Sam Mallikarjunan | Onescreen.ai
What do billboards, car wraps, and TVs in bars have to do with inbound marketing?
They’re all part of the category of “out-of-home” - or OOH - marketing, and an incredibly powerful tool for inbound marketers to use in generating brand awareness and driving inbound interest.
On this week’s Inbound Success Podcast, Onescreen.ai CEO Sam Mallikarjunan pulls back the curtain on OOH and shares examples of where it fits within the marketing funnel, and how marketers can use it to disrupt their industry.
Check out the full episode to hear more.
Resources from this episode:
Visit the onescreen.ai website
Connect with Sam on LinkedIn
Follow Sam on Twitter
Sam and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Sam Mallikarjunan, who is the founder and CEO of Onescreen.ai. Welcome to the podcast, Sam.
Sam (00:27):
Thanks for having me and for saying my last name properly on the first shot.
Kathleen (00:31):
Well, I kind of had a head start because you are one of a very, very exclusive club of people who have been on the podcast twice. So you were on it. Gosh, I think it was probably like a year or two ago, probably two years ago, if I had to guess when you were with you were with Bluebird, maybe? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it's, it's honestly probably under five people that I've interviewed twice. So it's great to have you back and I'm especially excited about the topic we're going to talk about and about what you're doing these days. Like I just personally think it's really interesting and I'm really excited to share it with my listeners. So with that little bit of a teaser, can you in case, especially if somebody didn't hear the last podcast and wasn't familiar with you and your background, maybe you could just talk a little bit about kind of yourself and, and your history and then what you're doing now and what one screen is.
Sam (01:29):
Got it. Yeah. So I grew up in in Florida and your Kennedy space center was, was hosting an am FM talk radio show about cigars on the weekends. When the folks in the cigar industry started asking me for helps with, with the internet, cause like I knew the internet. And so like I built some websites for them and then they're like, we're not making any money. I'm like, that's not my problem. And then I came across this company called HubSpot who had a video, like you ought to do inbound marketing and all this stuff like that really started consuming their content actually became essentially self-taught because I didn't go to college for marketing and then built a website called hire me hubspot.com and ran ads to get people who work there to sign up for the free webinar on why you should hire me especially. ABM before we called it ABM. And yeah, I was there for eight years after that. Chief Revenue Officer at flock.com. And then after that in March of last year, we launched a onescreen.ai.
Kathleen (02:25):
Nice. And tell me a little bit more about what one screen does.
Sam (02:30):
Yeah. So originally by the way, I think I told you it was, it was an accident. It was just a hackathon. I know we're not going to show too much of the video here, but now I have a background where I show like one of the barber shops in Boston and us handing them a giant check with all the advertisers on them. The idea was what if there was Google display network for the real world, would that help small business owners monetize, you know decreased capacity and just like fluctuations in the revenue. And so a bunch of former HubSpot and I got together built that platform. Then we did what we kind of have jokingly called the reverse stealth mode. We called the companies in the what's called the out of home advertising industry. We talked to Comcast and clear channel.
Sam (03:11):
We were into we're 20 minutes into a demo with one of the big companies before they realized API does not stand for the American press Institute. So wonderful people, some of the best people I've ever like worked with, but not super technical. And then the other thing we found out was that like out of what's called out of home advertising which is a terrible name for a category, but includes billboards and mass transit, but also like wrapped ice cream trucks. You can sponsor little league teams, ads in bars and restaurants or doctor's offices, airports events it's the only traditional ad medium still growing. So they're using spreadsheets and post-it notes fax machines, it's all like manual archaic processes, crazy fragmented. Like all the inventory is owned by a bunch of small companies. And it's still managed to double in the last 20 years.
Sam (03:59):
So that's what got us together saying like, wow, like if this thing can double in 20 years using spreadsheets and post-it notes and fax machines and being crazy fragmented, like what could it become if it was actually an efficient ecosystem? And that's the same time. So you've got, COVID making out of home, like wants to become a smarter addressable channel because they were suffering a lot from a reduced revenue. And that same time you've got internet advertisers who are being pushed off Facebook, Google AdWords, et cetera, because the prices are going up there due to privacy restrictions and just over-optimization right. Like people like you and me have spent 20 years running AB tests now on these things. And that's just all table stakes. So you got hundreds of billions of dollars looking for a new smart, addressable channel at the same time as you've got this massive industry, that's being forced to become a smarter, more addressable channel. So our goal is can we create an easy all in one platform to take the performance growth, performance, acquisition mindset off the internet and into the real world?
Kathleen (04:58):
I just think this is so freaking brilliant. And I think that, that one of the reasons I love it so much is that it lends itself really well to gorilla marketing, you know, and, and I've always been, I owned my own business for a long time and we were a smallish company. And then since then, I think because I, I still have this entrepreneurial spirit, I've gone into a bunch of series A's. And so my history is like, I generally don't have a giant marketing budget, but I always like to say, you know, it's about punching above your weight class. It's about getting creative and figuring out how you can do more with less and not letting the fact that you don't have a huge budget or a big team stand in the way of hitting your goals. And I feel like this is so right for that, you know, whether it's like, Hey, I can't afford to sponsor that big conference, but I am definitely going to have a billboard across the street from the convention center, or I'm going to have, you know, all the CTVs and the bars around it showing my ads, you know, there's so many things are like, have 10 wrapped cars driving around it all the time.
Kathleen (06:06):
Like there's so many ways you can get creative and scrappy and like, and actually probably get better results than a lot of the people that are pouring money into some of these more traditional channels. And so I, I kind of want to dig in and, and talk about the different use cases. And I'm hoping you have some examples you can share. Cause I just think, I do think for a lot of marketers, particularly people who are more digitally focused there's such potential here, but, but I having those examples is so crucial because this is a very, as you pointed out, it's there's spend is increasing, but it's, it's going to be a new channel for a lot of people who are used to just building paid ad funnels,
Sam (06:47):
Which is entertaining for me because I like to tell the story of how I was director of marketing at university of south Florida. I think it must have been 2008 or something. And I tried to spend money on Facebook ads to reach college students, which seems like an obvious. Yes. but the comptroller kicked it back because it wasn't a real marketing expense. I was allowed to do buses and, you know, movie theaters and newspaper sponsorships, but like, I wasn't allowed to do Facebook ads. Now, the pendulum has swung, right? Like out-of-home is seen as an emerging technology channel and emerging something that almost, almost nobody knows anything about. It is also a lot more complicated. Like the internet is straightforward, it's flat, there's like a click feedback loop. Like it's why we spent the last 15 years focusing on it is because it was a lot easier to get a lot better, a lot more quickly without having to invest as much creativity.
Sam (07:37):
So, but this is the most fun I've had doing marketing since they invented, I don't know, like paid social ads like we're just tired. Everybody's tired of doing their 5,000 baby work, maybe a test on ad-words. And yeah, some of the things you said, like if you're going after a conference, the wrapping and ice cream truck thing was originally a joke, you can do that. And just like park it across from the event, you can buy a billboard, you can buy ads, targeting all the people who are you know, all the bars and restaurants around it. We hope to add events like, so you should be able to sponsor those events, programmatically. There's no, there's no like auction or anything else for sponsoring events. And when I was at HubSpot, I had an intern who went around finding all of the marketing events and getting the contact information for sponsorship, which is like crazy.
Sam (08:26):
So that's when I say out of home is bigger than what people think it is like sports advertising events place-based CTV. So if I'm a beer marketer in 2021, I should be able to just run TV commercials and bars. You know, in addition to what people conventionally think of out of home and some of the things that you mentioned are exactly how it works. So like MGM or bet, MGM specifically wrapped a bunch of cars and drove it around the all star game to drive adoption of their betting app. What was also interesting though, is they used billboards. I think it was Indiana and S and adds in sports bars in salt lake city. They had a mix in each, each media but they knew, they figured out that like sports bars and salt lake city worked better than sports bars in Indiana and billboards in Indiana worked better than sports bars anywhere else. So I think a lot of this has come down to marketers. We, we somehow went from being seen as the corner. It seen the sits in the corner playing with crayons and doesn't measure anything to having to be able to draw a direct line from a dollar out to a dollar end. And that's, that's just not possible, right? Like,
Kathleen (09:35):
Amen. Not to interject, but like I just posted something about this on LinkedIn the other day, because between, you know, with GDPR, if you're, if you're really serious about GDPR compliance, what I'm seeing is that anybody who comes to your site and doesn't accept cookie tracking, like the volume of people being classified as direct traffic on my site is massive. And I know they're not direct because I can see the URL they come in on and ain't no way anybody's typing that URL in their browser. Right. And so the ability to track there is, is so incredibly you know, deteriorated over time. And then when you factor in all the changes with iOS 14.5 and now iOS 15, as far as email tracking and not knowing really who opened your emails, and then the ability to the lack of ability to retarget effectively like performance marketing as a discipline is I think it's sort of like under attack and, and maybe not in a bad way. I think as you've pointed out, we became so reliant on our ability to track everything that I, I feel like for a long time, we've under invested in brand and we've shied away from some of these other, these big plays, like the things you described because they're not measurable and in doing so, we've really tied our hands behind our backs. So I feel like this is going to serve as a forcing function to get marketers, to, to rethink and get more creative. That's my little rant. Sorry.
Sam (11:04):
Yeah, no you bring up two great points. One is it's performance. Marketers tend to think it's either all or nothing. And it's not that out-of-home, isn't measurable. It's just not as measurable as for example, having a click stream. And, but like marketing is a social science, right? Like it's everything we measure is just a matter of choosing how we want to be wrong consistently so that our insights are directionally. Correct. and then the, the teams are tired too, of hearing like you don't have to outrun your buddy. You just have to not run the bear. Right? Like you just have to be better at applying metrics, analytics and optimization than your competitors. You don't have to have perfect analytics to make it work. But yeah, I mean, if it sounds weird that a bunch of former inbound marketing make love not spam, HubSpot is like HubSpot founders were our biggest investors would do this part, our whole thesis too, is all of this internet MarTech technology has been based on a lack of consent.
Sam (12:00):
And if you go back to the original concept of inbound, it was like, Hey, what if we got their phone number, their first name, their email address, all this information about them, but we asked them for it in exchange for something of value. And so that's very much how we look at things where one, there are some data sources like a reclaim which is a fascinating thing, just pays you for data, right. Because they're getting paid by Oracle and whoever else, right. They just pass on the money to you. And then too, I think that people should have pretty granular controls. Like I don't care if the screens in Boston, Logan airport make more money because they're smarter than they know about me. I do care if a screen's in like my favorite bar, local bar, can make more money because they know more things about me is one of our original, like a hypothesis is like, how would it change the, the future of brick and mortar, small business retail, if they suddenly became the smartest performance marketing acquisition channel.
Sam (13:01):
So as Facebook and Google and everything else, those ads are getting dumber because the prices are going up and you've got more people bidding on less targeted people. What if we gave people control over over their data. And then also like, you know, Google is trying to shift to these, what they call flocks. This federated learning of cohorts thing out of home is inherently that it's a shared experience, right? Like we're not trying to target an individual. We're trying to target like groups of people and personas and cohorts and all the things that inbound marketing talked about that the internet advertisers are now trying to figure out how do we not know personally identifiable identifiable information out of home is, is built that way inherently. So that's why it's, it's, it's a fascinating confluence of, of tailwinds for, for out-of-home and headwinds for the internet.
Kathleen (13:52):
So I want to get into a little bit of if somebody is listening and they're ahead of marketing w w how should they think about this within their broader strategy? Where, where do you generally see out of home come in as far as its applicability?
Sam (14:13):
Yeah it's applicable full funnel but the companies that have seen the most success success with it are not actually the Pepsi's and McDonald's and such there's good research from Northeastern university on this, where the marginal benefit to what we call challenger brands. If somebody doesn't know who you are, nobody's impressed by your ability to do Facebook ads. Like there's a big trust issue there, but if they see you on a billboard, like, and then see your Facebook ads, it adds a huge amount of crust of trust and credibility to you as a brand, and actually makes your Facebook ads a lot more impactful. So Facebook's own study showed I think, like a 13% lift in Facebook ads just by running out-of-home campaigns, alongside them. We've seen something like a 52% decrease in cost per click by retargeting people after they see your billboard.
Sam (15:06):
Like it's, again, it's, it's a lot of fun. We have customers who post on LinkedIn and they're their mother like, proud of them. It's like, look, my made it because they're on a billboard or they're on a wrap car or something like that. Right. It's it feels so much more real, so much more credible. So definitely if you're trying to break through the noise which turns out to be either challenger brands, startups CPG brands that are trying to get people to try something new, or anybody hunting like high value targets, enterprise ABM, we've been surprisingly popular with if you're trying to, to reach the people who work at HubSpot, we can show you like the roads those people take to get there. We can show you the bars and restaurants they go to before and after.
Sam (15:50):
And then you'll be able to have that feedback loop of like, did they actually go to your website? What actually isn't, isn't working. So definitely in terms of driving awareness and driving credibility and making everything else further down the funnel be more effective. But they're also just effective on their own, like again, MGM and such measure us on a count cost per funded account basis because that's what they care about and it can still be an ROI positive campaign for them. So it's, it's, it's a full funnel channel that marketers weirdly there's our biggest issue is there's nobody at most marketing teams who has permission to think about new channels anymore. Like we used to, that was like our thing 10 years ago, right? Like I did experiments marketing at HubSpot. We played with all kinds of new channels.
Sam (16:38):
Everybody was, you know, didn't want to be last to post. But now there's such a hesitancy in terms of like trying something new. Even if it's old, like for as long as there's been people, there's been somebody writing this week's Mastodon specials on the inside of the cave wall. There's been out of home advertising. There's just that lack of creativity and flexibility on marketing teams that marketing leaders need to make sure that they find a way to break because odds are the people on your team aren't even thinking about it probably don't even know what out-of-home stands for, or OOH stands for
Kathleen (17:15):
You think there is that lack of an experimentation mindset,
Sam (17:25):
Because we got, because we got, we got so addicted to the things that were easy to experiment with, right? It's just like, make the button red or blue, run a test, get statistically significant results. And then like, make the button like blue or purple get statistically significant results. Like we, we all became spreadsheet jockeys which one is boring well to marketers it's boring, right? Like we could have gone to JP Morgan and made more money if we wanted to all day in spreadsheets. But two, it's trying to, it's trying to bring order to chaos and marketing, social science, how humans make decisions, even attribution modeling is the oldest debate in marketing. All of that stuff is, is chaotic. And so we latched onto the thing that was the clearest simplest way to demonstrate that we drive value for our organizations after, you know, 50 years or a century of really not like there was that survey that was like 80% of CEOs or something.
Sam (18:23):
Don't think marketing organizations drive business value. There's that survey like 10 years ago. And so we overcompensated and went to like, no, we can, like, we can show you a funnel for everything and a buyer's journey for everything. And we really threw out anything, even just content marketing. It's got more adoption now, but because it's so hard to say, like, was it the blog article? Was it the retargeting ad? Was it the abandonment? Was it the conversion rate optimization of the landing page, et cetera. Whatever is closer to the point of financial transaction is what we've hyper-focused on. Cause it's the easiest, but it also means it's the most like worthless, it's the most saturated now.
Kathleen (18:59):
So I want to, I want to rewind, because you said something, you slipped something into your description of where out of home could be used in the funnel. That was like kind of a big a big knowledge bomb. And it was, it was slipped in really quickly. And I want to go back and you described how it could be used for ABM. And you said, for example, if somebody wants to reach the top decision decision makers at HubSpot, we can tell you the roads they drive to work and the bars they go to and we can talk, okay, you need to like explain that more because I have a feeling anybody listening was like, wait, what, and, and is this true for all companies? And tell me more.
Sam (19:40):
Yeah. So if you remember the original Google page rank algorithm, we took that same concept and applied it to what we call place rank. And our new chief revenue officer makes me write TM now because of this trademark, when I say that, but I can't speak TM. But if you think of two, two spots on a map like, like websites and they have their own metadata, like one is a billboard and one is a hospital in Pittsburgh and you think of mobile devices observed at each his inbound links, but the inbound links also have their own metadata. So where they live, where they work, other places, they go not the personally identifiable information, but how they move about a space. And so if you want to reach people who work at hospitals in Pittsburgh, I just happen to know this because we did this there are 54 billboards, 19 of them have the most inbound links. If you will. The most mobile devices observed at hospitals in Pittsburgh for eight hours a day. Meaning that that person probably works there.
Kathleen (20:37):
So hold on. I want to take this slowly because I'm going to dumb it down so that I know I understand it. And, and if I can understand it, then I think anybody can. So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're able to source data anonymized data on, on cell phone, kind of like pinging back to towers and, and you, and like, if you start with the premise that we want to reach decision makers at this hospital in Pittsburgh, you can look in aggregate at, okay, all of these cell phones consistently ping from the hospital, meaning that's probably somebody who works there. And then is it like a, a correlation of there's a large percentage of these people who also ping from these other places? Or is that, is that what we're talking about?
Sam (21:19):
Yeah. So where we get the data from is basically the same mobile ad tech stack that we've always used for mobile ads. It's just the set of watching people. We watch places as groups of people move past. So we're not watching you as you drive around, but we are watching the billboards as you may drive around some of them. And you're being included in that group. And the information we know about you is being included in that group. And then it's, and then it's literally just like a, an inbound link concept, which is the goal is you should be able to look at our website and say, here's, here's the audience I want to reach. So doctors who work at hospitals in Pittsburgh, and we should be able to say here's all the available inventory or all the available places that we think will reach that audience.
Sam (22:05):
And then the third level is outcome optimization. So we've got an advertiser in Boston. Who's a liquor store and there are 3% of people who go to the liquor store and then go to work, super interested to find out who they are. But in general, unless you're targeting parameters, have something in common with those 3% of people. If your goal is to get somebody to go to a liquor store, the system's not going to tell you to use inventory. That's gonna reach people when they're on their way to work. The opposite being true for B2B. You want to reach people when they're on their way to work because they're in a buying decision making mindset. So it's it's just taking that same, like mobile, the mobile data hypothesis, but throwing out the concept of having to creepily target individuals and just trying to associate groups of people and buyer personas with inventory that can reach them and the right inventory that can influence them based on your outcome. And then giving you a feedback loop like a literal pixel for your website so that you can see this billboard did better than that billboard or wrapped cars did better than billboards in general or sponsoring a little league team was really the way to go.
Kathleen (23:10):
So a couple of follow on questions to that. So it sounds to me like we're taught, we're really talking about understanding travel patterns and in aggregate and like looking at correlation between different places, to what degree of granularity can you go because you talked about the liquor store and I thought, and this is again, I'm going to dumb it down because I don't know a lot about, about mobile tech, but I thought that the way that cell phones ping back to towers, you could get kind of a range of area. How, how specific can you get?
Sam (23:43):
It depends on what type of data you're using. So the pinging, the towers thing, doesn't give you very good location-based data. It does give you decent IP address data. Usually it's, somebody has an app installed on their phone and they've given permission to share their their data. Which is why, which is one of the reasons why other ad tech companies are so screwed is because they are relying on apps that really have no need to have your data, right? Like the, th they, they request your location data, even though it's not value add now the phone makers are saying like, Hey, this app wants access to your data. Do you actually want to give it access to your location data? So it's forcing app developers to be more creative in terms of figuring out types of apps that actually require you to give access to your data again, that inbound concept of providing value.
Sam (24:39):
But then too, yeah, a lot of the data that we use is not, it doesn't include like an IDFA or a mobile ad ID, which is what everybody's freaking out with iOS 14 and such. Cause again, we don't need to know who you are, right. We just need to know how you move about a space. And a lot of the concepts we use any of the tools that we use are actually tools for like retail planning. Like we use a similar level of cause it's real estate, right? Like our, our, our role model or our economics model is a combination of Amazon and Airbnb. Airbnb is literally like short-term rental of non-standard inventory in the real world. It's just imagine if you had to be able to rent 400 Airbnbs and it had to be equally difficult as renting one, Airbnb,
Kathleen (25:20):
This is so interesting to me. You talked about the different types of inventory you have, and there's some, I think that seem a little bit more straightforward. Like the billboards, everybody understands billboards. We drive by them all the time. At least as consumers. I think we have a good appreciation for them and how they work, but then there are these other kind of, I would say more creative things. There's there's mobile billboards, there's car wraps. You talked about the little league teams. And I have a feeling there's probably a lot more categories than I've even mentioned. And so if somebody is coming to you wanting to do a campaign, how do you navigate the process of trying to figure out what that mix should look like for them?
Sam (26:01):
Yeah. One of my favorite Jeff Bezos quotes is we don't make money. We sell things, we make money, we help people make purchase decisions. That is the core mission statement of our product engineering team, as well as our customer success team. It's just a lot, like I learn new things every day. We had somebody who was doing scholarships for military families. It turns out there's militaryooh.com that specializes in like ads on military basis. Or what was it? Somebody was doing a campaign in Miami and there's these like literally billboards on boats that like go up and down the channel and along the side. And then they're like, what can we put, like dancing brand ambassadors on it? I'm like, it's the real world. You can do anything. So this, this is our biggest, our single largest challenge is how do we how do we bring sense to the sheer volume of possibilities? Painted murals are a thing.
Kathleen (26:55):
I was going to say, well, the one I've always wanted to do. And I mean, I don't know if you've even thought about this is I've always wanted to go to like a huge trade show. And I was head of marketing for a cyber security company, like RSA, which is massive. And at the Moscone center, we could never afford to sponsor or even have a booth because we were a startup. And I always wanted to hire somebody who did light art and project our logo onto the side of the Moscone center.
Sam (27:19):
Yeah, we have that. We have that in the in the marketplace. You can also just hire people with projectors on front of them to like walk around and just like projected in different places, wearable billboards again like the there's all kinds of things you can do with inflatables, but this, this is why the search engine concept is so important is because our goal is to be able to say, who's the audience you want to reach? What's the outcome you want to drive? And then either what's your budget or what's your target cost per outcome. And then we will literally source what mechanisms are the most important or are likely the most impactful for you. Because if you're trying to drive one is obviously the audience you're reaching and in what context two is just like the same person will react differently to the same message in a different place in time understanding the literal buyer's journey.
Sam (28:12):
So if you're, if you're a CPG company and you're being sold whole foods, you probably wants to reach people while they're on their way to whole foods. And that could be us parking an led truck in the parking lot at whole foods. Like that's, or it could be the billboards that people take on the exit to get to whole foods, et cetera. So that's, that's really, it really is a big challenge because the internet was, is relatively small. It's a flat surface with four constrained walls and really only two types of experiences, the mobile experience and the desktop experience. Whereas the real world is is much larger. It has much more opportunities, but it also means it has much greater challenges in terms of figuring out Tyler had a product calls it, the art of the possible. Anything you want to do is there's some company out there that's right.
Kathleen (29:01):
It was like fly drones in a formation over, you know, someplace that there's. So there's so many, and that's why I say it. Like I get so excited at the possibilities. And you, and I would imagine your challenge is to, is to not only discover all of the possibilities, but to somehow package them in a way that allows somebody to come in in a self-serve manner, you know, because this could easily, this could easily devolve into being a consulting model where you're spending time on the phone, helping people choose channels. And that's not scalable in the sense that, you know, you're not building a platform, then you're building a totally different business. So I, I can't even imagine how you're tackling that.
Sam (29:41):
Yeah. So one, th that's actually what's happened to most of the startups in this space is they've ended up becoming really sophisticated tech enabled agencies. Our, our philosophy is one stealing more from concepts like TripAdvisor or kayak, right? It's literally, here's where I am. Here's where I want to go. By like this seat on this plane, from this company, by this, from this airplane company, rent this car buy this hotel, like how, how do you create that multi-party purchase? Because you don't actually have a product which is a trip if you only have the ability to buy from one company. So like bringing all the companies that you need into one interface is a big part of it. But too, this is also why, like, I think a lot of startups have come in to this industry and there's not many by the way, there's like 69 tech startups in the entire industry.
Sam (30:36):
And that's, if I count Verizon and some of those folks and we we've called them all, and we're going to do like a support group for tech founders in this industry. But a lot of the ones that have failed, it's been because they've come in with this mentality of we're from the internet, we're here to help. And that's the exact wrong way to think about it because offline media is so much more complicated. The reason it hasn't faced digital disruption is because you can't disintermediate, disintermediate, human being entirely. So like we're not trying like a lot of the sales reps in the industry, as you see in lots of industries are worried that like they're going to be replaced. And my answer to that is like, we're not going to replace you. There's no way to replace you. First of all, it's not like Google and Facebook don't have massive ad sales teams to harass all of us constantly.
Sam (31:24):
But second of all, our job is to automate all of the things that slow you down that, you know, make it make it a dumber process and free the human brain up to be used on things that the human brain is actually good for. Like a local sales rep will know that that billboard on Friday nights when you're trying to reach a audience that's going out is going to be slammed because the high school football team like has their football game there. Right. there's so much subject subjectivity that we don't just match buyers with inventory. We also match them with consultants creative consultants with salespeople like our job, our goal is to make these sales reps at these media companies into super sales reps.
Kathleen (32:08):
So is it more of a marketplace then? I mean, because when I think programmatic programmatic in general is a marketplace, but it's, it's also, it's a marketplace traditional programmatic that doesn't in many cases require any human interaction, but this seems like it's a, it's a bit of more of a hybrid.
Sam (32:26):
Yeah. So in 2015 a guy named James wrote an article in tech crunch on market networks, and that's actually the model that we follow. So you've got the marketplace facilitate transactions, you've got the network people so that you can decide which creative person you want to work with, or which inventory is the most appropriate et cetera. And then you've got the workflow tool. So the SAS automation tools to make sure that, like, if you buy a static billboard, you don't also have to call it printing company, right? Like the dimensions or sense of the printing company, it's, it's all managed seamlessly on the backend. So it's, it's, it's a marketplace that does not try to fully disintermediate disintermediate people, but the whole goal is to have us be the people we don't want to have to be the ones like teaching everybody this stuff. There's really smart people and we want to get good at at matching the right advertiser with the right inventory, but also with the right data companies with the right consultants, with the right creative, with the right you know, sales reps who can help them have local context.
Kathleen (33:28):
It's amazing. I, I just, I think the possibilities are so intriguing. So any any really cool success stories or really creative use cases that you think are worth sharing.
Sam (33:41):
Yeah. we had, I mean, some are quite petty which is to be fair in my, the only time I had done out-of-home before this was to, was to off a competitor with, with a billboard. And I hadn't been thinking about it as a performance channel. One person talked about finding the little league team that the CEO of their biggest competitor went to sponsoring that little league team, just so that they had to put on their, like their shirt or we're doing the ice cream truck thing, like create a positive associations with people that your competitors really don't want to have positive associations. I'm very interested in these challenger brands that we've been popular with. So if you're selling through, you know, third-party re retailers being able to prove that you drive foot traffic and drive a lift in sales, that's new.
Sam (34:33):
And then account-based marketers. They're, they're really they're, they're really iffy about like adopting new methodologies and technologies, but once they see like the map, like it's literally a red line overlaid with inventory that says, like, people who work in this office, these are the roads they take at what time you know, they they've been using that really, really well. And then I am bullish on, we don't have a name for it yet. So I call it place-based connected TV. This is right now, there are connected, there are place-based networks. Like you may have seen chive TV or something in, in bars and restaurants. That's that's place-based TV. But I was at my my mother-in-law's nursing home facility the other day. And they were showing Budweiser and Bowflex commercials. And I'm like, this is just an aberration it's 2021.
Sam (35:23):
The technology exists for us to enable beer marketers to buy TV commercials just in bars. Right. But it hasn't been broadly deployed. And that was my pitch to the executive team at Comcast. Awhile back was like, take $20 billion off of your competitors revenue next year, by calling all their business subscribers and saying, Hey, what if your TV paid you and then call all of your advertisers and say, Hey, CPCs just went up 10 X because we're now CTV instead of being linear TV, which is on targeted. So the implications for that super interesting, especially you think about sports stadiums, being able to programmatically take that over. The Minnesota twins stadium in in, in Minneapolis has 650 digital screens. Like one, I would've done my proposal to my wife differently if I had access to like massive takeover media in real time.
Sam (36:16):
But to even just think, you know, imagine you're a sales rep, you're, you're taking somebody out to a game or something like that. Like, it really changes the possibility when you can control the experience around you if I'm in an airport, right. Or, or if I'm at an event you know, those are the really interesting use cases is how do you take the lessons of 20 years of beating our heads against the internet and apply them to, how do we create interesting brand experiences offline. So, and I love the ads that don't move thing. The led trucks, the cars, you can swarm them too, right? Like rapid fire is one of our vendors. You can like have them swarm cars at a specific area in time, and you will get noticed it's just not going to happen, that you don't get noticed. So if that is a challenge that you have, which is the core problem, most startups have in all challenger brands have this is the, this is the way to solve it. Billboards work, they do work, they work arguably better than any other medium except wrapped cars for account based marketing. But there's so much more to out-of-home and just billboards.
Kathleen (37:24):
It's so interesting. I have one more question before we kind of start to wrap which is cost, right? Like that's going to be the thing on everyone's minds. Obviously there's so much potential here to experiment and do different things. What do you have to have a certain minimum budget as an entry point to this?
Sam (37:46):
Yeah, I'm going to give the annoying, it depends answer. It depends on the audience. You're trying to reach the outcome. You're trying to drive. The different mediums have different costs that can range from $1 CPM to a $50 CPM, if you want, like private airports that reach executives and sports professionals. The, and then it also depends on one how effective your creative is and how effective your conversions are. So we can track, you know, a subset of people who drive past your billboard and then go visit your website and then convert. But that depends on how good your ad creative, how good is your website conversion? How compelling is that offer? And the reason I bring that up in terms of costs is because what gives you statistically significant data? So we've run campaigns with as little as a thousand dollars in budget.
Sam (38:34):
We generally don't advise people who don't know what they're doing to do a campaign with more than a hundred thousand dollars in budget, because we would rather like, if you don't, if you haven't done it before, and you don't have a baseline of data, like a hundred thousand dollars is enough to get statistically significant data from like a single DNA that you can then scale out your learnings elsewhere. But anywhere in that range, again, it depends on who you're trying to reach the outcome you're trying to drive. But the average is somewhere between like 20 to $50,000, that's somebody who's going to do a campaign. Usually yeah, usually one to three months. Cause again, it is about like how long does it take us to get statistically significant data because you can't unlike Facebook or Google or whatever, you can't just like throw more budget at it cause you can't get more people to drive past your billboard faster. There's I mean, I'm sure you probably could. But there's no way that we found to do that. So to an extent you have to wait until you have you know, enough data ingested to make that decision.
Kathleen (39:38):
Yeah. I, that, that is actually very much like online advertising in a sense that like, if you, you know, a lot of these platforms have certain minimum audience sizes, maybe it's like number of people who viewed half of your video. And I find myself sitting there like, okay, when are we going to reach that number where the ads is going to kick in? And so I think that's a familiar construct for marketers who are used to online advertising. Well, I feel like we could talk about this for a long time because there are so many cool ideas and just ideating is really fun with it. But we're going to start to wrap because you do not have all the time in the world. And I want to ask you the two questions that I always ask my guests at the end first being you know, marketing is changing really quickly. This whole conversation is a great example of it. Do you have certain sources that you really rely on to stay up to date and current on what's happening in the world of marketing?
Sam (40:38):
I mean, when we've got like the HubSpot Mafia Facebook group, I find good stuff there. But it really, honestly, it's not mostly books and videos and such anymore. It's much more blog articles that people send me. You know, things that I see on social media, like the, the pace of change is so fast. Like, like my book, you just shouldn't buy. Right. Cause it's wildly out of date. The first chapter is interesting, but like I'll email me and I'll send it to you for free. I'll send you a PDF. Things change too much for, for billboard for for books to be that valuable, unless it's a really heavy topic. So I get a lot of information from you know, more so than I used to not people talking about marketing, not actually the HubSpot blog or marketing profs or stuff like that, but actually marketers who are doing something that are interesting and surfacing some of those experiments. I still wish there was some just marketing experiments community where we could all share like hypotheses and such and then test things together. But yeah, for other marketers is generally where I learn the most from because it's seeing them like try new things. And then, you know, talking to them about how it went.
Kathleen (41:54):
Yeah. I think that the, I feel like communities online communities are really flourished. Particularly in the last two years with COVID. I feel like everybody needed another outlet since conferences went away. And I I'm with you on that. I, there are a couple of communities, I'm a member of where I just find tremendous value and it's like, it's gotten rid of the necessity of reading as much or listening to as many podcasts. It's kind of a little bit of a shortcut. So that's really nice. Second question is, and this one is going to be interesting cause you, you have a long history with inbound marketing and you had your HubSpot years. The podcast is all about inbound and I always define inbound as just anything that naturally attracts the right audience to you. So that's a big umbrella no longer is it, you know, put any book behind a gate and see what happens. Is there a particular company or individual that you think today is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?
Sam (42:53):
There are a couple one again, like reclaim, which used to be keeley.io. The idea of paying you for your data, their their growth thing is just see, see what your data is worth or see how many people are selling your data. It's kind of like website creator back in the day. It's just like a really interesting app. Like you should go check it out like to see my data is being sold for a few thousand dollars a year to a few different so it shows you who's selling it, who's buying it. That type of free almost freemium experience to get people into their app. The other people who are doing a really good job are sports teams. So with sport venues being at reduced capacity for such an extended period of time they are figuring out new ways to use Instagram and Snapchat to create fan content and sort of like feed that obsession to have that feedback loop that, that we would want.
Sam (43:53):
We're actually eventually gonna launch an integration with cameo for business. Because like I tried to do a billboard campaign in Boston a couple of years back that said our flocking city with David Ortiz for recruiting push I was doing. But it was so hard to work through his agency and everything else like that. And the, the sports venues are getting really good at creating content to keep, to create new fans and keep them engaged and also leveraging their, you know, more than just their in venue inventory. The personal interactions with people on the on the teams, I think is an amazing resource that that they've just never unleashed before. So yeah, Reclaim's doing a really good job of it. And then I'm excited for the future of sports advertising because they are, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Like they really, really took a hit, obviously during COVID and could at any point take another hit if there was like a second wave that they had to lock down. And so they're, they're doing extremely interesting things in terms of engaging their fans.
Kathleen (44:58):
That's the first time anybody's mentioned sports teams on this. And so I think that's going to be interesting for people to go out and kind of look at them through a different lens. Well again, could have talked for hours, but we don't have hours. So I really want to thank you for joining me if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about one screen, or if they have a question for you, they want to connect with you, what is the best way for them to do that?
Sam (45:21):
Yeah. So if you have a question for me fortunately my last name is really easy to SEO optimized. So if you Google anything even close to my last name, you'll find either my website, my Twitter, my LinkedIn, just feel free to shoot me a note. If you want to find out more about one screen.ai, come check out the website. We're about to launch a new one. So don't blame the current head of marketing. Our current website is terrible, but that's because it was built by me. And I haven't actually used HubSpot in like five years. So do come by the website though, check out the blog. We've got great content there. And then yeah, Phil just reach out to us and have a conversation with us or one of the, one of the folks on my team we have yet to find anybody for whom out of home is actually not a good fit. Unlike with HubSpot, where there were specific like entire groups or cohorts of personas, where HubSpot as a software or endowed marketing as a methodology was not a good fit. We haven't found anyone yet. So yeah, if you, if, if out of home advertising isn't a fit for you, come hunt us down because it's helpful to know that.
Kathleen (46:23):
Yeah. And if you've tried it and had any successes I'd love to hear about it too. So you definitely tweet me. I always say tweet me if you know of somebody who should be our next guest and my Twitter handle is @workmommywork. That's a throwback to when I started on Twitter and I had little, little kids. And, but also tweet me if you have some good examples of this. Cause I think this is a really interesting discussion that we could keep going a little bit on Twitter with. But that is all the time we have for this week. And so really appreciate you joining us Sam so much fun to learn about this. And I can't wait to see how people use the product and how they test out different campaigns.
Sam (46:58):
You too, I'm looking forward to it. It's it's the most fun I've had doing marketing in a long time. So that's something that makes me feel good.
Kathleen (47:06):
Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for joining me if you're listening and you like this episode, head to Apple Podcasts and leave a review, tell your colleagues and friends about the show and head to kathleen-booth.com for links to onescreen.ai and Sam's various super SEO optimized social profiles. Thanks Sam.
Sam (47:28):
Thanks.
