Prompt Jockeys: Not Your Grandpa's Billboard - How to Build a Real World Brand and Degenerate Marketing (Appearance on Prompt Jockeys Podcast)

In this episode, OOH Insider Host Tim Rowe, appears on the Prompt Jockey podcast hosted by Joe DiRico. The Prompt Jockeys get the Insider's take on "What Is OOH?"and how born online brands and creators should start to think about attention in the real world.

[00:02:58] Brick and mortar mindset.

[00:06:28] Billboards and modern media.

[00:11:39] Exploitable value in billboards.

[00:14:24] Exposed Visitation Rate - How to Measure OOH Advertising

[00:16:40] Long-lasting impact of billboards.

[00:22:02] LifeLock's bold marketing strategy.

[00:25:36] RideshareTV - backseat tablet advertising.

[00:32:02] Young people deleting social media.

[00:37:02] Targeting for OOH.

[00:41:17] Out of Home and direct mail.

[00:44:00] App integration into screens.

[00:50:33] Video production and short clips.

[00:52:27] Content distribution strategies.

[00:55:53] Accountability and motivation.

[00:59:44] Changing marketing mix drives success.

Connect with Tim Rowe at https://www.linkedin.com/in/troweactual/

And learn more about Joe DiRico here https://www.theoohinsider.com/guests/joe-dirico/ or checkout the Prompt Jockeys podcast - https://www.promptjockeys.ai/

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

Transcript

What up, Prompt Jockeys? We are back, episode 3 of the pod. And today we have a special

00:14 one. We have one of our very own from the Discord community, Tim Rowe, creator of OOH

00:20 Insider, here to educate us on everything out of home advertising related, educating

00:26 the Zoomers on the potential opportunities that the physical world has to bring. So

00:31 excited to have you on, brother. Thank you for joining.

00:33 Excited to be here. Excited to have found this great community and be a part of it and

00:39 join here in the pod.

00:41 Hell yeah. Would you mind giving a little bit of an intro as to what out of home advertising

00:47 is? Because we've got a lot of Zoomer digital natives like myself who have been glued to

00:52 their computers for the last 20, 30 years and we have forgotten all about what exists

00:56 in the physical realm.

00:58 Well, that's the world that I come from, so I totally get it. Out of home is a terrible

01:05 category. It's really anything that you see offline. It could be a billboard, it could

01:12 be a bus shelter, it could be a wrapped truck, it could be a flyer above a urinal. It could

01:20 be absolutely anything in the physical world, which is why it's kind of a bad category and

01:26 clunky and hard and is still really untapped, which is an exciting opportunity obviously

01:33 as a marketer.

01:37 Even the... Well, first off, you and my dad would be good friends because my dad is a

01:40 big brick and mortar guy. He's had a restaurant for the last 30 years and anytime I tell him

01:45 like, we're doing crypto, we're doing AI, he's like, you and your friends are idiots,

01:49 brick and mortar. He's like, if you ever seen like Arrested Development, there's always money

01:53 in the banana stand type show. That's my dad. So you guys would get along well.

01:58 Yeah. You say he's got a restaurant too, right?

02:02 He's got a restaurant. Yeah. He understands AI, understands crypto, all that stuff, but

02:12 At the end of the day, people got to eat. People got to go to work. So we're in this

02:20 mindset of like, I'm going to do digital marketing and I'm going to get in front of the entire

02:23 world. But in reality, your audience is going to be walking past the subway billboard every

02:29 day, twice a week in the entire year. So you got to understand where the audience is. And

02:35 that's why I'm excited to learn more about what you're working on because I think there

02:38 opportunities, especially for us, DGENs of the world to kind of come in and shake things up,

02:45 utilizing these sorts of strategies. Yeah. And I think that the biggest thing for me was

02:51 like the mindset shift. I came from the traditional agency world. I'd bought and sold a lot of TV and

02:58 radio, direct mail, things like that. We're doing a lot of Facebook ads, Google, kind of doing all

03:04 of that stuff. And then ended up going to work for a billboard company. And as the digital guy

03:10 working at a billboard company, I was a bit skeptical. Like, all right, these things are big,

03:16 you know, big pictures on sticks on the side of the road, but is it targeted? No. Is it measurable?

03:24 No. So if you can't measure it, why do it? That's really the school that I came from and was working

03:31 at the billboard company. And there was a nonprofit group that helped homeless men get back on their

03:36 feet. And it was the summertime. I would later find out it was their slow fundraising time of the

03:42 year. If you've ever worked with or for a nonprofit, obviously their goal is to raise money because

03:48 that's their lifeblood, right? They don't have traditional revenue like a business would. So

03:53 they're always trying to raise money. But in the summertime for this nonprofit, it was their slow

03:57 time and they decided to do some billboards. I was in on the meeting and I asked for Google

04:04 Analytics access. This was still in the times of Universal Analytics circa 2019. So things were a

04:10 little different. But what I saw over the next four to six weeks was everything go up and like

04:18 up in really significant ways, direct traffic to the website up 30%, average website donation size

04:25 up 90%. All of the key conversion goals were just completely off the chart. So called the marketing

04:35 director and instantly was curious, hey, are you doing anything else? And she told me, no, we're

04:41 just doing the billboards. So that's when I really got curious. Like these must be signals of whatever

04:48 the billboards are doing. I still don't understand what they're doing, but something's happening here.

04:54 And then I had to keep pulling on that thread. So changing the perception on how is it going to show

05:00 up, right? It's not linear. It's not going to show up as a click in my analytics. But when you can,

05:06 you can get outside that and understand, hey, this is a big canvas. This is a place that I can

05:11 put a message up on a really, really big piece of real estate. And kind of like aligning back to the

05:17 story about your dad having ownership of something in the real world, I think is a really, really

05:22 powerful grand positioning statement to have in 2023.

05:28 Yeah. And a lot of, I mean, myself, and I think a lot of people in our community are big fans of

05:33 the hustle and Sam Parr and my first million. And years ago, I remember Sam Parr saying that when he

05:40 was starting the hustle, he wanted to understand the history of media. And he started looking at

05:46 guys like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner's dad owned the billboard business. And then

05:53 Ted Turner took that over and ended up turning it into CNN and the Atlanta Braves and Turner

05:58 broadcasting and all that stuff. So billboards have their roots and did give birth to the modern

06:06 media landscape that we see today. And you even see it reflected in, you know, for anyone that's

06:11 done any sort of display advertising and that you look at the names of the ad sizes, right? You have

06:19 a billboard size ad, you know, ad display or leaderboards and all these different sizes,

06:25 but they all take their route in out of home, right? They've just been converted into really

06:31 small picture format on our phones that we carry around. So it was that. And then also, you know,

06:38 just seeing how like a DSP like the trade desk, seeing how they position display advertising,

06:46 understanding that the goal of display advertising isn't necessarily as a traffic driver,

06:52 but as a brand builder. So if you can find a physical piece of real estate to do that,

07:01 then I think that that's a good opportunity to kind of plant a flag.

07:06 I think to me, you've said it to me already. I want to know, Tim, if you don't mind,

07:11 you know, how would you go about, say if you've never had a billboard campaign, you've never

07:18 done anything like this before, how do you get into it as someone who mainly would do online

07:23 marketing? You know, what's the order process like? Do I have to make phone calls to a company,

07:30 a billboard company? Is there someone who handles the distribution to, you know, hundreds of different

07:35 locations? What does it kind of look like from a, you know, going into it completely fresh?

07:42 I'd say it depends on two things, your pain tolerance and your budget. Pain tolerance being

07:48 like how much manual work do you want to do? If you're planning a multi-market, six-figure

07:54 campaign for a brand, then it probably makes sense to do a little bit of legwork. Maybe you

08:00 want to work with an agency. Maybe there's just a few specific partners that would make a lot of

08:04 sense for you to work with. I've actually put together a little directory. You can visit

08:10 triadscout.com. There's a bunch of companies kind of listed there, wrapped car companies,

08:15 wrapped truck companies, things like that. So you could piece it together yourself if you kind of

08:21 have a budget that's on the bigger scale. You could also deploy that money via programmatic DSPs. You

08:28 could just say, hey, I want to buy a bunch of impressions in Walmarts and on street kiosks and

08:34 things like that. So those are some of the avenues there, but particularly for, you know,

08:39 like the DGENs, like I'm a scrappy marketer at heart. That's who I am. And those are the

08:47 opportunities that got me most excited when I started playing around with Out of Home. So

08:51 there's a platform called Blip Billboards. And as far as I'm concerned, I've tested all of them.

08:57 This is the best one because it's pay per play. So it's most similar to a Google ads campaign

09:06 where you're going to pay each time your billboard runs. So you're paying per billboard flip. That's

09:12 why it's called Blip, a billboard flip. And what's neat about that is you can optimize your day

09:18 parting schedule. So you could say, hey, I want to only run on Mondays and Fridays between 6 a.m.

09:23 and 8 p.m. So you can set all of that up. You can optimize bid strategies. What I think's really

09:30 interesting about that is you can select a group of billboards and then deploy that strategy against

09:37 the group of billboards. Or the really, really exciting opportunity is to do each individual

09:43 billboard as its own campaign. Because what you'll find is when you do each billboard as its own

09:50 campaign, there's all of these opportunities to exploit how undervalued the billboards really are.

09:57 So let's say that those are the really valuable times, 6 in the morning till 8 at night.

10:03 If you wanted to buy that, let's say, digital billboard from the digital billboard company

10:08 for a month, they might say, hey, it's $3,500 to be one of the eight advertisers in this rotation.

10:15 You're like, I don't have $3,500. I've got $5 a day. Cool. Go on Blip. Think of it just like any

10:23 other digital marketing you've done. Where do I want to target? I want to target in this city.

10:27 I want to be close to a Walmart. You could do all these things for yourself really, really simply.

10:33 Get in there, set up a low budget, find one billboard, and then you start optimizing bid

10:39 strategy and day partying. And what you're going to find is-

10:43 I want to say they need to do a bit of an online campaign because I've never heard of Blip.

10:49 And this is, again, this is part of that exploitable value is they target small local

10:58 businesses and that's really who they're built for. The types of campaigns that we're describing

11:05 right now, I've run them before for big brands with big budgets. And I can tell you that- I'll

11:11 give you a very direct example. There was one specific digital billboard in Salt Lake.

11:17 We had priced it out as $4,000 to be on that digital billboard to be one of the eight advertisers

11:23 in the rotation. That's generally how many advertisers there are, about eight in the rotation.

11:29 $4,000 to be one of the eight. Really all the brand cared about was six in the morning until

11:35 eight at night. We ended up becoming- we ended up playing in two slots, so essentially having

11:43 the equivalent of two spaces. We were buying so much space during the day at one fourth of the

11:49 price. So we spent a thousand bucks to essentially run $8,000 worth of media. That's the type of

11:57 opportunity that's there, but it comes with the level of, all right, I'm willing to accept that

12:04 this isn't going to show up in my analytics the way that I'm used to. I'm going to have to think

12:10 a little bit outside the box. You have to think out of the box to really track your, I guess,

12:14 your conversion rate, I guess. So Tim, talk to me about the- I saw some companies that are

12:22 attempting to measure this sort of advertising the same way that they do with digital, right?

12:28 So talking about the exposed visitation rate and things like that, the different ways that

12:32 you could actually get some analytics on these billboards. And that's, I think it's the mix

12:40 that I've seen a lot of B2B SaaS companies, B2B FinTech companies get right, which is,

12:47 all right, we're going to measure this in a few different ways. We're going to measure it

12:51 holistically. Does our overall cost to acquire a customer come down? Can we accelerate the sale

12:57 cycle? Can we increase lifetime value, right? So we're looking at some of these kind of key metrics

13:03 and we're also looking at organic traffic to the website. Is our cost per click coming down?

13:10 Is our email open rate going up, right? It's going to show up in other ways, but then specifically

13:16 for out of home, you can get really good directional feedback by using some technology that uses a

13:24 measure called exposed visitation rate. I would equate it most similarly to a click-through rate.

13:30 So the idea behind exposed visitation rate is, hey, we've got this billboard. This billboard is,

13:36 it's a hundred feet high. It's 48 feet wide. It's this far off the road. Imagine a cone coming out

13:45 from the center of that billboard. It's capturing all those people. That's called a view shed.

13:50 From that view shed, we're saying this many people were exposed to the advertising.

13:54 If it was a static billboard that was up all the time, obviously it's capturing everybody.

13:59 If it's digital, it's based on the exact timestamp and the window, the duration that that digital ad

14:06 was playing. So it's actually pretty scientific the way that the audience is captured. And then

14:12 from that, we're looking at cross-device matching. So does that person either from their cell phone

14:19 that we observed, do they go to a website? Do they download an app? Do they go to a store?

14:25 Or maybe they go home at night and they set that phone down next to their computer.

14:29 And because of that cross-device matching, we are able to detect that they went to the website and

14:34 finished that purchase when they got home. So now directionally, it's really amazing. So

14:39 directionally, now I can tell you, all right, these are the formats that are working hardest.

14:44 Your billboards are overperforming. The gym media that you have, the screens in the gym,

14:50 really not working that hard. But movie theaters, movie theaters are interesting. The sample size is

14:56 too small, but we saw a really good lift from that. Brands have never had insight like that before.

15:02 So for brands that are interested in kind of testing, really more the deterministic measurement,

15:09 those things are available. It's definitely an exciting time.

15:13 And also, so another thing that I thought was interesting, like I saw Cody tweeting the other

15:19 day, growth is supposed to be boring. And I think that that's kind of weird for us to hear,

15:25 because we're used to kind of pushing forward and being the Jen and trying out all these different

15:30 things and being scrappy, like you said, but it's supposed to be boring. And you want to run

15:34 advertisements that can be sustainable for a long time. Like I saw on your blog, like TikTok was an

15:40 example of something that could just be a flash in the pan, it comes and goes. But there's this

15:46 billboard on my, I used to see on my way to school. So on I-95 going to Connecticut, and it says,

15:52 your wife is hot. And it was for pools. And dude, that ad has, that ad has, it's still there like

15:58 10 years later. And that guy has been running the same ad. And I'm sure everyone sees it and looks

16:03 up and chuckles to themselves. And I bet you they got a shit ton of business for it. And he's just

16:07 had the same ad up that entire time. And here's the really crazy thing. What would happen if he

16:14 took it down? People would wonder, people would, they would notice, right? They would notice it was

16:20 gone. And- You would never do that with an online ad, right? If you stop seeing, I don't know,

16:28 Google ads on a website, you're never going to think, oh, I missed that. But if you have a

16:33 physical reaction to seeing something in real life, you're going to get used to it, right?

16:39 If you see it every day, you're going to get used to it. It's going to become a part of your routine.

16:42 It's like a landmark. It's mind blowing. Yeah, yeah, really. And I guess, there's so many ways of

16:50 tracking how many people are seeing it now. I mean, I guess things like, IoT devices, phones,

16:56 watches, you know, at some point in the future, everyone will be wearing the Apple Pro Vision crap

17:02 that they're rolling out. And I'm sure they'll be able to just tell you, you know, this person was

17:07 within X amount of meters of your billboard. This counts as a, you know, that they went on their

17:15 iPhone and went to your website. And, you know, that's crazy. So they're, they're, they're

17:21 technically pieces of real estate, like you had mentioned to me a few days ago.

17:26 When you're, when you're analyzing them, right? So if you, even if you don't want to run ads

17:30 yourself from an investor perspective, you can, you can purchase these and they function as,

17:36 as a REIT almost. That's what you had mentioned to me as well, right?

17:39 And that's really, I think where the underpriced opportunity comes from is most out of home media

17:47 companies are set up and run as real estate investment trusts. So their objective is to

17:55 generate a high dividend for their investors, right? It's to take money out of the company

18:02 and pay out. That's in direct conflict to a high growth media company, right? If you just close

18:09 your eyes and you don't even need to be an expert in any of these things. If you just thought,

18:13 what would it look like if Google owned a billboard company? They probably wouldn't be

18:18 pulling all the money out and paying a dividend. They'd be reinvesting in technology. They'd be

18:24 reinvesting in growth. They'd be pushing that industry so much faster. So because of that,

18:32 you are essentially buying short term, you're leasing short term real estate.

18:39 And then you have to think of it as a marketer, right? I'm buying this real estate or I'm renting

18:44 this real estate for a period of time for this amount of money. I need to generate this return

18:51 above whatever my investment here is. So like another real like degen hacky thing that I would

18:58 love to see someone do. I found one guy who did it and there's some pieces that come together on it.

19:05 Maybe we could do this as a group experiment, which is to get cheap billboards. You can get

19:13 cheap billboards in rural parts of the country, like especially out here by me. Those little

19:18 ones you see on the side of the road might be four, five, six hundred bucks for a month, right?

19:23 So you can buy really cheap attention and then do something like a pay-per-call affiliate link or a

19:30 pay-per-call affiliate number rather, right? And hey, we're going to sign up for an affiliate

19:35 network and we're going to make XYZ amount of money each time we generate a phone call off

19:41 this billboard. There's that much underpriced attention out there. I think there's opportunity

19:45 for someone to do things like that. Yeah, because even think about like the rural ones, especially

19:53 like a lot of people say, hey, when you're trying to do drop shipping or trying to do these econ

19:58 brands, instead of trying to target the younger kids, go after the older audience. And that older

20:06 audience is definitely going to be paying attention to billboards as well. And that could be a good,

20:12 a nice experiment to run, like an econ experiment where your marketing, instead of doing Facebook

20:17 ads and TikTok ads, you were running billboards. And can you get actual sales that way or even

20:22 affiliates, like you said? People trust what they can see physically, right? So

20:29 I've never thought about it. I've genuinely never in my head been like, you know what,

20:34 a billboard is a good idea. Now I'm thinking risk assessment, we get some nice logos, Joe, we get

20:39 some, you know, we get some billboards in every big city in the US. Just put your face on them.

20:46 Yeah, straight up, build that brand. But I know genuinely though, right, people will trust like

20:52 a cyber security company more if they- Remember what LifeLock did in New York City?

20:57 He made a TV commercial of a truck driving around with his social security number on it.

21:02 Right? And that was LifeLock. That was the TV spot. Yeah. I was like, damn, man,

21:06 I kind of need that shit. I was like, man, these hackers are coming for me. Like they're,

21:10 they scared the shit out of me. Like this guy's willing to drive a truck through New York City,

21:14 he's driving a truck through Times Square with his social on it. That's genius. It's a really

21:19 strong statement of life. It's instant credibility, it's grassroots at scale,

21:26 it does so many things. But because it's not easy to measure, it gets overlooked.

21:36 Yeah. Sorry, Joe, I was just going to say from an outsider, it just sounds, you know,

21:42 super expensive to me. You know, it's physical, there's people involved, right? They're going to

21:47 have to, I mean, I'm not even talking about digital billboards, you know, physical ones. And

21:52 it sounds expensive. It sounds like a lot of effort. There's people involved, you know,

21:56 going and updating them or whatever. And, you know, do we include like the actual poster billboards,

22:03 or is it just digital ones that you're talking about in all of this? So actually, you know,

22:09 put the paper on it and glue it and you know, it sounds crazy to me.

22:13 Yeah. And it can be a pain. And I think that that's where the opportunity comes from, is it can be.

22:23 Thinking about it at scale, there are really practical ways to do it at scale, whether that's

22:30 wrapping a fleet of cars for a conference and driving those cars around the conference,

22:35 whether that's doing one or two trucks in New York City for three months. Like, I know a guy

22:41 that does trucks in New York for 1500 bucks a month. You could run a truck, pick wherever you

22:47 want in New York City, six days a week, deliveries from sunup till sundown for 4500 bucks. But you

22:54 got to be willing to stroke a check for 4500 bucks. And I get like, that's not for everybody.

22:59 I think blip is a really practical way to get started. I think it's as low as $2 a day or a

23:05 dollar a day. I have run and generated leads for a dollar a day on digital billboards.

23:13 Honestly, I think Lewis bro for risk assessment. I think that like a B2B SaaS, if you

23:21 figured out, okay, there's a big cybersecurity conference in town, I think that that wrapped

23:25 car one is a good idea. Genuinely, I was just thinking in my head, we need to scope every

23:29 cybersecurity conference in the US, which has more than X amount of people and make sure that we have

23:36 physical ads in that location. It'll be amazing. And there's some really practical ways to do that.

23:42 Right. So maybe wrapping cars is outside of the budget. But there's a platform, they were

23:46 actually acquired by T-Mobile not too long ago called Play Octopus. And maybe there's some folks

23:51 that have even seen these. I hope you're right. Of Uber and Lyft. You got me and you can go to

23:58 try out scout.com. See, that's that's why it exists. So there's they put tablets they put,

24:06 I describe it as if you've ever gone to Olive Garden, and there's the tablet on the table with

24:11 the games and the stuff. It's that in the backseat of an Uber in the left. Oh, I've seen them. Yeah,

24:15 yeah. Right. The difference is your Uber is about to be a good ride. He's got the tablet and he's

24:20 got the speaker system and some free water bottles. Okay, so we've obviously never talked

24:24 about this before. Drivers that have these in the back seats of their cars get larger tips and have

24:31 a higher rating than those who don't. So it's funny to hear you actually just say that unprompted

24:36 because that's the truth. So it's a more engaging experience. Here's what's interesting. That piece

24:42 of technology, it uses Google Glass in the tablet. So it doesn't detect that it's Joe or that's

24:49 Louis or that it's Tim, but it does detect hey, a person just got in front of this. So it's verified

24:54 one to one impression in the physical world. The creative format is a 15 to 30 second video creative,

25:01 which means it's pre roll or mid roll. And at certain budget thresholds. And again, this is

25:06 where like sometimes there's a barrier to entry, but at certain budget thresholds, you can actually

25:12 gamify your ad. So let's pretend it was some sort of interactive game like a mobile ad,

25:20 where they had to find the key that matches the lock. And when they unlock it, they get, you know,

25:26 $500 off whatever and they can enter their email. It's actually a lead generation tool. I've run

25:32 campaigns for cannabis company, where they were getting email opt ins from the back seat of Uber

25:38 and Lyft for the same that they were through their like digital marketing campaigns.

25:43 Dan. That's crazy. It's crazy. We need to like, after this, I'm going to scope out every big cyber

25:49 security conference in the US. I'm going to have a look at it. It sounds it sounds so good for that.

25:54 And you can do guerrilla stuff too, right? You can go do guerrilla stuff, do stunty things, hire

26:00 people to do street teams, right? Like, it doesn't have to cost a ton of money. It's just, it's really

26:07 that it's, I guess, coming all the way back. It's back to that pain threshold. Do you want to figure

26:12 it out? When we say like DGEN marketing, I think it's just a new way of saying guerrilla marketing.

26:17 Essentially, everyone's trying to do like scrappy, scrappy marketing. I think the usual, you know,

26:24 shots and Google ads on and that it rep is like, there's a lot of good hinge, for example, I just

26:31 off the top of my head, like subway ads in the city. I mean, you see hinge the dating apps all

26:35 the time. Grubhub, Zocdoc, like a lot of those. So they wouldn't be spending money if it wasn't

26:42 effective. And I wouldn't remember the ads realistically, if it wasn't effective, right?

26:46 And I think a lot of people remember them as well. But how about local businesses? I've seen you talk

26:50 a bit about like Google My Business. How can local businesses implement these strategies as well?

26:57 I think that's maybe the most untapped opportunity is local businesses kind of

27:08 dialing up an appetite for being a little bit more comfortable with some risk because

27:15 the way that this shows up for local businesses are in your Google My Business. It shows up as

27:22 calls. It shows up as people looking for directions to your business. It shows up in

27:27 really tangible ways. And again, I think a platform like Blip is a great place for small businesses to

27:35 get started too. Is it close by to my business? Let me just put up a simple billboard that lets

27:40 people know I'm here. Proof of life. Our business exists. Could your business afford to reach more

27:48 people? Would it hurt your business if more people knew you existed? So I think that some people in

27:53 our group, they're either running local agencies for those types of businesses or they may have.

28:00 So how could they potentially go to their local businesses and be like, hey, I run Facebook ads,

28:06 all this stuff, but I have these ideas as well. What are some things that they could potentially

28:10 bring to their clients in that regard? I think definitely with the changes that iOS 14.5

28:18 brought in, it's now a couple years back, but that brought in much smaller audiences, less

28:24 targeting, less tracking, right? It definitely created some bumps for a lot of those advertisers

28:31 and specifically for the agencies that provide those services. So I think learning how to,

28:36 even if it's just something as simple as doing lawn signs and digital billboards,

28:42 or just doing digital billboards as a service, going in, having something new to talk about

28:48 is always valuable as an agency. And leading with billboards that are really scalable for any budget

28:56 is something that the local billboard company is probably not going to be able to do.

29:00 So I think as an agency offering flexibility in pricing with the advantages that billboards can

29:07 obviously offer a small business that they might be working with. Yeah. And I gave the example as

29:12 well of the container website that I was working on. The target audience there are construction

29:20 professionals and contractors and people like that. Those guys aren't on LinkedIn all day.

29:26 They're actually out in the field doing work, being productive. So to try to run a LinkedIn ad

29:32 for them is probably not the best idea. It'd be much smarter if I were to either hand out flyers

29:37 or set up some billboards around those construction sites. I think that's another example as well,

29:42 where you could get in front of them that way, utilizing these strategies here.

29:47 And something scrappy you could do if you're trying to get in front of construction sites.

29:53 This is an entire portfolio of some media company's business, which are putting advertisements up on

30:01 construction barricades. If you're trying to get in front of construction workers and there's a

30:06 construction site, hey, if there's a construction barricade, figure it out. Again, that's the hard

30:13 work. That's the hard work that's in the way, but that's the opportunity. The obstacle is the way

30:18 in this case. Figure out who owns that barricade. Hey, I noticed that you have this construction

30:24 barricade. I'd like to advertise on it. Can I give you 200 bucks to put a banner on this

30:31 for the next month? 100%. I was just doing a bit of research while you guys were talking.

30:40 It's actually a number that I didn't know, but I thought I'd check. 82% of the US population

30:46 are on social media and on their phones. I mean, it's 20% aren't. It's such an untapped audience.

30:55 It just, I can't believe. I mean, young people as well, right? I know so many people nowadays,

31:02 people my age, just going into the 30s, just going cold on social media, like no Facebook,

31:10 no Instagram, just completely deleting all of it, right? And just live in there. And non,

31:16 it's becoming like a popular thing to do. The cool thing to do is just not to be on socials.

31:20 So it's such a, it seems to me like an untapped way of doing this market. And then many people

31:27 will just stray away just saying, no, it's not going to work. It's not for us. But really,

31:34 I guarantee that people doing this would get their money's worth from it. Just because of

31:41 the amount of reach you can get from it. Honestly, you've blown my mind, Tim. I can't believe it.

31:46 Tim, we had, so we had Kobe on the podcast last week, speaking with Cody. Kobe is the CMO or

31:53 head of growth at Rupa Health. So health tech startup. And one of the things that he said,

31:58 he's very excited about in relation to AI is the ability to do more physical marketing because of

32:04 the level of targeting you could do and all things like that. So what opportunities are you seeing

32:10 in terms of leveraging all the powerful AI technology we have now and applying it to this

32:15 physical realm? One of the most exciting things I've seen is actually a tool that's not intended

32:22 for media planning or buying its platform called Unearth Insights. And I think it's totally free

32:30 to sign up for. I've been sharing this a lot within the kind of out of home community. But

32:37 specifically that tool gives you insights on every zip code in the country, the population that's

32:46 there relative to key points of interest. I want to see all the Starbucks that are around here. How

32:51 many gas stations are in the state of New Mexico? That's a write down. That's one to take home.

32:56 Unearth Insights. But then you look at there's some tactical takeaways.

33:03 One of the features within that tool that's so interesting is you can drag and drop a pin.

33:10 So I'm going to use New York City for this scenario because it's the most extreme example,

33:15 but you can use this obviously anywhere in the continental United States. You drag,

33:21 just like Google Maps, you drag the little person and drop it. And then you tell it,

33:27 and then you tell it, I want to see a five minute walking radius of where this pin drop is.

33:36 And it will show you a five minute walking race. So now imagine you're your dad's restaurant and

33:42 you want to do some physical marketing to drive foot traffic during lunch. So you can see, all

33:50 right, where are all the places that are within a five minute walk of my restaurant? Because you

33:56 know it's not going to be a circle. It's going to be some weird jagged shape, but how would you

34:02 know it natively? You wouldn't. There's no way that you could.

34:06 Now, does it show you the most like basically you give it point A to point B and it's going to show

34:11 you what route people are usually taking to get there? Close. So in this case, we would put a pin

34:17 right on the restaurant and say, show me a five minute walking radius of this point of interest.

34:24 And it's going to draw that weird polygon shape. And now you know where to put the media.

34:31 There's got to be a reason, you know, big restaurants doing it right. McDonald's,

34:35 it's probably the most common physical ad that people would see, right? In the UK anyway,

34:41 I don't know about the US, but every bus stop, every billboard pretty much is McDonald's,

34:49 fast food, you know, and it's always within a certain, you know, distance of the nearest

34:58 restaurant, right? So as soon as you get into the city, I live in anyway, as soon as you get into,

35:03 you know, a 10 minute walk with McDonald's, you just start to see McDonald's billboards everywhere.

35:10 And it's like, it's overwhelming to a point that literally you can look around and you see it, but

35:16 it works as soon as you see like, oh, and McDonald's, that would be, that's a nice treat,

35:20 right? I'm just going to go and maybe I'll stop by. I need to do that.

35:24 Hey, but the ping, Tim, what about targeting? So can you, one of the big things that we talked

35:31 about is you're not able to measure maybe as well as, as you would if you were running a digital ad,

35:37 but now with AI in terms of targeting, you could segment and say, okay, I know I have this

35:43 demographic in this location, so I want to show them this specific billboard. And then you could

35:48 get creative with what specific billboards you're showing in each different area.

35:52 So there's a few ways to think about targeting for out of home. Most, most of the programmatic

36:02 kind of dedicated digital out of home demand side platforms are going to have good targeting,

36:08 audience targeting. I want to reach moms between 35 and 44 who have $150,000 and above household

36:16 income with these parameters in these zip codes. They're really, really good at that. So I would

36:22 say, you know, and at least online with whatever you've done on Facebook, where I think the

36:29 exciting opportunity is for targeting with out of home and offline media specifically

36:36 is using commercial real estate data. And there's a platform called Placer AI, and you can get a

36:42 really good taste of what they do for physical points of interest for free. There is a paid

36:49 version, but this is one of the tools that I use when planning for like a B2B SaaS company

36:55 is a tool like this because what it's looking at are insights relative to the physical real estate.

37:02 And why that's important is the data used for targeting ads on the internet falls under

37:09 different privacy laws as data collected for physical real estate. So this is used for

37:14 commercial real estate, urban planning, you know, hey, we're going to close this road,

37:19 which roads should we detour to, right? It's used for municipalities and commercial real estate

37:24 investors and that sort of field. Well, what's cool about it is let's say I'm chewy and I want

37:30 to target people that go to PetSmart. Well, I can look at all the PetSmart in the Chicago area,

37:38 and I can look at which zip codes contribute the most shoppers to PetSmart from this area,

37:45 which roads specifically do they drive on when they're going to PetSmart or when they're leaving?

37:52 Because maybe when they're leaving, I want to serve up a chewy billboard that says,

37:56 hey, out of stock on dog food, visit chewy.com, get 20% off today. Right? So now it informs a media

38:06 planning strategy where you can confidently invest in whatever you're buying because you know,

38:12 this is where they live. This is where they work. These are the roads they take. These people take

38:18 public transit. They also shop at Target and you can put together that real world buyer's journey.

38:24 And then you could also, so going back to the level of segmentation, let's say you're chewy,

38:33 you could also send out mailers to everyone that lives near PetSmart and hit them with like a

38:40 postcard potentially as well. Absolutely. You know now that, hey, zip code 12345 contributes 65%

38:49 of the visitors to this PetSmart. I'm just going to go blow out direct mail in that area.

38:57 Dude, and so chewy one time, I never really checked the mail, honestly, but one time when

39:03 I lived at home, I did and I saw a handwritten note from chewy and I was like, damn, that's good.

39:09 I was like, mom, never stop ordering from chewy. I was like, these guys, they're good.

39:12 They're good guys over there. So it does like that, like putting that human touch on it as

39:17 the AI wave sort of takes over. There's a lot of automation. There's a lot of bots out there.

39:22 You got to figure out ways to sneak in that human element in order to stand out. And I think that

39:28 leveraging this stuff for the segmentation, so you could do personalization at scale. I think

39:33 that's what I'm getting at. Yeah. Personalization at scale is exactly it. And it kind of on the

39:39 direct mail, you could do like retargeting direct mail. Hey, this person hit my website,

39:45 reverse IP targeting stuff. We're going to try and figure out and take a pretty good guess and

39:49 send you a piece of direct mail that way too. So I think just tactics like that, thinking about

39:55 attention differently is the biggest mindset shift. So does that fall under the purview of these

40:02 billboard type companies or agencies rather like does direct mail, is that a part of their media

40:08 mix or do they primarily handle like the display? And then there's a specialized team that does

40:14 the more direct postcards flyers, things like that.

40:17 It's actually really interesting. And I don't think there's anyone that's doing it at a really

40:23 high level, which is I don't think there's anyone as an agency that's specializing in

40:30 out of home and direct mail. I think it's a huge opportunity. I think someone should

40:35 definitely do it. Maybe we'll do it after we wrap this up here.

40:39 Worth an experiment. Yeah. I really have not seen anybody who's leading with billboards and direct

40:46 mail, but for the local business, there might not be a better full funnel marketing stack right now

40:55 if you have out of home in your area. And if you can be scrappy and figure it out, if you don't,

41:00 there's an opportunity. So my friend who he works down in the docs, right? And he has the shop where

41:08 they modify the shipping containers. He had sent me a kind of like a pen pencil holder type thing,

41:14 but it's a container, like one of those shipping containers that you would see

41:19 on the ocean, wherever. And I was like, that'd be really cool to make one look nice and send it to

41:26 the interior designers that we're looking to get in front of as a way to stand out, send one of those

41:32 little message handwritten note, but where you would leverage the AI stuff is on the targeting,

41:37 obviously, like who is the best type of person to send this to because you don't want to just

41:41 blast nuts. Everyone would be very expensive, obviously. Yeah. I love 3D direct mail. Dan

41:48 Kennedy has some great stuff on 3D direct mail. If you can figure out the list,

41:54 direct mail is a great option. That'd be a good one. What about if you've seen Mission Impossible,

41:59 when they walk past the ads, the ads react to the person and show them something very targeted.

42:05 How far away are we from something like that? We're there already. It's in airports.

42:13 There is digital signage that has, and I don't know enough to speak on it. I've been in touch

42:20 with one of the founders of one of the technology companies that's doing it. But depending on where

42:26 you stand so that the use case for the airports is we all have different flights and we'd all like to

42:32 see the information that's relevant to us. Depending on where you stand, there are assigned

42:38 spots to stand, you can see the relevant flight information. It's the same screen. There's dozens

42:45 of people looking at the same screen and everyone's seeing something different, arguably dynamic.

42:52 So we're there from a technology delivery standpoint. I think what's coming and what's

43:00 exciting is thinking about app integration into screens. I think the real world becoming more

43:10 engaging, more personalized. Imagine you're a parent and you have Pokemon Go on your phone.

43:18 I don't know if that's still a thing, but this was a hypothetical that we were playing with a

43:23 few years ago and we're still not there yet. But imagine you walk by and Pikachu pops onto the

43:30 screen at the mall. And now you're forced to stop because your kid's going to say,

43:37 mommy, daddy, Pikachu, and you're going to take your phone out and you are not going to be able

43:42 to pass go until you complete whatever the heck is going on that screen. So I was like, when I

43:49 begged for the Pokemon, yeah, when I used to go to the dentist or anything back in the day,

43:52 they used to have to buy me Pokemon cards. Got to, right? It's always a bribe. My son got a tooth

43:56 taken out yesterday. It's like dealing with terrorists. But thinking about that, thinking

44:03 about personalization, that could be anything. It could be, hey, I'm on the Nike app and I want to,

44:09 I want to check a lively, I'm running in New York and I want to check a live leaderboard of everyone

44:14 that's running in New York right now. That's cool. What a cool brand experience for Nike.

44:21 I, you know, so those are the opportunities that get me excited about personalization and

44:28 delivering that experience. And then also seeing the explosion of retail media,

44:34 retail media networks, Amazon, just everyone's talking about retail media, retail media. What's

44:40 the job to be done? It's, I want to reach decision makers when they're spending money.

44:45 83 plus percent of commerce still takes place offline in a physical store, right?

44:55 For sure.

44:56 It's a trap. Like D to C only accounts for 15 to 17 percent of sales in the United States,

45:06 and that's the most anyway.

45:08 That's pulling back post COVID as well. Like we thought it was a new normal,

45:12 but it's kind of reverting.

45:13 The trend's going the other way. People want to be in the physical space. They want to touch it.

45:19 They want to feel it. They want to smell it. They want to be outside and that's not going to stop.

45:24 So I think that that's the trap is that the majority of the opportunity,

45:29 the underpriced attention, it's offline, but because it doesn't come with a shiny dashboard

45:34 and it's not necessarily easy, people run away.

45:38 Yeah, exactly. And also, I think that

45:41 the difference between the AI wave and for example, like the crypto web three wave,

45:46 the AI wave provides tangible benefits if you take the time to learn this stuff,

45:51 because A, you could automate things that you hate doing and B, it allows the busy entrepreneur,

45:58 like my dad, who never really wanted to pay attention to marketing.

46:01 It allows him to do things that he previously just didn't have the time or technical know how to do.

46:06 So even you as an example with your podcast, I know you've been leveraging AI to automate a lot of your workflow.

46:14 So could you maybe talk about that a bit and how it's helped you personally?

46:17 I don't come from any independent wealth or fame, so I like to think that being resource restricted

46:25 is an advantage because it forces you to find creative solutions. And I've been doing a podcast

46:33 about out of home for maybe four years now in October. And I just kept going, I just kept

46:41 making the next episode and there were periods where there was some financial support. I worked

46:46 at a startup and they gave me a budget and I had a social media team and a production team.

46:53 But it was still never growing. I had never intentionally focused on growing a podcast.

47:02 And it really wasn't until I found this community on Discord and the DGNs on Twitter and this

47:10 community specifically that I started to look at the podcast from a growth standpoint. And I sat

47:17 down one day and I said, okay, I don't have the money to hire anyone. I'm not going to take

47:22 fundraising. But if I could hire people to do some of the jobs that I wish someone would do for me,

47:29 what would those job descriptions look or sound like? And I ended up coming up with, okay,

47:34 I would have a team of copywriters, people to do the show notes, people to do the descriptions,

47:39 do all this stuff for me because that's hard, the tags, all that stuff. I wish I had a team to do

47:45 that. And I wish I had a team to do all the video production. I'd love to be like Alex Ormosy,

47:51 who wouldn't have social clips on every platform just in tonnage every day.

47:57 So I'm like, okay, I'd love to have a team of video producers and I don't want to do any of

48:02 the work. I wish that there was someone that would just distribute all of it for me. I just want to

48:07 record podcasts. I don't want to be a production team or a social media marketing team or a team

48:13 of copywriters. I want to do those things. So I wrote these little job descriptions out.

48:19 I started looking and the first thing I found was Swell. I found Cody on Twitter.

48:26 And I found Swell. I was like, oh, okay, there's my team of copywriters. Cool. I don't have to do

48:32 this stuff anymore. Getting just that space back in my brain, that gave me energy, that gave me

48:40 hope. Like, okay, these are now things I don't even have to think about doing. All I have to do is put

48:46 eyeballs on it and make sure it like makes sense. Maybe I make it sound a little bit more like me or

48:50 whatever, but 85% of the work is done. Awesome. That's more time with my son. It's more time

48:56 doing the things I want to do, going for walks, listening to podcasts, whatever. So, okay,

49:01 found a team of copywriters. Now I needed to find a team of video producers. I'd been editing my

49:06 own podcast in a platform called Veed and not too many edits, just adding like an intro and an

49:13 outro music, whatever. Not big video editor by any means. I went to school for finance. So this is

49:20 all self-taught, I assure you. Anyone listening can figure this stuff out. So then I found Opus

49:27 for making the short form clips. So then I said, okay, now I can give Opus a 30-minute podcast.

49:33 It's going to give me back 20 clips. Of those 20 clips, six to eight of them are going to be good

49:40 enough. And this is important. So I'll just point this out right now. A friend of mine ran a big

49:47 part of, if folks know Gary Vee, a friend of mine will be on the podcast in a couple of weeks,

49:53 so we'll come back and share the podcast. We're catching up recently. He started his own agency

49:58 and we were talking about this exact workflow. And he said, Tim, that's where most people get

50:04 tied up is they think it's about the quality. It's not. The quality matters far less than the

50:11 long-term consistency. I was like, shit, honestly, I just never gave it enough time.

50:18 I never gave it enough time because I didn't have the bandwidth to do all the things I wanted to do,

50:22 so I just got overwhelmed. So now I've got Swell being my team of copywriters. I have Opus creating

50:30 the clips. All I do now is I do post edit on the clips. I spend about two to three minutes per clip.

50:37 So now I look at an hour's worth of time differently. I sit down and I say, okay,

50:41 it's going to take me three minutes per video. I'm going to focus for an hour. If I focus for an

50:47 hour, I'm going to be able to create 10 to 20 clips and I can come back later, spend 30 minutes,

50:54 post them all on YouTube, and then I use a platform called repurpose.io and that pushes

51:00 all of my content out from YouTube to all of the socials. My LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok,

51:07 Instagram, the short form content, the long form content, it's all done. I just set up a schedule,

51:15 a posting schedule, and it does it for me. So the things that I used to never even be able to do,

51:22 I do in an hour, an hour and a half, and I'm done.

51:25 Yeah, it's fucking crazy.

51:27 Yeah.

51:28 So that's been an exciting unlock. I put it together as a course for people that want to

51:34 see the exact over the shoulder process and I'll make that available after we finish recording this.

51:41 I'm going to finish putting it together. So I'll definitely share a link out for folks that want to

51:46 jump on that. But the process I just described is how to do it. So you just got to be willing

51:51 to figure it out. Yeah. No, it helped me a shit ton because I spent like two days,

51:55 I think, just really, it was really manual and really tedious and just not very intelligent.

52:04 The way that I was, I was sending something out on YouTube and then I was doing the podcast and

52:08 then the newsletter and it was, I was like, there's got to be a better way. And then when I saw your

52:12 workflow, I was like, oh shit, this is a lifesaver. Yeah. And Opus is awesome too, man. Yeah.

52:18 You can pump out so much more with all of those tools. It's kind of like with the AI, you know,

52:24 articles and the niche blogs and stuff. It just enables you to really focus on the outcome, right?

52:30 Getting to that point and it just allows you to pump out so much more content. And like you said,

52:37 that's the key bit. Consistency and just having, yeah, stuff with people.

52:43 It is intimidating for people like us who are self-taught. When you see Gary V. Hermazi,

52:50 my first million, you see the level of quality and you just see there all of it and you're like,

52:54 I can never do that. But yeah, you can get pretty close with the workflows and tools that are

53:00 available now. And you don't have to hire because even like hiring VAs are great, but you have to

53:08 teach the VA what you want. You have to be very specific. There's a lot of back and forth. And

53:12 then all of a sudden that becomes another headache that you're like, fuck it. I don't

53:16 want to do this anymore. And then the same time that you're spending managing that,

53:23 I've already released another seven hours worth of content and you won't catch up. You just won't

53:29 catch up. It's actually to the point where like I called a friend right before this, just laughing

53:36 about it. Like never in my life did I think I'm going to teach a course on this workflow.

53:42 I taught this workflow earlier today. The teaching part took me about 13 minutes.

53:51 I will spend about two and a half hours total putting it through the whole workflow, turning into

53:57 a course and all of that stuff and have it live available for sale. Never in my life did I think

54:02 that that time was going to be in this lifetime. Like I grew up with no internet, right? Like I

54:09 can still remember what it was like to not have the internet. And I just created a course that

54:16 I know will save people hundreds of hours of figuring it out for yourself, create millions

54:23 of dollars in enterprise value for agencies that do these things. It's just an incredible time to

54:29 be in. So to be in the arena with you guys, there's no better place to be.

54:35 It makes it a lot easier when you could bounce ideas and just learn. And also

54:42 having other people who are going through the beginner stages, it helps hold you accountable.

54:46 I always give you the example of Muay Thai class when I used to take those.

54:53 You felt very guilty skipping one of those classes because you knew that like the trainers would be

54:58 like, oh, this kid's a little bitch, like all this stuff. Like the other kids in the class are like,

55:01 he didn't show up today, he's sleeping in. So I would always go even though I didn't want to.

55:06 But when it came to building a business, it was very easy to flake on myself because I didn't

55:10 have anyone to hold me accountable. So that's why I like having the group dynamic because it brings

55:16 some of that same energy to building your side projects and building your entrepreneurial

55:22 ventures. It's always been the same for me. Always kind of did something and then after two, three

55:28 weeks, no one's holding you accountable and you just kind of, okay, I'm not seeing instant results,

55:34 give up on it, right? Whatever. Next thing. With PJ and the Discord channel, it's just,

55:40 you know, Bulk Dog, for example, it just motivates me to, there's no income from Bulk Dog, right?

55:46 It's an experiment mainly and something that I can just share. And being, even though no one's

55:53 going to say, hey, Lewis, you know, you haven't posted an update on Bulk Dog in a while, it just

55:57 sets like a thing in the back of my mind. Like I want to continue with it and keep on sharing

56:03 because people get some value out of, you know, just listening or reading about it. And

56:09 every single tweet about Bulk Dog, I get likes on. It's like, people enjoy reading about it, seeing

56:15 the ups and the downs, which I'm having right now with it. But yeah, I'm kind of excited to get back

56:21 to a point where it's on the up and get over this hurdle that we're having with it right now.

56:27 I'm excited to just keep on sharing with it. And if this, if that happened before the Discord

56:32 channel, I would have just given up on Bulk Dog. It would have been gone by now. The website would

56:36 have been deleted. As soon as the impressions just hit zero, it would have been okay. Something's

56:42 broke. There's no income from it. So what's the point in carrying on? So at least you get this

56:49 community vibe, right? And everyone's interested. Everyone wants to see how it goes. And the sharing

56:54 dynamic makes it interesting. For sure, man. Tim, any closing thoughts for the boys here

57:01 before we wrap this up? I had one last question. Yeah, go for it. I just want to know your biggest

57:07 success, Tim. And I know you probably have some good stories about it. But I want to know

57:14 what you can achieve with the OOH method. I'm going to give you the most incredible story

57:24 that I've seen. And it might not be relatable for everyone. But I think there's a lesson in it

57:31 for everyone, which is to have a tolerance to test. This was for a brand, a direct consumer company

57:42 that I would say sells a luxury product. They sell puppies, very high end puppies. And they wanted to

57:51 test out of home. They had scaled using performance marketing tactics, and they had a pretty high

57:58 lifetime value of a customer, right? The puppies were about $5,000 each. So if they could just

58:05 continue scaling customer acquisition, then great. Let's just scale to the moon. But they'd kind of

58:12 hit that threshold with digital. So they were starting to try offline channels. And they

58:17 approached my team at the time, and they said, all right, we're going to do radio. And then

58:24 we're going to do radio in these markets. And then we want to do radio plus out of home in this one

58:31 market. We want to test it in Phoenix. We want to test radio and out of home in Phoenix. Will that

58:37 help us to sell more puppies? At the time, Phoenix was their bottom three performing market. It was

58:44 one of the bottom three worst markets. Maybe it wasn't going to be a market that they continued

58:50 to pursue. All they changed about their marketing mix was adding radio and billboards. And Phoenix

58:59 went from a bottom three performing market to the number two market for the company.

59:04 It was all they changed. They did nothing else different. They didn't increase the supply of

59:09 puppies. They did nothing else. And I think that that ultimately speaks to,

59:16 that's it in an extreme circumstance. That's a brand that's got a bunch of money to spend.

59:22 That's what they're feeling with a lot of money. Your business is going to benefit

59:27 from even a smaller budget. It just might not show up as going from number three to a number two

59:34 market. But it's going to be there to be open-minded to finding it.

59:39 Hell yeah.

59:41 Sweet stuff, brother. Well, we appreciate your time. If you want to

59:45 discuss the things that we talked about in the podcast with the community, Jump in the Prom Jockeys

59:50 Discord, we are all relatively new at this. So do not feel bad if you don't know what you're doing,

59:56 because we don't really either. We're just learning as we go. So I didn't jump in during

01:00:01 the conversation. There's 600 people in there, right? And someone will be able to help.

01:00:10 There's actually smart people. That's who we learned from. So yeah, man, appreciate your time.

01:00:15 Looking forward to running some experiments together in the near future.

01:00:19 Definitely. Thanks again for having me, guys.