Does Outdoor Advertising on Billboards, Blimps and Cars Work?

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today we are talking about outdoor advertising, a very interesting marketing topic, not often as discussed, and we have a great guest to help us talk through it today.

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Charlie, welcome to the show, thanks.

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Thanks for having me.

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I appreciate it.

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So why don't we start off by you just taking a minute or two to share who you are and what you do?

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and above both B2B and B2C, to help plan strategize bringing brand marketing into play using different out-of-home channels, and we help them measure the success of those after the fact.

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Very cool.

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I actually saw somebody went to a conference last week and they were wearing a billboard on their backpack as they walked through the conference.

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Wow, One of the funniest things I've seen in a while was like a big 30-inch screen on the back of their backpack and they got us to leave because they were advertising and they hadn't paid to be as much.

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So I thought that was just a really funny example of out-of-home advertising.

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I actually know the story you're talking about.

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I saw that online.

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That's an interesting form of guerrilla marketing Out of home.

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I think most people think of out of home as billboards immediately.

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That's the first thing they probably go to, which is very relevant.

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But it's deal marketing, it's experiential marketing, it's PR marketing, those types of things we work with companies to do street teams and they'll have sandwich boards.

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If you really wanted to target a conference or an event, you could do walking billboards like that, digital billboards.

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So yeah, out of home kind of covers a lot of different executions.

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We've done campaigns for companies that want to do ABM programs that have put ads on top of pizza boxes and had them delivered directly to their target account offices or homes.

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So yeah, out-of-home covers a lot.

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I did see that was a unique way to try to get around a sponsorship.

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Most conferences we work with a lot of conferences to help brands extend their sponsorships.

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But I think most of the conferences don't like when you circumvent the rules like that.

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But I liked it.

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I can't resist asking this question because I was talking with some of my colleagues from my startup.

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We're like, let's just be really guerrilla.

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Could we like put our startup on a blimp and fly it over New York city?

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It's just the right spirit.

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I don't know People actually do blimp advertising.

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I would say any idea is a good idea.

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I think it's the execution of it.

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We do airplane advertising.

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If you really want to pull one of those banners behind at a beach, those are executions we can help plan for, I think, over New York City.

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If you've got the budget and you can find ways to get around any FAA regulations, we would look into it.

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But that's a fun idea and I think out of home is a nice way to mix science and art.

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We do a lot of planning around where the audience that you want to talk to, where they spend time, especially if they're B2C.

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We have a lot of buyer data that we can access so we can get really granular and specific about where you'd want to be seen.

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Then it's the fun part of the creative piece.

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And yeah, being on the side of a lamp would be fun.

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Being on the side of the F1 race car would be fun too.

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So there's all kinds of places you could have fun with outdoor advertising.

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I was in South Beach last month in Miami and there was planes flying down the beach advertising different things with the big banners behind them, and I would just remember thinking people probably wouldn't do that if it didn't work.

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So I just think there's lots of opportunities out there.

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Maybe you can share a story with us about some of the best marketing you've done that you're the most proud of, about some of the best marketing you've done that you're the most proud of to start us off.

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Yeah, when you just find something that works and you're, a lot of marketing is experimentational or if that's if I just made up a word there but it's experimenting with a wide range of channels and not to belabor the point about out of home, but it's one channel.

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Like the customers we work with, they don't just do billboards, they're doing digital, they're doing email marketing, they're doing social marketing.

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It's one piece of it and it really fits into brand marketing.

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And so I think some of the campaigns that I've had the most success with are being able to build a good strategy.

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Okay, who are we trying to talk to?

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Where do they spend time?

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And it's a media mix.

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And I've done some fun campaigns where I've actually, from an out-of-home standpoint, I've wrapped smart cars.

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So when smart cars came to the States, that was a big deal.

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We bought three of them, we wrapped them with some really fun branding and we drove them around to events.

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And there's an experiential piece to it of a wow factor, of look at these little things, they're very bright colors.

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What's this about?

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That takes people to a landing page Like they want to learn more.

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On that landing page, there's either a conversion piece to it or it's just it's a brand play.

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So I think some of the best campaigns that I've run had been using multiple channels.

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In that campaign we used direct mail, which again is another kind of old school maybe thinking tactic, but we did it in a way where it was very trackable.

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We made sure that someone had a sign for the package.

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We made it oversized, so it stood out a little bit, and everything worked together from the branding.

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So the creative oversized, so it stood out a little bit and everything worked together from the branding.

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So the creative was consistent, the messaging was consistent.

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So we didn't just rely on one channel.

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We didn't rely on email or programmatic or paid social.

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We did a mix of all those channels.

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So we talked to them where they were online.

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We retargeted from the information we were able to get from out of home and from some of those channels and we used some maybe old school tactics but that broke through the noise of just being completely hit with digital.

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And, yeah, we had some fun campaigns that really told a story that all drove back to a website and a landing page that we were able to prove ROI on the conversion there.

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But it was a mix of out of home.

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It was a mix of direct response, it was a mix of social, it was a mix of programmatic, and when you use all the channels and you can assess which ones are, you can pull the levers of which ones are working better and which ones aren't.

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But it was effective because we didn't rely on one channel.

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We talked to people in a lot of different ways than just relying on one place and we had fun with the creative with it too, which is also important.

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Yeah, I think the wrapping the cars thing is interesting.

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I see sometimes even Uber drivers will let people put signage on their cars, and so that could be an interesting strategy for people.

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If they wanted to do that with a bunch of cars in a particular city or something, I'm curious.

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One of the things you mentioned that I thought was really helpful for people is that you can actually track results without a home advertising right?

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There's probably different strategies that you guys help people with to do that.

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What are some of those strategies?

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Yeah, I think a lot of what we've found is there's misperceptions around out of home.

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Again, billboards are the only thing that's part of that mix.

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It's not trackable, so how can I sell that idea of this being a channel within my overall media mix?

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It's too expensive, which there are ways.

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You can do a massive campaign in San Francisco, which might be expensive, but you can also find secondary cities that were able to identify a target list of your customer prospects or your prospect list we could say.

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Actually they reside, there's a cluster of them in these cities, and it's way more affordable.

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What we do a lot with Conference Place too, and so things we can do with those are we can measure brand lift.

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We can pixel a website and see we'll do a control group and then we'll have an exposed group and we can show what sort of lift there was over a flight.

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We've done that with a customer who was a bank actually, and so we measured based on what they were interested in brand impressions and how much activity they got back to their website.

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We were able to cookie their website, have a control group who didn't see the ads and then have the exposed group that saw that and we saw a pretty large list of those that were exposed that visited their site shortly after.

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We can also use de-anonymized mobile IDs and we can base that on the planning that comes in ahead of time.

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We understand who they want to talk to, what sort of titles, what sort of roles, and we can use de-anonymized information from mobile IDs to be able to give an advertiser feedback on the exposure of who actually saw those ads.

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So there's a couple of ways that could be done.

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If it's an app download, we can use QR codes or, based on the call to action, say, if it's a mobile, it's a mobile truck, whatever the call to action.

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On the side of that, we can help them track to see how many downloads there were, how many like what sort of conversion there was there.

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So yeah, out of home can be measurable.

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A lot of customers use it for brand marketing and sort of like that support around maybe some other channels.

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But there absolutely are ways that out of home executions can be measured in a very similar way to digital campaigns.

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Yeah, so it can be used as part of B2B and even AVM campaigns if you can track things with QR codes and people going to a specific site or people calling a specific number.

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My mind is filling now with Better Call Saul and the billboards that he had me track the number of phone calls coming in, that was great.

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Yeah, at the local level.

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You probably see more of that at your regional level, but we work with customers of all sizes.

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We work with startups and brands that are doing they might do takeovers of certain DMAs like the regions or cities, or they might want to do an ABM play.

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And again, I think there's a misperception there of how does out of home.

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How is that part of potentially an ABM play?

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We can work with a customer to narrow in on a target list.

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We can identify where their locations, their office locations, are.

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We could have mobile trucks parked right outside of that headquarters and so we could help to know if their audience, if the decision makers of that company, see the ad.

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We can rotate the creative to speak directly to them.

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So there's a lot of play that not only from a creative standpoint out of home can be utilized, but also from a way to measure that.

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We can show Lyft if those target accounts came back to the site to check that out.

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Or, if they were, you can geo-fence around locations and retarget ads to someone in the same way that's done through other digital channels.

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Yeah, there's a lot of different executions.

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It's interesting because we probably have a solution for a lot of different needs that companies may not be aware of that at home to be part of that mix for them.

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So do you help companies get the specific out-of-home placements and what is the cost for those?

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I'm assuming it's a wide range, depending on the particular tactic and is it more local or is it wider in scale?

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I assume it's a pretty wide price range, but do you guys help people get the actual placements?

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Yeah, that's essentially what we are and we're not just a vendor that can.

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We're not the middleman.

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We look at ourselves as trying to be very strategic around helping them solve their brand needs.

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So we'll sit down with the customer.

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They'll tell us what they're looking to do.

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If it's a product launch and they want to share that with a wide audience.

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If they have a very specific need, that they have a client base in certain cities.

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To go back to your question, it all depends.

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I know that's not the easiest answer, but there's a lot of factors that go into that.

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Buying billboards in New York City and San Francisco and Dallas is a lot more expensive than in Buffalo, new York where I live or Cleveland or Des Moines.

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So location is a factor and that timeliness is a factor.

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If you're planning your campaign two weeks out, more than likely there's not as much inventory.

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If you're planning six months out, we have more time and we have access to a lot of different vendors and inventory.

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So help them decide based on what their KPIs are and what they're trying to solve.

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We'll make recommendations around.

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Here's the exposure you're looking for.

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Here's a price.

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If they give us a price point, we can work within that based on all the different inventory.

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So yeah, depending on inventory, if they want to do mobile trucks versus large billboards, if they want to do street teams like we talked about, if they want to wrap cars, if they want to wrap ice cream trucks, really depends the city and location depends on that.

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The timing of that depends on that.

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Idaho can be more affordable than I think a lot of marketers think.

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I think they probably see a physical space and they probably think it's expensive.

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Idaho campaigns can be done for probably very similar to what might be a paid search campaign or a social campaign, or even less than that.

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Yeah, and if you can track the results and you can do tests and then you can prove it, that's where the dream comes alive.

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Yeah, we know we're not going to.

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We know a marketing team is not going to completely replace their media mix with just out of home.

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We're a compliment to what they may.

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Just out of home we're a compliment to what they may already be doing.

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Or we're a compliment to if they're sponsoring a conference, why not have five wrapped cars outside of that extending the brand?

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And especially if there's a creative message on there, you're going to get a lot of buzz.

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You're going to get people sharing that on social.

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So, yeah, we're a part through all that.

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There is measurement there.

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Sometimes it's a brand play, sometimes they just want to do a launch.

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It really depends on the type of company, it depends on their goals.

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But we want to help them be a part of that mix.

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We want to help them tell the brand story and the companies that invest in brand marketing in addition to demand gen or lead gen the studies have shown that their revenue goes up.

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They do better over time.

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We help them complement that whole brand mix and again, we don't just see ourselves as a vendor.

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We really help them try to figure out how out of home fits into all their overall strategy from a marketing standpoint.

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Awesome standpoint, awesome.

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Any final thoughts on out-of-home advertising that you'd like to share?

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That I didn't ask about.

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I think you ask great questions.

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It's fun.

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Like I said, there's a science and an art to it.

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The modern day marketer has to be comfortable with data and Excel.

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They also have to think creatively and stand out, and I think out of home gives a vehicle to do both of those things.

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I think the one thing for marketers to maybe think about is maybe your Blint example early on is a good example of this.

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But you can have a lot of fun without a home.

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Still measure it.

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They'll stay within a budget, but it's a creative vehicle.

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It's a creative vehicle.

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It's a creative channel.

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Yeah, Don't just assume it's just billboards and maybe a wrapped car, like we talked about.

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But there's a lot of different play that can be done that they may not be aware of.

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Awesome.

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I'm going to link to your website so people can get in touch and chat more about it If they'd like to learn more.

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Appreciate you being with us today and educating and sharing your story and insights about out-of-home advertising.

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Appreciate you being on the show, Thank you.

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Thanks, Eric.