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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:39 join here in the pod.

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

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

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

00:56 in the physical realm.

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

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

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

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

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

01:33 as a marketer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

44:55 For sure.

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

45:06 and that's the most anyway.

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

45:12 but it's kind of reverting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

51:25 Yeah, it's fucking crazy.

51:27 Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

59:39 Hell yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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