Why Billboards and Subway Ads Could Be the Next Billion Dollar Arbitrage

What up prompt jockeys we are back episode three of the pod and today we have a special one. We have one of our very own from discord community. Tim row, creator of Oh H insider, here to educate us on everything out of home advertising related, educating the Zoomers, on the potential opportunities that the physical world has to bring. So excited to have you on brother, thank you for joining.

Excited to be here excited to have found this great community and be a part of it and and join here in the pod. Hell yeah.

Would you mind giving a little bit of an intro as to what out of home advertising is because we got a lot of Zoomer digital natives like myself who have been glued to their computers for the last 2030 years. And we have forgotten all about what exists in the physical realm.

Well, that's the world that I come from. So I totally get it. Out Of Home is a terrible category. It's really anything that you see offline, it could be a billboard, it could be a bus shelter, it could be a wrapped truck, it could be a could be a flyer above a urinal, it could be absolutely anything in the physical world, which is why it's kind of a bad category and clunky and hard. And, and, and is still really untapped. Which is an exciting opportunity, obviously, as a marketer,

even the well first off you and my dad would be good friends, because my dad is a big brick and mortar guy. He's had a restaurant for the last 30 years. And any time I tell him like, we're doing crypto, we're doing AI, he's like, you and your friends are idiots like brick and mortar. He's like, if you ever seen like Arrested Development, like there's always money in the banana stand like I should. That's like, that's my dad. So you guys would get along? Well,

yeah, and you say he's got a restaurant, too, right?

He's got a restaurant. Yeah. And he, like, he understands like the he understands AI understands crypto, all that stuff. But at the end of the day, like people got to eat, people got to go to work. So we're in this mindset of like, I'm going to do digital marketing, and I'm gonna get in front of the entire world. But in reality, your audience is going to be walking past the the subway billboard, every day, twice a week, and the entire year. So you've got to understand where the audience is. And that's why I'm excited to learn more about what you're working on. Because I think there are opportunities, especially for us, deep ends of the world to kind of come in and shake things up, utilizing these sorts of strategies.

Yeah, and I think that the biggest thing for me was like the mindset shift, I came from the traditional agency world, I bought and sold a lot of TV and radio, direct mail, things like that. We're doing a lot of Facebook ads, Google, kind of doing all of that stuff, and then ended up going to work for a billboard company. And as the digital guy working at a billboard company, I was a bit skeptical, like, right, these things are big, you know, big pictures on sticks on the side of the road. But is it targeted? No. Is it measurable? No. So if you can't measure it, why do it that's really the school that I came from, and was working at the billboard company. And there was a nonprofit group that helped homeless men get back on their feet. And it was it was the summertime, I would later find that it was their slow fundraising time of the year if you've ever worked with or for nonprofits, obviously, their goal is to raise money, because that's their lifeblood, right? They don't have traditional revenue, like business woods. So they're always trying to raise money. But in the summertime for this nonprofit, it was their slow time, and they decided to do some billboards. I was in on the meeting. And I asked for Google Analytics access. This was still in the, in the times of Universal Analytics circa 2019. So things were a little different. But what I saw over the next four to six weeks was everything go up, and like, up in really significant ways direct traffic to the website, up 30%, average website donation size up 90%. All of the key conversion goals. Were just completely off the chart. So called the marketing director, and instantly was curious, Hey, are you doing anything else? And she told me, No, we're just doing the billboards. So that's when I really got curious like this. These must be signals of whatever the billboards are doing. I still don't understand what they're doing. But something's happening here. And then I had to keep pulling on that thread. So changing the perception on how is it going to show up right, it's not linear. It's not going to show up as quick in my analytics. But when you can, we can get outside that and understand hey, this is big canvas, this is a place that I can, I can put a message up on a really, really big piece of real estate and, you know, kinda like aligning back to the story about your dad, having ownership of something in the real world, I think is a really, really powerful brand positioning statement to have. And, you know, 2023

Yeah, and a lot of I mean, myself, and I think a lot of people in our community are big fans of the hustle and Sam Parr and my first million and years ago, I remember Sam Parr saying that when he was starting the hustle, he wanted to understand, like the history of media, and he started looking at guys like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch. And Ted Turner's dad owned the billboard business. And then Ted Turner took that over, and ended up turning it into CNN, and the Atlanta Braves and Turner Broadcasting and all that stuff. So billboards have their roots and did give birth to the modern media landscape that we see today.

And you even see it reflected in, you know, for anyone that's done any sort of display advertising, and then you look at the names of of the ad sizes, right, your billboard size, add, you know, add display, or leaderboards and all these different sizes, but they all take the root in out of home, right, they've just been converted into really small picture format on our phones that we, that we carry around. So it was that and then also, you know, seeing just seeing how, like a DSP like the trade desk, seeing how they position display advertising, understanding that the goal of display advertising isn't necessarily as a traffic driver, but as a Brand Builder. So if you can find a physical piece of real estate to do that, then you know, I think that that's a good opportunity to kind of plant a flag

100%.

To me, it sounded to me already. I want to know, Tim, if you don't mind, you know, how, how would you go about? So if you've never had a billboard campaign? You've never done anything like this before? How do you get into it as someone who mainly would do online marketing, you know, is what's the audit process? Like? Do I have to make phone calls to a company, a billboard company is someone who handles distribution to, you know, hundreds of different locations? What does it kind of look like from a going into it completely fresh?

I'd say it depends on two things, your pain tolerance and your budget. pain tolerance being like, how much manual work do you want to do, if you're planning a multi market, six figure campaign for a brand, then it probably makes sense to do a little bit of legwork. Maybe you want to work with an agency, maybe there's just a few specific partners, that would make a lot of sense for you to work with. I've actually put together a little directory, you can visit triad scout.com, there's, there's a bunch of companies kind of listed there, wrapped car companies, wrapped truck companies, things like that. So you could piece it together yourself. If if you kind of have a budget that's on the bigger scale, you could also deploy that money via programmatic DSPs. You could just say, hey, I want to buy a bunch of impressions in Walmart's and on street kiosks and things like that. So those are, those are some of the avenues there. But particularly for you know, like the de gens like, I'm a scrappy marketer at heart. That's who I am. And those are the opportunities that got me most excited when I started playing around with out of home. So there's a platform called blip billboards. And as far as I'm concerned, I've tested all of them. This is the best one because it's pay per play. So it's most similar to a Google ads campaign where you're going to pay each time your billboard runs, so you're paying per billboard flip. That's why it's called a billboard flip. And what's neat about that is you can optimize your day parting schedule, so you can say, hey, I want to only run on Mondays and Fridays between 6am and 8pm. So you can set all that up, you can optimize bid strategies. What I think's really interesting about that is you can select a group of billboards and then deploy that strategy against the group of billboards for the really, really exciting opportunity is to do each individual billboard as its own campaign. Because what you'll find is when you do each billboard as its own campaign, there's all of these opportunities to exploit how undervalued the billboards really are. So let's say that those are really valuable times six in the morning till eight at night. If you wanted to buy that, that's a digital billboard from the digital billboard company for a month. And they might say, Hey, it's $3,500 to be one of the advertisers in this rotation. You're like, I don't have 3500 bucks. I've got$5 A day, cool, go on blip. Think of it just like any other digital marketing you've done, where do I want to target, I want to target in this city, I want to be close to a Walmart, right? Like, you could do all these things for yourself, really, really simply get in there, set up a low budget, find one Billboard, and then you start optimizing bid strategy and day parting. And what you're gonna find is,

I want to say they need to do a bit of an online campaign because I've never heard of blip.

So and this is this is, again, this is part of that like exploitable value is they target small local businesses. And that's really who they're built for. Yeah, they've never the types of campaigns that like we're describing right now. I've run them before for big brands with big budgets. And I can tell you that, I'll give you a very direct example, there was one specific digital billboard in Salt Lake, we had priced it out is $4,000, to be on that digital billboard to be one of the eight advertisers in the rotation. That's generally how many advertisers there are about eight in the rotation. $4,000 to be one of the A, really all the brand cared about was six in the morning till eight at night. Yeah, we ended up becoming, we ended up playing in two slots. So essentially having the equivalent of two spaces, we were by buying so much space during the day, at 1/4 of the price. So we spent 1000 bucks to essentially run $8,000 worth of media. That's the type of opportunity that's there. But it comes with the level of alright, I'm I'm willing to accept that this isn't, this isn't going to show up in my analytics the way that I'm used to. Yeah, I have to think a little bit outside the box, you have to

think out of the box to really track your, I guess your conversion rate, I guess. And

so Tim, talk to me about like the I saw some some companies that are attempting to measure this sort of advertising the same way that they do with digital, right, so talking about the exposed visitation rate, and things like that, like the different ways that you can actually get some analytics on these on these billboards.

And that's, you know, I think it's it's kind of the, it's the mix, that I've seen a lot of b2b SaaS companies, b2b FinTech companies get right, which is, alright, we're gonna measure this in a few different ways. We're going to measure it holistically, does our overall cost to acquire customer come down? Can we accelerate the sales cycle? Can we increase lifetime value, right, so we're looking at some of these kinds of key metrics, then we're also looking at organic traffic to the website, is our cost per click coming down, is our email open rate going up? Right, it's going to show up in other ways. But then, specifically for out of home, you can get really good directional feedback by using some technology that that uses a measure called expose visitation rate, I would equate it most similarly to a click through rate. So the idea behind exposes notation rate is, hey, we've got this billboard, this billboard is it's 100 feet high, it's 48 feet wide. It's this far off the road. Imagine a cone coming out from the center of that billboard. It's capturing all those people. That's called a view shed. From that view, shed, we're saying this many people were exposed to the advertising. If it was a static billboard that was up all the time. Obviously, it's capturing everybody. If it's digital, it's based on the exact timestamp and the window, the duration that that digital ad was playing. So it's actually pretty scientific the way that the audience is captured. And then from that, we're looking at cross device matching. So does that person either from their cell phone that we observed, do they go to a website? Do they download an app? Do they go to a store, or maybe they go home at night and they set that phone down next to their computer. And because of that cross device matching, we are able to detect that they went to the website and finished that purchase when they got home? So directionally it's really amazing, so directionally now I can tell you, all right, these are the formats that are working hardest. Your billboards are overperforming, the gym media that you have the screens in the gym, really not working that hard. But movie theaters, movie theaters are interesting, the sample size is too small, but we saw really good live from that. Brands have never had insight like that before. So for brands that are interested in kind of testing, you know, really more than deterministic measure. Rent, those things are available. And it's definitely an exciting time.

And also, so another thing that I thought was interesting, like, like I saw Cody tweeting the other day, like growth is supposed to be boring. And I think that that's kind of weird for us to hear. Because we're used to kind of pushing forward and being the Gen and trying out all these different things. And being scrappy, like you said, but it's supposed to be boring. And you want to run advertisements that can be sustainable for a long time. Like I saw on your blog, like, tick tock was an example of something that can just be a flash in the pan that comes and goes, but there's this billboard on my, I used to see on my way to school, so on I 95, going to Connecticut, and it says Your wife is hot. And it was for pools for pools. Yeah, and dude that ad has that ad has, it's still there, like 10 years later. And that guy has been running the same ad. And I'm sure everyone sees and looks up and chuckles to themselves. And I bet you they got a shit ton of business for it. And he's just had the same add up the entire time.

And here's the really crazy thing. What would happen if he took it down? People would no wonder people would they would notice, right? Yeah, they would notice it was gone? And would never do

that an online ad, right? Would you stop seeing other Google ads on a website, you're never going to think, Oh, I missed that. But if you have a, you know, a physical reaction to seeing something, you know, in real life, you're going to get used to it right? If you see it every day, you're gonna get used to it, it's going to become a part of your routine.

Some of the landmarks is mine. Yeah, really,

I guess. You know, there's so many ways of tracking how many people have seen it now. I mean, I guess things like, you know, IoT devices, phones, watches, you know, at some point in the future, everyone will be wearing the apple pro vision crap that they're rolling out. And I'm sure they'll be able to just tell you, you know, this person was was within X amount of meters of your billboard, this counters or you know, that they went on their iPhone and went to your website, and

it's crazy. So they're there. They're technically pieces of real estate, like you had mentioned to me a few days ago. When you're when you're analyzing them, right. So if you even if you don't want to run ads yourself from an investor perspective, you can you can purchase these. And they function as a REIT almost, that's what you had mentioned to me as well, right.

And that's really, I think, where the underpriced opportunity comes from is, most out of home media companies are set up and run as real estate investment trusts. So their objective is to generate a high dividend for their investors, right, it's to take money out of the company, and pay out. That's in direct conflict to a high growth media company. Right? If you just close your eyes, and you don't even need to be an expert in any of these things, if you just thought, what would it look like if Google owned a billboard company, they probably wouldn't be pulling all the money out and paying a dividend. They'd be reinvesting in technology, they'd be reinvesting in growth, they'd be pushing that industry so much faster. So because of that, you are essentially buying short term, you're leasing short term real estate. And then you have to think of it as a marketer, right? I'm buying this real estate, or I'm renting this real estate for a period of time for this amount of money. I need to generate this return above whatever my investment here is. So like another real, like, de Gen hacky thing that I would love to see someone do, I found one guy who did it. And there's some pieces that come together on it. So maybe maybe we could do this as a as a group experiment, which is to get cheap billboards, you can get cheap billboards in rural parts of the country, like, especially out here by me, like, those little ones you see on the side of the road might be four or five 600 bucks for a month, right? So you can buy really cheap attention. And then do something like a pay per call affiliate link or a pay per call affiliate number rather. Right and hey, we're going to sign up for an affiliate network and we're going to make XYZ amount of money each time we generate a phone call off this billboard. There's that much underpriced attention out there. I think there's opportunity for someone to do things like that.

Yeah, cuz even think about like the rural ones, especially like a lot of people say, hey, when you're trying to do drop shipping or trying to do these econ brands, instead of trying to target the younger kids go after the the older audience and that older audience is definitely going to be Paying attention to billboards as well. And that could be a good experiment to run like an E commerce experiment where you're marketing instead of doing Facebook ads and Tik Tok ads, we're running billboards. And can you get actual sales that way or even affiliates like you said,

people trust people trust what they can see physically right? So this site I've never thought about it I've genuinely never in my head being like, you know, on a billboard is a good idea. Now I'm thinking risk assessment and we got some nice logos Joe, we got some you know, we got some billboards in every big city in the in the US put your face on them. Yeah, straight up, build that rat's butt. No, genuinely though. People will trust like a cybersecurity company more if they remember

what LifeLock did in New York City. Oh, yeah. He made a TV commercial of a truck driving around with his social security number on it. Right. And that was LifeLock was the TV spot. Yeah,

I was like, Damn, man, I kind of need that shit. I was like, man, they're these hackers are coming for me. Like they they scare the show? No, I

know, like, this guy's will drive a truck through New York City. He's driving a truck through Times Square with the social on

it. That's genius.

It's a really strong statement of life. It's it's instant credibility. It's grassroots. At scale, it does so many things. But because it's not easy to measure. It gets gets overlooked. Yeah. It's

sort of Joe's just gonna say from an outsider, it just sounds you know, super expensive to me. You know, it's physical. There's people involved, right? They're going to have to, I mean, I'm not even talking about digital billboards, you know, physical ones. And it sounds expensive. It sounds like a lot of effort. There's people involved, you know, going in and updating them or whatever. And I do we include, like, the actual poster billboards, or is it just digital ones that you're talking about? And all of this, but I would actually, you know, put the paper on? Glue. It sounds crazy to me.

Yeah. And it can be, it can be a pain. And I think that that's where the opportunity comes from is it can be thinking about it at scale. There are really practical ways to do it at scale, whether that's wrapping a fleet of cars for a conference and driving those cars around the conference, whether that's doing one or two trucks in New York City for three months, like, I know a guy that does trucks in New York for 1500 bucks a month, you could run a truck, pick wherever you want. In New York City six days a week deliveries from sunup till sundown for 4500 bucks, but you gotta be willing to stroke a check for 4500 bucks, and I get like, that's not for everybody. I think blip is a really practical way to get started. I think it's as low as$2 a day or $1 a day. I have run and generated leads for $1 a day on digital billboards, usually Rico.

Honestly,

I think lewisboro for risk assessment. I think that like a b2b SaaS if you figured out okay, there's a big cybersecurity conference in town, I think that that wrap Karwan is a good idea. I

genuinely I was just thinking in my head, we need to scope every cybersecurity conference in the in the US, which has more than x amount of people, and make sure that we have, you know, physical ads in that location. It'd be amazing.

And there's some really practical ways to do that. Right, like so maybe wrapping cars is outside of the budget. But there's there's a platform, they were actually acquired by T Mobile not too long ago called Play octopus, and maybe there's some folks that have even seen these. And hopefully, of Uber and Lyft. Recording, you got me and you can go to try out scout.com. See, that's that's why it exists. So there's they put tablets they put, I describe it as if you've ever gone to Olive Garden. And there's the tablet on the table with the games and stuff. It's that in the back seat of an Uber in the left

of season, Amelia, right, the difference. Uber is about to be a good ride. He's got the tablet, and he's got the speaker system and some free water bottles.

Okay, so we've obviously never talked about this before drivers that have these in the back seats of their cars, get larger tips, and have a higher rating than those who don't. So it's funny to hear you actually just say that unprompted, because that's the truth. So it's a more engaging experience. Here's what's interesting, that piece of technology that uses Google Glass in the tablet, so it doesn't detect that it's Joe or that's Louis or that Tim, but does detect, hey, a person just got in front of this. So it's verified one to one impression in the physical world. The creative format is a 15 to 32nd video creative, which means it's pre roll or mid roll. And at certain budget thresholds, and again, this is where like sometimes there's a bear Are your entry but it's certain budget thresholds, you can actually gamify your ad. So let's, let's pretend it was some sort of interactive game like a mobile ad, where they had to find the key that matches the lock. And when they unlock it, they get, you know, $500 off, whatever, and they can enter their email. It's actually a lead generation tool. I've run campaigns for cannabis company, where they were getting email opt ins from the backseat of Uber and Lyft. For the same that they were through their, like digital marketing campaigns.

That's crazy. It's crazy. We need to like after this, I'm going to scope out every big cybersecurity conference in the US, I'm gonna have a look a blip on. It sounds it sounds so good for that.

And you can guerrilla stuff, too, right? You can go do guerrilla stuff, do study things, hire people to do street teams, right? Like, it doesn't have to cost a ton of money. It's just, it's really that it's, I guess, coming all the way back, it's back to that pain threshold. Do you want to figure it out?

When when we say like dejenne marketing, I think it's just a new way of saying Guerilla Marketing essentially thinks everyone's trying to be like scrappy, scrappy. Yes, just

the usual, you know, shots and Google ads on and that it rep, it's got

a lot of good. Hinge, for example, just off the top my head like Subway ads in the city. I mean, you see hands the dating apps all the time, or GrubHub, ZocDoc. Like a lot of those. So they wouldn't be spending money if it wasn't effective. And I wouldn't remember the ads. Realistically, if it wasn't effective, Brian, I think a lot of people remember them as well. But how about local businesses? I've seen you talk a bit about like Google My Business? How can local businesses implement these strategies as well?

I think that's maybe the most untapped opportunity is is local businesses, kind of dialing up an appetite for for being a little bit more comfortable with with some risk, because the way that this shows up for local businesses are in your Google My Business, it shows up as calls, it shows up as people looking for directions to your business, it shows up in really tangible ways. And again, I think a platform like blip is a great place for small businesses to get started to, is it close by to my business? Let me just put up a simple billboard that lets people know I'm here proof of life, our business exists. Could your business could your business afford to reach more people? Would it hurt your business if more people knew you existed?

So I think that some people in our group, they're either running local agencies for for those types of businesses, or they may have So so how could they potentially go to their local businesses and be like, Hey, I run Facebook ads, all this stuff. But I have these ideas as well, what are some things that they could potentially bring to their clients in that regard?

I think definitely with the changes that iOS 14.5 brought in now, a couple years back, but that brought in much smaller audiences less targeting less tracking, right, it definitely created some, some bumps for a lot of those advertisers, and specifically for the agencies that provide those services. So I think, learning how to even if it's just something as simple as doing lawn signs, and digital billboards, or just doing digital billboards as a service, going in having something new to talk about is always valuable as an agency, and leading with billboards that are really scalable for any budget is something that the local billboard companies probably not going to be able to do. So I think as an agency offering flexibility in pricing, with the advantages that billboards can obviously offer, you know, a small business that they might be working with.

Yeah, and I gave the example as well, of the container website that I was working on, like those, the target audience, their construction professionals, and contractors and people like that. Those guys aren't on LinkedIn all day, like they're actually out in the field, doing work, being productive. So to try to run a LinkedIn ad for them is probably not the best idea. It'd be much smarter if I were to either hand out flyers or set up some billboards around those construction sites. And I think that's another example as well, where you could get in front of them that way utilizing these strategies here.

And something scrappy, you could do if you're trying to get in front of like construction sites. This is this is an entire portfolio of some media companies business, which are putting advertisements up on construction barricades, right if you're trying to get in front of construction workers and there's a construction site. Hey, if there's a gun struction barricade a figure it out. Like, again, that's the hard work. That's the hard work that's in the way. But that's the opportunity. The obstacle is the way in this case of figure out who owns that barricade. Hey, I noticed that you have this construction barricade, I'd like to advertise on it. Can I give you 200 bucks to put a banner on this?

For the next month? 100%. I just did a bit

of research. Sorry, I was just doing a bit of research while you guys are talking. And it's actually a number that I didn't know. But I fought a check. So 82% of the of the US population are on social media, on their phones. I mean, 20% aren't. Right. So it's such an untapped audience. It just, I can't believe I mean, young people as well, right. I know, so many people nowadays, people my age, you know, just go into is that I just go in, you know, cold on social media, like no Facebook, no Instagram, just completely deleting all of it right and just live in a non it is becoming like a popular thing to do, the cool thing to do is just not to be on socials. So there's such a, it seems to me, like an untapped way of doing this market. And then many people will just, you know, stray away just just saying that it's not gonna work. It's not for us. But really, I guarantee I guarantee that people doing this would would get their money's worth from it. Just because just because of the amount of reach you can get from it. I'm just honestly blown my mind. I

can't believe it. And Tim we had so we had Kobe on the podcast last week, speaking recoding, Kobe is the CMO or head of growth at Rupa health. So health tech startup. And one of the things that he said he's very excited about in relation to AI is the ability to do more physical marketing, because of the the level of targeting you could do. And all things like that. So what opportunities are you seeing in terms of leveraging all the powerful AI technology we have now and applying it to this physical realm.

One of the most exciting things I've seen is actually a tool that's not intended for media planning, or buying its platform called unearth insights. And I think it's totally free to sign up for I've been sharing this a lot with within the kind of out of home community. But specifically, that tool gives you insights on every zip code in the country, the population that's there, relative to key points of interest, I want to see all the Starbucks that are around here, how many gas stations are in the state of New Mexico, that's a write down, that's when you take home unearth insights, but then you look at there's some tactical takeaways, one of the features within that tool that's so interesting is you can drag and drop a pin. So I'm gonna use New York City for this scenario, because it's the most extreme example. But you can use this obviously, anywhere in the continental United States. You drag just like Google Maps, you drag the little, little person and drop it. And then you tell it, I want to see a five minute walking radius of where this pin drop is. And it will show you a five minute walking race. So now imagine, you're your dad's restaurant, and you want to do some physical marketing to drive foot traffic during lunch. So you can see all right, where are all the places that are within a five minute walk of my restaurant? Because you know, it's not going to be a circle? Yeah. Right. It's going to be some weird jagged shape. But how would you know it natively you wouldn't, there's no way that you could

now have it show it show you the most like, basically you give it point A to point B and it's going to show you what route people are usually taking to get their

clothes. So in this case, we would put a pin right on the restaurant and say, show me a five minute five minute walking radius of this point of interest. Okay, okay. And it's going to draw that weird polygon shape. Now you don't know where to put the media. There's gonna

be a reason you know, big restaurants do that. Right. McDonald's is probably the most common physical advice that people will see right in the UK anyway, I don't know about the US, but every bus stop every every billboard pretty much is McDonald's, fast food, you know, and it's always within a certain you know, distance of the nearest restaurant, right? So as soon as you get into the Sea Island anyway, as soon as you get into, you know, 10 minute walk with McDonald's, you just start to see, like done those billboards everywhere. And it's like it's overwhelming to a point You bet. Literally, you can look around and you see it, but it works. As soon as you see a McDonald's out, that's a nice treat, right? I'm just gonna go and maybe I'll stop I need to do that

he would ping Tim, what about targeting? So can you, one of the big things that we talked about is, you're not able to measure maybe as well as, as you would if you were running a digital ad. But now with AI in terms of targeting, you could segment and say, Okay, I know I have this demographic and this location. So I want to show them this specific billboard. And then you can get creative with what specific billboards are showing in each different area.

So there's a few ways to think about targeting for Out Of Home, most, most of the programmatic kind of dedicated digital out of home demand side platforms are going to have good targeting audience targeting, I want to reach moms between 35 and 44, who have $150,000 and above household income, with these parameters in these zip codes. They're really, really good at that. So I would say, you know, at least online with whatever you've done on Facebook, where I think the exciting opportunity is for targeting with out of home and offline media specifically, is using commercial real estate data. And there's a platform called place or AI and you can get a really good taste of what they do. For physical points of interest for free. There is a paid version but but this is one of the tools that I use when planning for like a b2b SaaS company is, is a tool like this, because what it's looking at are insights relative to the physical real estate. And why that's important is the data used for targeting ads on the internet falls under different privacy laws as data collected for physical real estate. So this is used for commercial real estate, urban planning, you know, hey, we're going to close this road. Which road should we detour to? Right? It's used for municipalities and commercial real estate investors, and then that sort of field. But what's cool about it is, let's say I'm chewy, and I want to target people that go to PetSmart. Well, I can look at all the pet smarts in the Chicago area. And I can look at which zip codes contribute the most shoppers to pet smarts from this area, which roads specifically do they drive on when they're going to PetSmart for when they're leaving, because maybe when they're leaving, I want to serve up a chewy billboard that says, hey, out of stock on dog food, visit chewy.com Get 20% off today. Right? So now it informs a media planning strategy, where you can confidently invest in whatever you're buying, because, you know, this is where they live. This is where they work. These are the roads they take these people take public transit, they also shop at Target, and you can put together that real world buyers journey.

And then you could also so going back to the level of segmentation. Let's say you're chewy, you could also send out mailers to everyone that lives near PetSmart and hit them with like a postcard potentially as well.

Absolutely. You know, now that hey, zip code 12345 contributes 65% of the visitors to this Petsmart I'm just gonna go blow out direct mail in that area.

Dude, and so chewy one time I've never really checked them out honestly. But once I'm when I looked at home I did and I saw a a handwritten note from chewy and I was like, Damn, that's good. I was like wrong. Don't I was like mom never stop ordering from chewy. I was like these guys. They're good. Good guys over there. So it does like that, like putting that human touch on it as the AI wave sort of takes over. There's a lot of automation, there's a lot of bots out there. You got to figure out ways to sneak in that human element in order to stand out and I think that leveraging this stuff for the segmentation you so you can do personalization at scale. I think that's what I'm getting at.

Yeah, personalization at scale is exactly it and it kind of on the direct mail. You can you could do like retargeting, direct mail, hey, this person hit my website, reverse IP targeting stuff. We're going to try and figure out and take a pretty good guess and send you a piece of direct mail that way too. So I think just tactics like that thinking about attention differently is the biggest mindset shift.

So does that fall under the purview of these billboard type companies or agencies rather like does direct mail? Is that a part of their medium next quarter, they primarily handle like the display. And then there's a specialized team that does the more direct postcards, flyers, things like that.

It's actually really interesting. And I don't think there's anyone that's doing it at a really high level, which is I don't think there's anyone as an agency that specializing in out of home and direct mail, I think it's a huge opportunity. I think someone should definitely do it. And maybe we'll do it after after we wrap this up here worth an experiment. Yeah, I really have not seen anybody who's leading with billboards and direct mail. But for the local business, there might not be a better full funnel marketing stack right now. If you have a thought of home in your area, and if you can be scrappy, and figure it out, if you don't, there's

so my friend who he works down at the docks, right, and he has the shop where they modify the shipping containers. He had sent me a kind of like a pen pencil holder type thing. But it's it's a container like one of those shipping containers that you would see on the ocean, wherever. And I was like, that'd be really cool to make one look nice. And send it to the interior designers that we're looking to get in front of as a way to stand out, send one of those little message, handwritten note. But where you would leverage the AI stuff is on the targeting, obviously, like who is the best type of person to send this to? Because you don't want to just blast it out to everyone or be very expensive, obviously.

Yeah, I love 3d direct mail. Dan Kennedy has some great stuff on 3d direct mail, if you can, if you can figure out the list. Direct Mail is a great option a good one.

What about if you've seen Mission Impossible when they walk past the ads? The ads react to the person and show them something very targeted? Yeah. How far away? Are we from something like that?

We're, we're there already. It's in airports. There is digital signage that has, and I don't know enough to speak on it. I've been in touch with one of the founders of one of the technology companies that's doing it. But depending on where you stand, so that the use case for the airports is we all have different flights. And we'd all like to see the information that's relevant to us. Depending on where you stand, there are assigned spots to stand, you can see the relevant flight information. It's the same screen. There's dozens of people looking at the same screen. And everyone's seeing something different, arguably dynamic. So we're there from a technology delivery standpoint. I think what's coming and what's exciting is thinking about app integration into screens. I think the real world becoming more engaging, more personalized. Imagine, imagine you're a parent and you have Pokemon Go on your phone. I don't know if that's still a thing. But this is, this was a hypothetical that we were playing with a few years ago. And we're still not there yet. But imagine you walk by and Pikachu pops onto the screen at the mall. And now you're forced to stop. Because your kid's gonna say, Mommy, Daddy, Pikachu, and you're gonna take your phone out and you are not going to be able to pass go until you complete whatever the heck is going on that screen. So

beg for the Pokeyman Yeah, when I go to the dentist or anything back in the day I used to they used to have to buy Pokemon cards

got to right. It's always a bribe. My son got a tooth taken out yesterday. It's you know, it's like dealing with terrorists. But thinking about that thinking about personalization, that could be anything. It could be, hey, I'm on the Nike app. And I want to, I want to check a lively, I'm running in New York and I want to check a live leaderboard of everyone that's running in New York right now. That's cool. Like, what a cool brand experience for Nike. I you know, so those are the opportunities that that get me excited about personalization and kind of delivering that experience. And then also seeing the explosion of retail media, retail media networks, Amazon, just everyone's talked about retail media, retail media, what's the job to be done? It's, I want to reach decision makers when they're spending money. 83 plus percent of commerce still takes place offline, in a physical store. Right? For sure. It's a trap, like DTC only accounts for 15 to 17% of sales in the United States. And that's the most

No pulling back post COVID as well, like we thought it was normal, but it's kind of reverting

the trends going the other way people want to be in the physical space, they want to touch it, they want to feel it, they want to smell it, they want to be outside. And that's not going to stop. So I think that that's the trap is that the majority of the opportunity, the underpriced attention, it's offline, but because it doesn't come with a shiny dashboard, and it's not necessarily easy.

People run away. Yeah, exactly. And also, I think that the difference between the AI wave, and for example, like the crypto web three wave, the AI wave provides tangible benefits if you take the time to learn this stuff, because you could automate things that you hate doing. And be it allows the busy entrepreneur like my dad, who never really wanted to pay attention to marketing. It allows him to do things that he previously just didn't have the time or technical know how to do. So even you as an example, with your with your podcast, I know you've been leveraging AI to automate a lot of your workflow. So could you maybe talk about that a bit and how it's helped you personally.

I don't come from any independent wealth or fame. So I like to think that being resource restricted is an advantage because it forces you to find creative solutions. And I've been doing a podcast about out of home for three, four years now in October. And I just kept going and just kept making the next episode. And there were periods where there was some financial support. I worked at a startup and they gave me a budget and I had a social media team and a production team. But I it was still never it was still never growing. I'd never intentionally focused on growing a podcast. And it really wasn't until I found this community on Discord and kind of like like the the de gens on Twitter and like this community specifically, that I started to look at the podcast from a growth standpoint. I sat down one day and I said, Okay, I don't have the money to hire anyone. I'm not going to take fundraising. But if I could hire people to do some of the jobs that I wish someone would do for me, what would those job descriptions look or sound like? And they ended up coming up with okay, I wish I would have a team of copywriters, people to do the shownotes people to do the descriptions to do all this stuff for me because that's, that's hard, the tags, all the all that stuff. I wish I had a team to do that. And I wish I had a team to do all the video production. I'd love to be like Alex or mosey who wouldn't write like, I'm social clips on every platform just in tonnage every day. So like, I'd like okay, I'd love to have a team of video producers and I don't want to do any of the work. I wish that there was someone that would just distribute all of it for me, right. I just want to record podcasts. I don't want to be a production team or a social media marketing team or a team of copywriters. I want to do those things. So I wrote these little job descriptions out, started looking. And the first thing I found was swell. I found Cody on Twitter found swell. I was like, oh, okay, there's my team of copywriters, cool. I don't have to do this stuff anymore. Getting just that space back in my brain. That gave me it gave me energy that gave me hope. Like, okay, these are now things I don't even have to think about doing. All I have to do is put eyeballs on it and make sure like make sense. Maybe make it sound a little bit more like me or whatever. But 85% of the work is done. Awesome. It's more time with my son. More time doing the things I want to do. go for walks, listen to podcasts, whatever. So okay, found a team of copywriters. Now I needed to find a team of video producers. I'd been editing my own podcast in a platform called V. And not too many edits, just adding like an intro and an outro music whatever, not big video editor by any means. I went to school for finance. So this is all self taught. I assure you anyone listening can figure this stuff out. So then I found Opus for making the short form clips. So then I said, Okay, now I can give Opus 30 minute podcast, it's gonna give me back 20 clips of those 20 clips, six to eight of them are going to be good enough. And this is important. So I'll just point this out right now a friend of mine ran a big part of this. Folks know Gary Vee. A friend of mine will be on the podcast in a couple of weeks. So we'll come back and share the podcast. We're catching up recently. He he started his own agency. We were talking about this exact workflow. And he said, Tim, that's where most people get tied up is they think it's about the quality. It's not Quality Matters far less than the long term consistency. I was like shit like honestly, I just never gave it enough time. I never gave it enough time because I didn't have the bandwidth to do all the things I wanted to do. So I just got overwhelmed. So now I've got swelled being my same team of copywriters, I have Opus creating the clips. All I do now is I do post edit on the clips, I spend about two to three minutes per clip. So now I look at an hour's worth of time differently. I sit down, I say, Okay, it's gonna take me three minutes per video, I'm going to focus for an hour. If I focus for an hour, I'm going to be able to create attended 20 clips. And I can come back later, spend 30 minutes, post them all on YouTube. And then I use a platform called repurpose that IO. And that pushes all of my content out from YouTube, to all of the socials, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, the short form content, the long form content, it's all done. I just set up a schedule, a posting schedule, and it does it for me. So the things that I used to never even be able to do, I do in an hour, an hour and a half, and I'm done. It's fucking

crazy. Yeah.

So that's, that's been an exciting unlock, I put it together as a course for people that want to see like the exact over the shoulder process. And I'll make that available after, after we finished recording this, I'm going to finish putting it together. So I'll definitely share a link out for folks that want to jump on that. But the process I just described is how to do it. So just gotta be willing figured

it helped me a shit ton because I spent like two days I think, just really, it was really manual, and really tedious and just not very intelligent the way that I was, I was sending something out on YouTube. And then I was doing the podcast, and then the newsletter. And it was, I was like, There's got to be a better way. And then when I saw your workflow, I was like, oh, shit is a lifesaver, then obviously, a lot of time to man, yeah,

you can pump out so much more. We all have those souls, it's kind of like with the AI, you know, articles on the niche blogs and stuff, it just enables you to really focus on the on the outcome, right? Getting to that point, and it just allows you to pump out so much more content. And then like I said, that's the key bit consistency. And seven, yeah, stuck with

people it is it is intimidating for people like us who are self taught when you see Gary Vee or mozzie, my first million you see the level of quality and you just see they're all and you're like I can never do that. But yeah, you can get pretty close with the workflows and tools that are available now. And then could you don't have to hire because even like hiring VAs are great. But you have to teach the VA what you want. If be very specific, there's a lot of back and forth, and then all of a sudden, that becomes another headache that you're like, Fuck it, I don't want to do this anymore.

And then the same time that you're spending, managing that I've already released another seven hours worth of contact and you won't catch up, you just won't catch up. It's actually to the point where like, I called a friend right before this, just laughing about it like never in my life did I think I'm going to teach a course on this workflow. I taught this workflow earlier today. The teaching part took me about 13 minutes. I will spend about two and a half hours total, putting it through the whole workflow turning into a course and all of that stuff and have it live available for sale. Never in my life that I think that that time was going to be in this lifetime. Like I grew up with no internet, right? Like I can still remember what it was like to not have the internet. And I just created a course that I know will save people, hundreds of hours of figuring it out for yourself, create millions of dollars in enterprise value for agencies that do these things. It's just an incredible time to be and so to be in the arena with you guys. There's no better place. No better place to be.

It makes it a lot easier. It makes it a lot easier when you can bounce ideas and just learn and also having other people who are going through the beginner stages it helps hold you accountable. I always give you the example of Muay Thai class when I used to take those. I felt you felt very guilty skipping one of those classes because you knew that like the trainer's would be like are this kids a little bit like all this stuff like the other kids in the class are like Oh, he didn't show up today sleeping in. So I would always go even though I didn't want to but when it came to building a business, it was very are easy to flake on myself because I didn't have anyone to hold me accountable. So that's why I like having the group dynamic. Because it brings some of that same energy to like building your side projects and building your entrepreneurial ventures. It's always been the

same for me, it always kind of, you know, did something and then after, you know, two, three weeks, no one's held holding you accountable when you just kind of, like, I'm not seeing instant results, give up on it, right, whatever. Next thing with with, with PJ in the discord channel is just, you know, booked up, for example, it just motivates me to, there's no income for Bulldog, right? It's an experiment mainly, and something that I can just share. And being even though I'm not, no one's gonna say, hey, Louis, you know, you haven't posted an update on Bulldog in a while. It just sits like a thing in the back of my mind. Like, I want to continue with it. And keep on sharing because people get some value out of, you know, just just listening or reading about it. And every single tweet about Bulldog I get likes on it's like, it's people enjoy reading about it, seeing the ups and the downs we've been having right now with it. But yeah, I'm kind of excited to get back to a point where it's on the up and get over this hurdle that we're having with it right now. I'm excited to just keep on sharing. And if this if that happened, before the discord channel, I would have just given up on board with it would have been gone by now. The website would have been deleted. As soon as the impressions just hit zero, it would have been okay, this is something's broke. There's no there was no income from it. So what's the point in carrying on? So at least you get there, you get this like community vibe, right? And everyone's interested, everyone wants to see how it goes. And the sharing dynamic makes it interesting.

For sure man says you have any closing thoughts for the for the boys here? Before we wrap this up?

I had one last question. Before we wrap it up. And that was I just want to know your biggest success, Jim. And I know you probably have some good stories about it. But I want to know what you can achieve with with the O H method.

I'm gonna give you the most incredible story that I've seen. And it might not be relatable for everyone. But I think there's a lesson in it for everyone, which is to have a tolerance to test. This was for a brand, a direct consumer company that I would say sells a luxury product, they sell puppies, very high end puppies. And they wanted to test out of home, they had scaled using performance marketing tactics. And they had a pretty high lifetime value of a customer, right, the copies were about$5,000 each. So if they could just continue scaling, customer acquisition, then great, let's just let's just scale to the moon. But they'd kind of hit that threshold with digital. So they were starting to try offline channels. And they they approached my team at the time and, and they said Alright, we're going to do radio. And then we want to we're going to do radio in these markets. And then we want to do radio. Plus out of home in this one market. We want to test it in Phoenix, we want to test radio and out of home in Phoenix. Well, that helped us to sell more puppies. At the time, Phoenix was the bottom three performing market. It was one of the bottom three worst markets like maybe wasn't going to be a market that they continued to pursue. All they changed about their marketing mix, was adding radio, and billboards. And Phoenix went from a bottom three performing market to the number two market for the company. Then it was all they changed. They did nothing else different. They didn't have they didn't increase the supply of puppies, they did nothing else. And I think that that ultimately speaks to right that's That's it. In an extreme circumstance, that's a brand that's got a bunch of money to spend. If that's what they're feeling with a lot of money, your business is going to benefit from even a smaller budget. It just might not show up as going from number three to you know, a number to market. But it's going to be there. Be open minded to finding it. Oh, yeah.

Sweet stuff, brother. Well, we appreciate your time if you want to discuss things that we talked about in the podcast with the community jump in the prom jockeys discord. We are all relatively new at this so do not feel bad. If you don't know what you're doing because, you know, we don't really either. We're just learning as we go. So I didn't sound conversation.

Yep. And 600 people in there right. And someone will someone will be out To help

there's a few there's actually smart people that to learn from some exam and appreciate your time looking forward to running some experiments together in the near future

definitely thanks for having me guys all right