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Nov. 18, 2021

Programmatic 101 w/ Adam Malone of Screenverse (Part 2!)

Programmatic 101 w/ Adam Malone of Screenverse (Part 2!)

On this episode of OOH Insider, Adam Malone, Co-Founder & President of Screenverse, shares his knowledge of programmatic digital out-of-home.

Screenverse is a specialized provider of ad management and monetization for digital screen owners. They maximize revenue through direct, programmatic, and systematic direct sales channels.


Takeaways

  • Media owners should utilize direct sales through the existing channels and programmatic tools to sell their inventory.
  • Make your inventory available during the open exchange and then read the data to see who is putting a bid. Use programmatic tactics to communicate and strategize with companies while they are still at the top of the funnel.
  • OOH impressions can be difficult to calculate because there is no set way to measure them. The industry needs to work on pinpointing data for targeting, addressability, and contextual relevancy.
  • In order to grow as an industry, we need to be more honest and establish goodwill with advertisers, especially during the current buying climate.

Links

Special thanks to OneScreen.so for making this show possible. Check out OneScreen.ai and learn How to Beat Facebook with Billboards at www.onescreen.ai

Join OOH Insider and Placer.ai at The Premier Leadership Conference for those Building the Future with Location Analytics, December 10th, 2024 at Pier Sixty. Use discount code OOHInsider70 to save 70% at registration. Learn more here.




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Transcript

Welcome back to out-of-home insider and part two without a Malone where we break down programmatic buying versus guaranteed direct. We unpack some of the jargon, discuss the differences. And while I don't know that we'll settle any debates on this one, it should serve as a primer for digital place based out of home and the lens we view it through.

And if you have a place-based network, we want to list you on the one screen marketplace. Visit one screen.ai and click get listed. Feature your company on the first. Public access directory for all things out of home. That's one screen.ai and click. Without further ado. Let's welcome everybody to the out-of-home insider show, a podcast like no other hosted by the one and only Tim Rowe.

You ready to have some knowledge dropped on. You went to be entertained because nothing is more valuable than food for your brain. So sit back, relax. We're about to dive in as the best industry podcast is the bathroom.

Adam Malone. Thanks for coming back. Good to see you happy to do that. It's great to have you back so soon, you know, yesterday or yesterday, the last week we got to talk about, um, you know, the, the origin story, how screen verse came to be your background in the space. And we really wanted to have time to break this out as its own conversation, which is the.

The debate around to be programmatic, not to be programmatic is programmatic the end of the AA. What is programmatic? That's not programmatic. All of those things. It's a hot button conversation. So I figured that, uh, you know, it'd be a fun one to, to break down for the audience. Uh, then we can do that here today.

Absolutely. I'm excited to do it. So, you know, I think fundamentally programmatic, as we think of it in out of home is, you know, first it's all digital inventory. So digital billboards screens, um, large screen, small screen. The second thing is, you know, guaranteed and non-guaranteed, so that's very fundamental to this.

You know, direct campaigns as we think of them or are planned well in advance. And you're promising a certain number of locations and a certain number of impressions sometimes not always, but you're promising, Hey, we're going to run your ad on these screens or in these places for a fixed amount of time.

And it's, you know, some amount of money. So juxtapose that against programmatic and programmatic, we make inventory available to. These buying tools in these programmatic media buyers. And they can make purchasing decisions in essentially real time and they can buy as much or as little as they want at any time run a campaign, as soon as they buy it and then optimize and report essentially in real time.

So what that means for out of home sellers, not a home media owners is I always recommend to people. You know, make your direct sales, right. Three months in, in, in the future, sell as much of that stuff as you can for the highest possible price. And then just understand that some amount of your inventory as it gets closer to perishing, or as it gets closer to, you know, they're not being a bid or not being a buy, you can make that inventory for sale on these programmatic exchanges and make some actual.

Um, so I look at it like any media owner should be utilizing both, you know, direct sales through the existing channels and programmatic tools to sell their inventory is programmatic remnant and is remnant programmatic. It's a good question. And, and I use the term remnant for a lot of years and I got pushed back from media owners in the space of, you know, don't call it remnant, it's perishable, or it's all premium.

So it's not, you know, it's like, don't, don't devalue mean. I should mention just, you know, that it's not just because it's last, last minute. It doesn't mean that. It doesn't mean that it's remnant, it's it. You can have a conversation with a media buyer about campaigns that are expected to spend into the future.

So, uh, somebody will approach us and say, Hey, I have a client. Here's what they're looking to accomplish in these markets. You know, what do you, what do you got for us? And so we'll actually, you know, go through and filter through our own inventory and say, Hey, I think grocery stores make sense here. Gas stations might make sense or Eby charging, et cetera.

So you're still doing media planning. And you're thinking about the future when you package these private marketplace deals together, you know, it'll, it'll execute in real time, but there's still real strategic thinking and there's still, you know, sort of a negotiation that happens. So in a case like that, well, let's say a financial services company wants to be near the point of purchase.

We'll say, okay, when's your campaign? And what's the volume that we can expect. And then that will dictate how we carve up our inventory as well as the price. So if they want to spend 300,000, maybe I go from a $7 CPM to a $6 CPM for that private marketplace deal before I turn it on for them. And then, you know, as we come closer to campaign start, we believe that they're going to start spending on a certain day.

They're going to spend with certain trajectory to get to that 300,000. And so we'll see if that actually, uh, turns out that way, but you've sort of planned on your inventory in the future. Selling direct as well as packaging is private marketplace deals with known customers who have known campaigns into the future.

So in that case, it's definitely not remnant it's. In fact, it could be sort of premium inventory that's carved out and can even, you can put a higher price on it at certain events and certain hot markets. Uh, in the same way that you would price up your mall media inventory in December, you can do that in programmatic, too.

You can set your price floors a lot higher and then actively package and sell into those into those future months in ways. It's kind of like having a, like a 10 99 sales person. Right. It's  it's gravy. If, if we, uh, if we find some additional sales through it, then Hey, why not? The space was sitting there and available someone else sold it for me.

I'll take that. And I would say the other thing too, is, is the companies that I know that are doing this really well. One of the tactics that they use is they make their inventory available on the open exchange. And then they read the data. So they see who's actually, who's putting a bit on, on the media and if you're in there every day and you're seeing, okay, this is interesting.

There's this, you know, a big, big telecom company is buying these six markets. Interesting. I wonder what they're up to, right. Reach out to them, you know, before they spend a hundred grand, you could, you could catch him in the first 10 and say, Hey, your. It seems like you're interested in this, you know, you can see the creative files that have been approved and are running, so you can have an idea what their strategy is, but don't go to them and say, Hey, what are you, what are you trying to accomplish?

Is there anything I can do, you know, from a measurement standpoint, can we add some, some, uh, mobile retargeting campaign to this? Can I further sort of filter through or make some additional inventory available to you to extend that campaign? So there's always this upselling and the communication and strategy opportunity.

And most importantly, you can say to them, Hey, if you're proving something out, if you're testing different creative with different audiences and different markets and you're figuring out what works. So these guys, when they're buying through the trade desk are buying through media, math, or buying through a mobi.

They've got these big analytics packages. They're not spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars without. So you can just ask them, Hey, what are you guys measuring? And what are you, what are you finding that successful for you? And then if they say, Hey, we just, we ran all these different creatives and we found out what worked, and now that's an opportunity for me as a seller to say, now, do you want to do a big direct campaign on top of that?

Take what we learned that proved to be effective. Let's do a big direct direct sale for next year. And now I just made a $600,000 sale off of a $50,000 remnant last minute, programmatic opportunity. So I think that you can use that those tactics to learn. And then, oh, by the way, that telecom company that was using the open exchange to try different things that I then sold this big direct campaign to now I can take that information and take it to another telecom company or another telecom company.

This is a tactic that you can try instead of trying to sell them a big campaign direct, you can say, dip your toe in test some creatives, figure out what works. And then when you're ready, give me a call. Something that I'm conflicted with is around the idea of, of impressions with programmatic and just out of home in general, really?

Right. So. We we know that there's a degree of waste online because of bot traffic and, you know, maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 50% who knows, you know, what the real number is. Plus you know, how much of the targeting really is current or how much of it really is deterministic. So if we think about waste online, like I'm sure it's much more than people would, would typically bake in.

Um, when we think about. Impressions and programmatic out-of-home something I can never quite reconcile is I'm buying a million impressions, but don't know how many plays that is share a voice and the relative frequency with which your ad plays. For me is a big question, mark, around all of those things.

How, how, how do you think about that? How do you address that? Is that a concern from advertisers? For me, it's something that's just like the biggest chasm to cross into, into completely going to programmatic. Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. And there's a series of answers and a bunch of different ways to take it.

But, you know, I think in the first thing I'll say is that it depends who you're talking to. If you're talking to a digital advertiser, you know, share a voice is not, is not something they think of a lot screen size and context is not something they think about a lot. They're going to take your audience and impressions figures at face value.

And they're going to just say, all right, I'm trying to find these audiences. I've been chasing them around the internet for weeks. And I want to find them in the real world and I want to deliver some messages to them. Right. And they've got their funnels built out and they know they get an email sign up on a website.

They got you, right. You're worth five 50, $6 and 6 cents on average, like if they get one, you know what I mean? They have the whole model out. So they're really just trying to get people to dump into the top of their funnel or better yet midway through their funnel. So they look at out of home as a channel for.

Exposure or driving this interest, getting you into these different levels of the funnel, where they know how to monetize you. So for the digital buyer, you're not going to talk about share a voice necessarily, or a spot in the loop or things like that, or how many other advertisers are on that digital bulletin.

They just wanna, they just want to know what's your methodology for the impressions, where are you getting your data on this audience? Um, and then, you know, report back when it's. And that's, that's really it. So in some ways there are a lot, there are a lot easier to work with, but you can also see the flip side of that, where an out-of-home person is doing, you know, not every screen is created equal and there's some big, giant screens that create this really wonderful, impactful, you know, experience for folks.

And that's got to come from something, right. You know, like a 20 by 60 is gonna resonate more than, than. You know, a 27 inch screen or a tiny screen and a taxi or heaven forbid a display ad on a mobile device like it does. Right. It has to. Right. Um, and that's an open question. And I think, you know, in some ways I like the digital mentality, which is like, look, if it delivers an audience and I can measure it, why do I care if it's a big screen or a small screen, this thing does great for me, you know, there's a hundred dollars that gets spent.

Every year, and that's a little display react display at, or pre-roll video, we're talking about, you know, even 27 inch screen or a 52 inch screen, or a 20 by 60 that's all way better. Right. In terms of an ad unit, um, than what digital is working with. But digital has the advantage of being, you know, targeted, contextual measurable in right now.

That's, you know, I would say that out-of-home. Awesome screens. So eight plus screens, eight plus ad units. And then we just have to work on the data that allows for targeting addressability, contextual relevance and measurability. We can shore up those things. Then I think that will earn, you know, a lot more than, than what we currently are in, in this space.

We've got to go back and find it. At some point, I did a, uh, I did a mock up of how many and busted them like. One inch display ads could fit in a billboard 55 million, 55 million like 500 display ad that would fit inside of one 14 by 48 billboards. So as the debate rages on about, you know, are impressions created equal, one could say, well, if that's $10 thousand for those impressions, but it's times that many individual.

Yeah. Now, uh, there's probably much smarter people than I, that can settle that debate. Um, so how, how do you think of all of these things working together? Like they must all have a place in, in putting together a campaign or, or getting introduced to out of home or as a supplement or a compliment campaign.

How do all these things coexist? Yeah. I mean, you know, I just look at the way. Whey, we all move, drop the world right. In the, in our media consumption habits and the things that we're influenced by. I mean, we all know marketing works. Let's start there. We know marketing works. There's this great sort of trick that I, I love to do with people.

It's like, all right, Sam, think of a movie. Does that be your favorite movie? It didn't have to be calming any movie that. Don't tell me, but think of a second one. Okay. Okay. What's the movie, the first one or the second one second one. Oh, monsters Inc. Monsters Inc. Now, why did you think of Monster's name?

Right. There's going to be this confluence of reasons. Around, you've got your kids, you did this, you know, two weeks ago, you did that and totally wants to be that for Halloween. I was just playing monsters the other day with my, my best friend's little girl. Okay. So there, you could have chosen any of 10,000 movies that you had thought that you've seen or you've heard about or whatever, but for some reason, those that that association happens to be monsters Inc.

Right now. You know, as we go through our lives, when, when I asked you for insurance companies, what do you think you always got Allstate state farm. Why? Because you've seen it and you've had relationship with it. You're familiar with it. Maybe you've had, it had good experience, had it had a bad experience, but all of these things, we don't really know where those associations are coming from.

And, and it's, it's mostly subconscious. That's my point. Right? You're you're, you're pulling the subconscious thing into your conscious and you're saying, okay, Geico. I don't know. Did you have to job Geico advertising? That's what I, you know, that's, that's what I think of. And I think that there's a whole lot out of home.

Yeah. Tons, but not at home. Good on you guys. Um, the other one should get on it, but, um, you know, some marketing works right in and, um, you know, so there's there's television campaigns because people watch television there's OTT because people are watching television different. You know, mobile, even though the ad units, aren't very good.

It's just so strong and all those other things, right. They know who you are. They know what your behaviors are. You know, Google maps will tell you you're going to work because you get into your car at eight, 17 every damn morning. You know what I mean? Like there's so much that these devices know about you.

So the ad unit can be terrible, but there's such good data and it's so actionable for advertisers. Um, and so, you know, in a way valuable for every. And then when you think about, you know, as we move in, in these shared spaces, um, you lose a little bit of context. You lose that. One-to-one, uh, um, sort of targetability, you know, when you're in downtown DC or when you're riding on a subway, you know, you're not, it's not tailored to use specifically, but it's tailored to.

You as a set of writers. Um, and so in that way, it has to be just a little, the messaging has to be more generalized. Um, you know, which is good. Cause if you're doing mass market stuff and you have a, a really kind of, um, ubiquitous message that does make sense. If your brief says 18 plus like out of homes killer, right?

And you want to be in a subway and you want to be in these, these places that see massive high-frequency people. Um, but if you have something that's like more contextual, like, uh, like a, um, you know, spirit brand or something like that, you know, we represent touch June. So obviously we think you're super close to the point of purchase.

You know, people are in bars for 90 minutes. They have a lot of dwell time, you know, go ahead and hit them with a special, hit them with some information about those sections, et cetera. To make them try to pull that lever. And then, you know, if you, if you try it once you're likely to continue to drink the same thing all night.

Like there's just, there's a lot of data around these little kind of closed loop networks where you can say, okay, drive some, here's an investment in this market. Let's see how it affects people's consumption habits. And then, okay, now that we know you spend a dollar to make a dollar 50, let's see how many times we can do this.

And so that sort of, that last little bit that I talked about or. For a dollar, we get a dollar 50. If we can close the loop at scale and on a home will command so much more attention, so much more revenue, so much more of the pie that we're currently getting. The problem is in a lot of instances, we're not able to close that loop yet.

Um, and I see, I see that being in, in it went 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago. I'm sure everyone was saying the same thing. This attribution thing is the holy grail. We really got to figure it out and that's still true at scale. Now there's individual, you advertise in a Walmart and you see brand lift. You advertise it in a convenience store.

You see brand lift or sales lift. You know, those things are great. But that's not times square. That's not on the side of the four or five, you know, the big, impactful, high value stuff that we have. Um, and so there's just a lot, there's just a lot there. And until we really are capable of closing the loop at the bigger scales, um, I'm afraid we're just going to still kind of remain at that 3%, 4%.

You know, piece of the piece of the pie, um, you know, but we're working every day to, to, to close more of the loops and to get, get to that bigger scale so that we can, let's start ourselves a little bit more as an industry. Yeah. You made me think there is what, what do we need to do as an industry? For all of these things to grow, we've got geo path going through some changes.

Um, we've got, oh, AAA, it's going through some changes. Like who, who, who should be leading these conversations? It seems like there's a vacuum, obviously at the top of our industry. And, um, everyone's kind of pulling in their own direction. How do we bring this all together? So it's a very good question. And it's a nuanced answer.

And one that sometimes I get in trouble for being a little bit too honest and challenging the status quo. Um, but I think the answer is we need to be honest as much as we can. And, and now I don't know exactly what happened to Kim Frank and geo path and what happened during COVID and all that stuff. But, you know, I know that we saw an opportunity as screen-based.

When, you know, billboard companies were trying to sell their media in a COVID environment and they were using the, you know, the impressions figures that have been granted, you know, derived from 2019 data. And they were saying, you know, this is it in the media buyers. Like, no, it ain't, if there's no way price in their house.

Yeah, exactly. And they're all working from home. It was an opportunity for us as an industry to, to establish some legitimacy, some credibility and say like, no, you're right. There's nobody on the fucking road. And that's why the impressions are down 90%. Oh my gosh. Wow. Out of home really is measurable.

That must mean everything else after that must be true too. It was such a missed opportunity. That point is, is brilliant and well said. I mean, Loving with people is a good thing to do. You know, and being honest with people and saying, Hey, we're down 60% right now. Like our audience is down. That's what we're selling by the way.

That's selling billboards. We're selling audiences. Yeah. You know, if you say, Hey, I mean, we did, you know, we, we invested tens of thousand dollars, tens of thousands of dollars in data that was four days old when we didn't have that much money to invest. You know what I mean? Like we, and we just invested in it because we're like, if we're going to try to sell people, you know, uh, screens and grocery stores and convenience stores and pharmacies, there's a narrative there at that point in time to say these are essential businesses and they're delivering audiences.

But when you can show it with data, that's again, four days old and you, and you show, Hey, this is what it was pre pandemic. Then it went down to this in March here in April. And then here's where it is in may. If I'm selling you that, that inventory based on this, you know, M the, the, the, um, the, the people portion of the CPM.

If I'm selling you that, then you're going to trust me. You're going to understand. And as that M goes up, as the traffic goes up in these locations, Then you get to make more money, you know, so if you're based on, if you're selling based on CPM, which we chose to do, and you're selling based on actual audience data, as your audience returns, then your numbers get better.

You know what I mean? Like, yeah. They started out low and it was like, you know, kind of funny to see the money trickle in as the numbers return then. So does the revenue, and I just think as an industry, And I know why people do it, right? A lot of these companies are public and they have to say a certain thing about no, it's fine.

And it's their, their projected they're protecting stock prices and everything. But, you know, I found that if he just, if you just love it with advertisers and say, Hey, a lot of this stuff isn't working right now, let's focus on the stuff that is, and let's, let's communicate and measure, and then we'll build and we'll build.

And then when malls come back great. When movie theaters come back great. When other things come back. But when you act like everything's hunky Dory and it isn't, then you do you find that you sacrifice some good will, that you can trade on later. So I don't know personalities that geo path and old AAA, I just think, find out what's really happening, sell your ass off with that data.

And as things get better, then it's going to be easier. You know what I mean? Like it's just going to be easier, but you know, not being honest with yourself and not being honest. The buying community is it's just short-termism and, and, you know, again, I don't knock it, you know, I don't know the specific examples of like, who was in the rooms and how close to insolvency they were, like all these things.

Those could, those could have all happened, you know, or geo path, you know, maybe they wanted to slash the numbers 40%. And there was a mutiny, I don't know. I really don't know. But I do think that there should be, there should be a rating standard for sure. Um, there should be methodologies that are debated and adopted.

Um, but at the same time, you know, the silly part is like, you know, we have ratings, Nielsen ratings, and geo pass ratings, and first party ratings for. From our media partners and we put them into these systems, the DSP could be trading on something completely different. Sure. You know, I don't know what it is they're buying us.

And like, I wonder if they're buying it based on our data. Yeah. Yeah, the buy-side wants to, they want to see value that you don't see. Right. They look, they're going to filter through your inventory and say, these guys don't even know what they have. They're missing it. Totally. Yeah. And then they're going to buy that and they're going to arbitrage or whatever.

Like, I don't know. Maybe that process of I'll get my data together and my arsenal of data and I'm going to go charge the hill and then they've got their arsenal data at somewhere. We've got to meet in the middle of grant things. Maybe it's. Supply and demand, figuring it out. It's going to work rather than, you know, 20 people sitting in a room at the AAA saying this number, work for you guys.

This methodology worked for you guys. Hey, there is an opportunity. Yeah, no, I, I think that, that makes a lot of sense to bring the buy and sell side together, to agree on what, what, what should the currency be? How, how do we, how do we agree to these things? Because I'll tell you one thing, that's not helping it and that's changing it every 24 months.

Like I've only been in this for 24 months and I've probably seen like three or four different conversations around methodology, how it's measured, who's measuring it. Who, you know, who. Mom and dad just, everyone's got to make up and we all got to figure out what we're all agreeing to agree to and move on with it.

So, I mean, conceptually, it makes a ton of sense to me, like makes a ton of sense. You know, like if I'm a, if I'm a screen, I'm a screen. My whole thing is that I gotta, I gotta zone. Right. There's like a cone. Of space for people. I can't really see my TV from here. I can see it, but I can't really see if there was something.

This is not an opportunity. I see my teammates. What if so for the example of me being a screen in the physical world, or your screen in your living room, you know, if there's like an unbelievably breathtaking woman or man that's there. That's naked. Who's standing and presenting himself or herself to you like that little, that little bit is going to catch your eye.

I bet you're going to walk in and go to wonder what the hell my son is watching. Turn it off, turn it off. But you got to get that parental principle.

He's like, look, I'm giving you the opportunity. And then if you put a bullshit message that nobody cares that it's not eye catching, you know? So, so the pre. You know, kind of regime and the previous, you know, eyes on, you know, what, what, how many people were actually going to see this then to me, I always felt like that seems like a creative challenge.

That seems like a creative opportunity, right? That the screen itself has inherent value. And that's what opportunity to see is now if you put a work of art or something, that's very, uh, either explicit or entertaining or wonderful or what, like that's going to draw attention. So. That's the opportunity.

And so when you're, when you're measuring the media value of a screen, I think it should be based on opportunity to see. And then it's up to us to, to, you know, to test different creatives and see what actually is most eye-catching and most interesting for folks. And that's why I would recommend you try a bunch of different things in programmatic measure.

What's actually converting for you. And then take that to the. You know, why haven't technologies like ad mobilize or some of these cameras and the, I track it like, like based on the way that you just described the opportunity to see, like, I can buy into that and that I would say like, cool, I put me a camera on top of that screen and let me split test creative so I can see what people actually look at.

Why, why, why are technologies like that? Not more adaptive. Why have they struggled with. You know, I don't know if they're struggling or if they're not, I don't, I don't know. Um, my, my basic take is that, you know, don't buy a car, don't buy a suit, don't buy a high performance sports car, unless you're going to drive it on the track.

Right. If you've got, if you've got, you know, this, this network, that's got all the bells and whistles. And you've got this content engine behind it, and you're going to do dynamic content and you're going to be able to optimize the entire value chain of deploying campaigns and measuring success and changing them and changing creative and being super dynamic.

Then by all means by that software and, and really take it to the, to the, to the nth degree. Um, But not everyone needs that. Not everyone needs that. So, so, you know, the sort of Honda accord of measurement is mostly what everybody needs. You just need to be able to have a tight enough methodology where there's traffic and it's mobile panels, or it's a, you said a geo-fence and you, you extrapolate based on devices that show up.

That's good enough for most networks. Most of the time. Now the challenge that I see is when. You know, a network that isn't committed to being incredibly dynamic and using all that data to, to cause it's, it's one thing to say, 37 year old female with this expression, but what, what then what are you going to do?

You're going to target her next. Are you going to play an ad in that moment? That, that appeals to her more? If you're not going to do any of that, then what does it matter? Right. Your reporting comes back and it's like, Hey, you just spent all this money. So sweet. What are you going to do now? Like, you know, so what I would say for the ad mobilizes of the world is if the network wants to deploy it mobilized, then use it and really use it.

That means dynamic creative. It means capturing information and retargeting, you know, cause if there's a 37 year old female, you get her device and you get her, you know, state of mind. Well that should, that shouldn't inform the next couple messages that come to her along the way. Um, or where else. You know, you buy a Ferrari and you park it in your garage and you, you know, it's like use it.

So I, I, I love innovation in the space. I think it's brilliant. Um, you know what they're doing, but I don't think it's for everyone. I don't think it's for everything. It's fair. Well, Adam, I don't know that we've settled any of the debates today, but I think that we have shared a lot of, uh, useful information and different ideas to think about.

Does programmatic  let's leave on this as a w we'll just strike fear into the hearts of anybody still listening. Does programmatic get rid of the account executive

programmatic, get rid of the accounting sector. Um, let me, let, let me inform where I'm asking from a masking from sitting in a local sales office with, you know, a team of account executives who have staked their career on this. They've been selling media in a market for 20, 30 years, right? They're maybe nearing the Twilight of their career.

And they're hearing this programmatic thing, programmatic, programmatic, and the computers are coming for them. Is there any of this technology, a threat to the account executive, I guess is maybe a better way to ask it? Um,

I think generally, no, because in my experience, the dollars that are flowing into programmatic, we're not coming to that account executive than of teams in general before, you know, it's so digital money that. Was sort of earmarked to go into, you know, mobile video pre-roll, et cetera, um, that we're going out and trying to earn.

And by we, I mean, the DSPs are, the agencies are the folks that are developing business along, along the channel. Now that that account executive needs to be working with those channel partners, for sure. To make sure the Adam's outdoor story is being told throughout, or make sure that. You know, XYZ network, uh, that their story is being told throughout.

Um, and then the other thing is that even in these really beautiful systems that exist today, the Vistar is in place exchanges. There's always challenges creative issues, or it's not playing for this or that reason and, and what happens. And I think one of the things that out of home people do really well is troubleshoot issues that come up right.

Vinyls got shipped to the wrong place. And how do we get. They're logistics people. Right? And so they, they've got a lot of strength and power in experience when it comes to like, alright, we gotta, we gotta solve this problem on the fly, figure out what's going on to get that message out, take that picture and get our, our PLPs done.

So that is an underrated skill in programmatic. Right. You know, Google is so good and DoubleClick is so good that the delivery challenge. You know, aren't, aren't, aren't there all the time or, uh, it will just, you know, if, if something's down for a week, it's okay. It'll just, this, the spend will make itself up and remain to the campaign.

That's the kind of mentality that happens in digital programmatic, you know, but, but I think one of the things that out-of-home executives do well is if they see something change. And there's a problem. They're on it. They're on it. They're troubleshooting. They're calling the people on down the chain and they're trying to quarterback that process and make it work.

So, yeah, it's a new set of technology that you'll need to sort of understand, but you can understand it. You know, it's not a person that's listening to this with 20 years of 30 years of experience selling. It doesn't understand. It's just trading that data that was in the spreadsheet send via the email update a hundred times before you get an IO.

You're just inputting that into a system and it's buying based on that. Um, and once you get that, you know, do the, the trade desk certification, you know, there's a lot of good resources. The DPA publishes and others published, read those things. You'll be surprised three months. You'll be an expert at this.

And then it won't be the scary thing, but a tool that you can use to be better and, and to attract more new revenue. Um, and if you can do it right, man, you can make money while you sleep. So, you know, don't be afraid of this stuff. It's new money, it's a new channel. It's new, it's interesting, but you can figure it out.

And, and I think the things about understanding context, understanding the spring, Understanding creative and the impact. I mean, you can bring that to bear. You're still talking to real human beings that are sitting at the other side of that computer and that they will listen to you and they will understand what you're saying and they will they'll say, okay.

So we'll recommend that media over the Southern media because. I get it now. So narrative matters. Um, so I'd encourage everyone to, to lean in and, and do it. Um, that's an exclamation point. I love it. I couldn't agree more. I think that all this technology ultimately empowers the account executive and makes the good ones great.

And the great ones just completely irreplaceable. So, um, I, I thought that that was a beautiful way to bring home Adam alone. Where can folks find you? Where do they connect with you? Give us the. Sure, uh, pretty active on LinkedIn. Uh, I think it's Adam alone as the URL suffix, uh, or just search for me, the company website screen verse media.com.

If you're a marketer or a designer and you see our website and you throw up a little bit in your mouth, reach out to me and we'll hire you. Cause we do need to upgrade it in a bunch of different facets in our marketing game. Um, we are hiring a bunch of different positions right now. So Korea. At screen verse media.com.

Tim. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here. Adam, if you found this helpful educational, any of those things, please share, share, follow, do all the things that help the podcast grow as the podcast grows, the community grows. That is all good stuff for out of home. So the subscribe button things down there in the corner and make sure it's smashed that if you're watching on.

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