I need a bunch of virtual cards to sign to each of my accounts, I need $100,000 spending limits, or I'm a media publisher. I've got age receivables that are 180 days. I'm working with some FinTech partners to help alleviate pains in those areas.

Cody Schneider: They got the cash too, which is awesome. Right.

Tim Rowe: So partnerships has been one of the ways who are the people that I'm already making an introductions for? And can they give me money? Because for a long time, I was making a lot of free introductions. Yeah. So understanding that point with all this, right?

Cody Schneider: Like, there has to be like, you know, I was talking about like, Oh, build an agency and then do this thing because you still need cash. And like, you still like have to have, you know, I was joking. Rent paid, food covered. You can do that. Cool. You're ramen profitable. Ramen profitable? Yeah. Don't do this thing, unless you already have that locked in. Because it doesn't make sense otherwise. What you just said perfectly segues into these questions that people have about your space in the industry.

Tim Rowe: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The questions.

Cody Schneider: Let's do the questions. Talk to me about AdQuick. What's your take on it?

Tim Rowe: I like AdQuik. I like the team at AdQuik, the startup that I mentioned. There were some competitive juices between ourselves and AdQuik, but I think that AdQuik's a great platform for folks who've bought a lot of traditional media. Maybe they're buying a lot of TV, a lot of radio, they're buying broadcast media, and they need to be more targeted, need to have some level of feedback and measurement. I think that their business model is restrictive for performance marketers where cost controls are a lever for CAC. So where you need to be scrappy and smart and have control over those things, I think that their economics are limiting. But overall, I think for the use case of a broadcast media buyer that needs to be more targeted with a better feedback loop, I like AdQuik.

Cody Schneider: Cool, cool. No, great take. I was curious, like somebody that's in the industry, do you think it's legit? And again, I know nothing about this, so I'm trying to get educated like everybody else. All right, next one is, why do lawyers have billboards all over towns? Why is that just something that they buy?

Tim Rowe: Why does Capital One send you so much mail? Because it fucking works. It works.

Cody Schneider: It's so crazy. So people are actually calling lawyers off these billboards.

Tim Rowe: 100% traffic. Oh, yeah. And it's not that it's not that there's, you know, a plethora of people sitting in traffic every day. They're like, Oh, I'm going to call what 800 got hurt. But it's, I saw it every day for the last five years. And then I got hurt. Yeah. And when you're in those moments, right? You're thinking about that, like, who do I trust the most? It's someone that I've seen a few thousand times, right? It's not probably going to be the person that I Google right away. I might need to get familiarized. So there's a lot of very biological, if you will, caveman factors.

Cody Schneider: Something about physical too, especially with that, like doctors, anything that's very traditional white collar, I would probably say. It's like, oh, John has bought this billboard for five years. I don't know who John is, but if he can buy that billboard, that physical thing that I perceive as being very expensive. Yes, for five years, then it's like he's probably doing.

Tim Rowe: I think that perceived difficulty by like, the people who are mostly going to be your customers. Hey, they did something that's hard. I could do a Facebook ad. Right? Anyone that I could do a Facebook ad. I don't know how to do a billboard. So they must be I don't know how to write a book. I don't know how to do a podcast. Therefore, the person who did it, I will assign authority to. Oh, yeah, you're good. Yep. Yeah, I actually had to move the chair at that point. I was running over my

Tim Rowe: Oh, yeah.

Tim Rowe: Yeah, I love those when I get to the end. The person I'm interviewing is like, Hey, it wasn't recording or something.

Tim Rowe: Uh huh.

Tim Rowe: It will probably all be there.

Tim Rowe: You and me both.

Tim Rowe: While you're doing that, I think that that's like that. I really would love for someone to do the research on this, like people who have lots of tabs open and their use of AI.

Tim Rowe: I think so. What's that? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, really? Holy fuck. That's so smart. Oh, I love that. That's brilliant. Yeah, it gives peep right. The OCD people are freaking out. Oh, that's awesome. Awesome.

Tim Rowe: Do you want me to leave and try to come back? I don't know what happens if a guest leaves. Or do you want me to open up the link? Oh, and I got another interesting monetization thing. It hasn't hit yet, but I'll give you another one. Storage is full.

Cody Schneider: Right. I don't know. We're gonna go with it. We're back. We're live.

Tim Rowe: Now.

Tim Rowe: Now I know to if it ever happens to be now I know what to do.

Cody Schneider: All right. So I'll just try to pick it up where we left off. But okay, so next question I got for you is, when do you like when do you even think like start to consider traditional advertising? Like when is it worth it for a company to even think about it?

Tim Rowe: I think if you're spending $100,000 a month on advertising, not just all marketing and expenses, but if you have a $100,000 ad budget, it's probably time to start thinking about channel diversification, if nothing else. And out of home could be one of those options. It doesn't always have to be expensive. There's lots of things you can do that are scrappy and low cost and gorilla. And I think that, yeah, if you're, if you're spending a hundred thousand dollars a month, start thinking about spending offline. Um, but out of home is good at any budget. Cause you can do scrappy things.

Cody Schneider: Awesome. Awesome. And then, uh, two more and then we'll, I want to hear this, uh, monetization thing you're talking about. So, um, ROI, everybody always asks that with anything physical. How are you thinking about it? How do you qualify it? And then I think for a lot of people, they're like, does this even actually work? Monday.com has a ton of billboards up in my neighborhood right now. Is that working for Monday? What is the value of that? How are they actually measuring that?

Tim Rowe: a little inside baseball on Monday without giving kind of the secret sauce away for them, but they very much believe in out-of-home, they know it works, and they have used Monday to create their own internal workflows for managing all of their out-of-home. So Monday has like a whole out-of-home team, and they're really, really smart about the way that they do it. Traditionally, measuring out-of-home has been super hard though, unless you have a data science team quants that can sit down and figure out all the mixed media modeling, et cetera. But I think what's kind of beautiful about the last three, four years, privacy restrictions, things getting harder to measure kind of overall is that. If you understand directional feedback and how to identify and how to control for it, out of home is typically it's localized, it's in a couple of zip codes. So if you start seeing new user traffic, if you start seeing conversion rates go up, more phone calls, more foot traffic, Hey, that could be a good sign that something's changed, right? We're looking at these things year over year, month over month. You can do really deterministic pixel measurement with exposed visitation groups. Hey, who saw my billboard? Think of like a cone projecting out of the middle of a billboard. We create a viewshed. Try to grab as many exposed devices as possible, cross-device match, do all of those things. So you can really have pretty deterministic measurement. But I think what's most valuable is understanding the directional feedback of which markets are working best, where is the biggest opportunity for me to get more new customers, gain market share. relative to the media cost, and then which formats are working hardest. Is it billboards? Is it buses? Is it maybe cinema media? Which format's right for you? So you can do really, really deterministic measurement Or you can just say, Hey, localized zip code lift conversion rate. All signs are go hammer down. Let's do more.

Cody Schneider: I didn't even think about the zip code thing, like in relationship to the website. Like, I'm just thinking about, I did, I did this in the past where we like, we mapped the zip code attribution. Like this was a totally different world, but it was like B2B. Um, there was a B2B manufacturing company that were in like in the windows, you know, like that type of stuff. Um, but what you just said was super interesting. It's like, okay, we put a billboard here and suddenly we started to see more traffic from that zip code where the billboard is. And you could basically graph that traffic of that zip code month over month or week over week within Google tag manager through Google analytics. Right. And that would basically show you like the actual, you know, here's, cause I think that's the thing that I always would get hung up on is like, I'm trying to follow them all the way from leaving platform to conversion events. But if third party cookies go away, which is like the inevitability, like we're all going to be blind again. I feel like it's going to turn into just traditional marketing again. Like you're working with, you know, fuzzy data. that you're making a ton of assumptions on, but that's just gonna have to be good enough, right? And like, I think for a lot of people, especially my generation that came up in like digital first, right? Like where it's like, you know, they don't even have any knowledge of it not existing, where you can't see everything. It's like very uncomfortable for them to think about that, but like, that's how this happened for the last, you know, whatever, a hundred years of this industry existing. So that's super interesting. I got a couple more minutes. Talk to me about this monetization thing. The other thing you were thinking about?

Tim Rowe: Oh, yeah, it was it was actually a strategy brought up by a friend who is in the trucking space, like truck drivers. He says, Hey, are you charging people to come on your podcast? I said, I'm not charging people to come on my podcast. Like, no way. That's, that's crazy. Why would I do that? He goes, because I just paid 30 grand to be on this podcast. And that's excuse me. And he shared the rate card with everything. Hey, I'll come to you and do a podcast. You come to me and do a podcast. You know, a live read.

Cody Schneider: They're in an industry that's like super expensive or just cash flush or whatever.

Tim Rowe: kind of like your friend described. It's a small industry where there's not a lot of platforms that does, that is rich with cash.

Cody Schneider: Of course, I'm like my CEO on this podcast where, holy shit. So I'm doing some work with a friend in the biotech space and we're starting to get this inbound where it's like, It's ridiculous, right? I'm talking huge, multi-billion dollar fortune, large companies. And they're like, hey, we want to come on the podcast because they want the industry. Now that the industry is listening to it, it's a social signal of influence when you're on this thing. And then suddenly it's like, you become this connector. And I, and again, I'm just thinking about like the, from an ad spent, like, you know, if you want to go again, this is why I think that this media thing is so powerful. Like pick a niche that looks ridiculous is unsexy is uncool, but it has a ton of cash. Go and build a media thing there and create any type of content that's just relative. It can just be relatively interesting. You're talking about billboards, but it's working because there's a lot of… 100%. …a segment of people that are really obsessed with billboards and all the things around billboards. And they want to hear industry insiders talk about that. If you go do that and then just sell ads to that, that same audience, like whether it's like go to, like you said, like software companies, et cetera. Um, I think that there's such a huge marketing opportunity and you don't need a team. You can do this now just by yourself with like, again, five hours of your time basically to build this whole thing out. I mean, it's crazy.

Tim Rowe: And my rant, that's my maybe you, if you work in that unsexy business and you're like, I need a side hustle, or maybe like you're, you're trying to build something on the side. Maybe that's not it. Maybe it's, maybe it's doing this. Right. I was, I was a digital media guy who ended up working at a billboard company selling billboards in Eastern Pennsylvania who one day decided I'm going to start a podcast. I have. zero qualifications to start a podcast. None. So but I did it and now here we are four years later and it's the most listened to still fastest growing podcast and I have I have an impassable moat. I am on the inside of an impassable moat. No one can catch up ever. 100% 100%

Cody Schneider: I think that's the perfect way to end it. Tim, dude, I'm so stoked. We got to connect. Thank you for your valuable time today and coming on and sharing everything that you've been learning. And I, again, I got my gears turning, just thinking about all this. So I'm super appreciative. Thank you.

Tim Rowe: Same Cody. Thank you so much. It's been great to, uh, great to follow your work and finally connect.

Cody Schneider: Stoked brother. We'll talk to you soon.

Tim Rowe: Definitely. See you.