Maximizing Impact: OOH Advertising for Performance Marketers with Simon Mills, Founder of George St. Growth

Tim Rowe: Revenue Growth Measurement Platform ProfitWell analyzed the marketing effectiveness of more than 10,000 companies and their findings confirmed what a lot of marketers have been feeling for a long time. The CAC, the cost to acquire a customer, is up nearly 50% over the past five years. The cost of creating content alone has gone up between 20 and 40% compared to 2018, while effectiveness has dropped by 60% because of things like digital ad fatigue, ad blockers, VPNs, and privacy laws that are changing the decision-making profiles of ad tech platforms like Google, Amazon, and Meta. And get this, those three ad platforms, Google, Amazon, and Meta will generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $395 billion in ad revenue just this year. Even though paid ads effectiveness is down roughly 30% compared to the effectiveness of organic, original content that educates and enables your audience. So what gives? Today, we're going to talk about that my favorite topic offline to online attention arbitrage, and how to use out of home advertising specifically to make marketing make sense again. Simon Mills, thanks so much for being here. It's gonna be a good one. This is like the culmination of I guess my entire experience and out of home, the original hook that got me so excited about this business was seeing it for myself, seeing in Google analytics, I'm going to date myself, universal analytics, 2019. I know, I guess it wasn't that long ago, but seeing it for myself, direct traffic, organic traffic, Google conversion goals, and not up like small, a half percent, 1%. a big 30 40 60% average donation size up average transaction size conversion rate, all of these things. So out of home as a growth channel has been a passion of mine since then. And that's what we're going to talk about here. So maybe give folks the origin story on you. How did you come to fall in love with the channel that is out of home as a performance marketer?
Simon Mills: Yeah, I mean, my background is all in sort of traditional, quote unquote, digital performance marketing. Right. So I really got my start on Facebook. Cut my teeth back in the back in the good old days of Facebook when, you know, Instagram stories was like the new thing. You know, we were one of the first advertisers to advertise on Instagram stories. Yeah. And basically, you know, I spent I spent about a year at a venture backed company. Just on the Facebook team where Facebook was responsible for about 70 percent of revenue, as you can imagine, that That can get a bit stressful when things are not going well and presents some existential risk to the business. And obviously, we found that. So then in subsequent years, what I ended up doing is spending all my time testing new channels, both offline and online. Everything from affiliates, influencer marketing, and then things like TV, radio, direct mail, out of home. And one of the things that we found when we were when we were testing all these different channels was that out of home actually very quickly was showing signs of signs of life or positive signal. Right. So on the first run that we did, it was here in Toronto. We basically saw the cap was not quite as good as Facebook, but it was like trending in that direction. And we're like, oh, my God, like. There's something there's something here, so let's let's do another one, let's spend more, go a bit harder. do kind of, you know, an additional buy. Same, same thing we were doing before, but just more.

Tim Rowe: Sorry to interrupt just for the audience. What sort of company was this for? Maybe paint the picture a little bit, if you can, about the brand and sort of what formats you chose, which markets, maybe round that out, just if you could.

Simon Mills: Yeah, yeah. So it was a essentially Legion, Legion for dentists who are going after people like you and I who needed to find a dentist in major cities around America.

Tim Rowe: Are you saying are you saying are you saying that I need? I need? Is my breath? Is it? Is it coming through the microphone? I apologize if it's radiating.

Simon Mills: No, you're good. You're good. I promise. But yeah, that that was sort of the the company or the business model. And, um, When we ran the initial test, we were like, okay, the whole thing is about direct response, right? It's like, we need people to take action now. So we ran an offer, and we ran it in kind of like high dwell time, high frequency locations, right? So transit was the big one, right? So subway ads, station posters, that kind of stuff, really trying to like create this effect of like, you know, if you're in these very specific areas, if you're in these FSAs in Canada, like the sort of zip code equivalent almost, areas were everywhere, right? Like on the train, at the stations, right, select posters above ground, we're kind of everywhere.

Tim Rowe: outside of that area, like, we don't exist, you know, but again, why, why did you make that choice specifically to dominate in this one area, and then kind of not be in the other areas? Did it not make sense? Was it a coverage of service product? Like?

Simon Mills: Yeah, it was, we decided it was a few things. So number one, we looked at, we looked at where our existing customers are, right? So where are the people who had the highest conversion rates, highest LTV, just the people who, where were the pockets of our existing customers? So, okay, in these areas, whether it's a function of income, whether it's a function of demographics, there's something about this area that our product lends itself well to. So we took that and we're like, okay, these people live here, they work here, they travel, how do they get from point A to point B, all that kind of stuff. And when you're working with a limited budget, really what you're looking for is how do you make that budget go as far as possible? Right. And the way to do that is basically to create like as much impact in that area. Right. So you're better off basically taking your budget and just really owning, you know, a handful of zip codes versus spreading yourself super thin. Exactly. Exactly. As a result, those people, your target customers are looking around. They're like, who are these people? They're everywhere. Like what is going on? Right. You hit the frequency piece, you hit the impact piece, you hit the dwell time piece. And then as a result, you get the direct response, you get the response piece. So that was sort of the thinking behind it. And then that strategy kind of worked. And then from there, we were like, okay, let's do it again. And then in that second, and you know, third, we actually saw that become a performance channel, it was driving conversions at the same cost as Facebook.

Tim Rowe: Wow, what what sort of timeline did this transpire over and kind of maybe a budget range? that you use for for this test specifically? What did that look like?

Simon Mills: Yeah, so I always say when it comes to if you want to do like a first foray into like out of home, an initial budget, like you can do it for 25 to 30k. It doesn't need to be that much. It just needs to be like very focused and concentrated, right at 25 or 30k. Like you're looking at like, you know, one to two zip codes, basically, right? And all you're doing is you're looking to see that lift in those zip codes. And then if you see that lift, you're like, okay, great. And then you kind of do more of it. So in our case, we started with a bit of a bigger budget around 50k. But the approach was the same. It was like very concentrated. And then from there, you know, we kind of like, okay, let's scale it up. We did, I think it was 75 or 100k. And then we had planned to do kind of another one closer to the 150 range. But then, you know, COVID happened and things sort of took a turn. But yeah, so we scaled the budget over time. And then, yeah, the signal what we're kind of looking for was Essentially, not only the lift, but also the lift in conversions, the lift in self-reported conversions. We had a checkout survey, the lift in pre-post. When you look post-campaign, pre-campaign, what's that difference? So you're looking at all these different signals to essentially get a read on how it went.

Tim Rowe: Something that, that you just said there with the respect to the measurement piece, and we're going to unpack this more kind of later. The direct response piece makes a ton of sense. Dollar in, three dollars out. What maybe were some of the, I'm sure it's evolved, like what are maybe some of the other use cases, maybe the SaaS or FinTech application? Does, does that still apply? Do you see those same rules hold true across other verticals?

Simon Mills: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. The key, so the key with it is there's a few things, right? There's a creative piece, there's the media planning and buying, right? So when and where you're buying. There's the negotiation piece, right? Because especially if you're looking to measure things on a CAC basis, the lower the price of your media, the higher chances you have of hitting the CAC that you need. And then there's the measurement piece, right? So when it comes to measurement, There's a few ways of looking at it, right? So, for example, in the FinTech example, right, that's a bit of a more complicated funnel. So what you're looking for is really a combination of things. You're looking for both like awareness, but then you're also looking, obviously, for those conversions. But the conversions might take a little bit longer to present themselves, right? Or you're not going to have as much, right? So, for example, what you could look at, you have your checkout survey, right? How do you hear about us? In the case of FinTech, for example, right, you'll have a checkout survey, maybe Before you start your bank application, maybe upon submission, or maybe even upon approval, ideally higher up in the funnel, kind of like pre-submit. So you have your checkout survey. Ideally, you have some sort of custom URL that you can point people towards. Most people won't use it, but it's good to have as one point. And then you can look at things that are higher up in the funnel. So you can look at things like… percent of new visits, right? So if your percent of new visits has gone up over your average during that, during and after the campaign, great, you've reached a whole bunch of new people that you previously hadn't reached, right? You look at things like time on site, bounce rate, you know, number of pages viewed, all those kind of things indicate, okay, are these the right people? Are they interested? Right? That's a very high level sort of like metric. But then even things, what's really, really important is like within a geo, right? So let's say you're running in Houston, for example. pre post, you can look at your branded search, paid branded search, right? You say, okay, typically, we see x number of clicks, x click through rate, x number of searches, you know, and then x number of conversions that come from branded search, you run your out of home campaign, in theory, your brand awareness has now gone up, more people should now be searching for you. So you can look and see, okay, is there a lift in my branded search? And then the same thing on the organic side. Is there a lift in the direct that you're seeing? Is there a lift in the organic search traffic for your search terms, for your branded search? So you combine all those pieces together, and then you can also look at your paid media on the Facebook side, for example, and see, okay, are you seeing increased efficiencies, increased click-through rates, all that kind of stuff, along with the down-bundle conversions of like, for example, in Houston, are you seeing a lift in the number of applications that are being submitted pre and post? So all of those pieces combined, will give you a sense of how the campaign actually did. And to your earlier question or to your earlier point, for something like a more complicated product, whether it requires a bit more consideration or is a bit more complicated, will you see an immediate lift in purchases slash bank approvals or whatever? Maybe, maybe not. Right. But in the case of like, like SaaS, for example, BB SaaS, right. Are you seeing an increase in the number of demos booked? Are you seeing an increase in the number of accounts created? Are you seeing an increase in the number of like, if you've, um, you know, content upgrades or whatever, right? Like webinar signups, eBooks, are you seeing an increase in the number of people signing up for those? Right? Like that is kind of what you need to look at because you can't just run a direct response and expect that to, to, to happen right away. But it's the same on digital, right? Like with the product like that, you're not always going to see the direct response there. So you're looking for these sort of. high value but mid funnel conversion events that can give you a sense of how things went.

Tim Rowe: How did you come to be introduced out of home? I guess I selfishly skipped over that part and dove right into the measurement piece. I guess one has to wonder like, how did how did Simon come to start using out of home? We talked about the dentist story. So I guess now we got we got we got we serve dessert up front. There you go. That's that's the really yummy stuff. For the mindset shift. That's such an important piece. I know like, you know, in marketing to start to look at things differently. I've been having a lot of conversations, doing some growth hacky stuff just selfishly. For the podcast, I've used selfishly twice, I'm gonna go snip one of those out. I'm Here it is. I'm doing some growth hacky stuff for the podcast. And one of those things is running right hand side text ads on LinkedIn. Hopefully no one's listening from from LinkedIn. Because if you do that, you optimize for CPM, and you set your cost per click at the absolute minimum, What ends up happening is you just rip a bunch of free impressions. I'm running hundreds of thousands of targeted impressions on LinkedIn. My CPM is 18 cents right now. So if anyone's curious how to do that, you know, you can send me an email. But but thinking differently about marketing, thinking differently than kind of conventional wisdom would say, how did you get exposed out of home in your career? And when did that mindset shift kind of take place for you?

Simon Mills: Yeah, I mean, it really it really came from that initial like dentist story, right? We just like, I think I was really woken up to the need for channel diversification. Because I was on this team where 70% of revenue was coming from one channel. And when that channel stops working, when that channel has policy issues, when that channel has technical issues, the entire business suffers. Which is pretty crazy, where your entire business is reliant on one single channel. And by extension, the people managing that channel. The way I kind of got turned on to channel diversification more generally was actually just like living that experience and seeing firsthand the existential risk that comes from having the majority of your revenue come from one channel, where you're so dependent on one thing, where it's like you basically have no other choice, where you put all of your resources, your human capital resources, your money, your creative resources, everything is going to, your whole thing is optimized for one channel. So it's like, how do you break out of that? And once we did that, it was like, oh, wow, this is a way healthier channel mix. And not only putting out of home and other things aside, but even just having search in the mix. Great, now search is making up 30%, 40%. That's way healthier. Now you layer on a bit of out of home. You layer on a bit of affiliate marketing. Even affiliate, driving 10%, 20%. No problem, but at least it's doing something. So when your primary channel, i.e. Facebook, has issues, right, a creative burns out or whatever, your whole company is not at risk. Right? Like that's so I took that experience. And like, ever since then, I've just been beating this drum of channel diversification, of just like, you cannot be dependent on one channel could be two, could be three, but like, you cannot just drive on one channel forever, up to a certain point, obviously, you know, if you're spending like, less than 100k a month, like, you know, 50 to 100k, you can probably get away with one channel, but really, Once you hit that $7,500K, you really should be thinking about diversification. If the product is right, the company is right. If you're spending $100K a month on Facebook, surely you can spend $20K, $30K, $40K on an out-of-home test. Or on a direct mail send. TV is a different ballgame. Or on some influencer marketing. You have the budget to do it and it starts to de-risk the business. You know, in very few cases, out of home is going to be the number one channel or the number one driver of growth. But can it supplement? Absolutely.

Tim Rowe: Escape the matrix allocation is the new optimization. And yeah, you talked a little bit about the halo effect. Like this also unlocks the other investments you're making. We see it show up in specifically branded keywords, all of the investments you've made in SEO and that organic content that we talked about being. more effective now than maybe ever before. Talk about that piece specifically for maybe some of the content organic marketers that are listening. I saw HubSpot. I saw HubSpot. It's funny because we We're part of a really early meeting with HubSpot. This was probably three, four years ago about doing a significant out of home campaign. And I just saw some pictures actually the other day that they, they are doing out of home and it makes sense, right? HubSpot created inbound as a category and now they're doing out of home. If there's not a better signal than that, I don't know what there could be, but what is that halo effect for the organic investment that's maybe already been made?

Simon Mills: Yeah, I mean, there's a few things, right? So, on the organic side, number one is just sort of like brand recognition or awareness or trust. That's, I think, a big piece that people don't talk about is trust, right? It's so funny because for whatever reason, when people see a brand in the real world, it could be something as cheap as like a taxi top, but you see like a taxi top, a billboard, a transit shelter ad, whatever it is, there's an immediate sense of like, oh, wow, this brand is legit. They have a billboard. right? The billboards like 1000 bucks for like four instant credibility, instant credibility, right? Because it's a physical thing in the physical world, right? And so right there, you kind of have this like trust element. And that kind of plays into your question on organic, right? Where it's like, if you have content where you're coming up for, you know, search keywords or whatever, right? Like, people can connect the dots on the brand, like, okay, like, I trust this source more, right? Or When it comes to the on-site stuff, like I was talking to you earlier about the e-book downloads, webinar attendance, all that kind of stuff, for more high-consideration products, they're more likely to actually sign up and attend. They're more likely to take action. They're more likely to sign up for that demo because they've connected the out of home thing here. It's like, okay, I know this brand. I've seen them in the world. Then maybe I see a LinkedIn ad for an ebook, right? I'm actually more likely to then take action on that ebook because you've connected like this isn't just some random company advertising on LinkedIn. This is a company that I've seen out in the world. It's like, okay, they're actually legit, right? So I'm gonna have to go and sign up for that ebook, right? Or for like, um, for a demo, right? It's like, oh, okay. You see the ad, you go to the website and then you sign up for the demo and that the quality of that demo, the intent of that demo is actually higher. You're more likely to sign up. or so not sign up, you're more likely to, to attend, right, there's obviously an issue with like no shows all the time. But you're more likely to attend that demo, you're more likely to be there with higher intent and more knowledge. Right. So from a halo effect standpoint, you do have like, it also increases the, the lead quality, right of the people that you're bringing in the door.

Tim Rowe: interesting, because I guess really, it's any anyone can show up on the internet. But it's, it's hard. It's it's hard to show up online. There's a signaling effect from a from a brand standpoint that says, I am someone you can trust. I am credible and an authority in the space. And it's interesting too, because it feels grassroots and it scales. So you can create that effect in any market. How does it maybe vary? I know you were recently working on a campaign in Toronto, and I think you were just working on something in London, probably not doing the same thing that you did in Toronto as you're going to do in London. Talk about that. How do you tailor a campaign to the market, to the audience? How do you get all those pieces right?

Simon Mills: Yeah, yeah. So this is kind of like a fun one. So yeah, as you mentioned, I've kind of done campaigns across Canada, then in the US, now in Europe. And some tenants are the same, some things are different, right? So that the core tenants are the same, right? When you think about creative, you think about negotiation, you think about pricing, you think about media planning, when to buy, where to buy, how to measure, right? Those things all sort of stay the same. What changes is your approach based on the market. So I'll give an example of Toronto, in Houston, right? So in Toronto, Toronto is a more transit heavy, transit heavy city, right? We have a fairly, well, it's not that robust, but it's robust enough, you know, transit system such that a lot of people take the subway, they take the streetcar, right? A lot of like, especially in the core, people like walk and bike. So that approach, the approach there is if you just kind of, go after those certain areas you're looking to target, right? You can go after transit ads, you can get that dwell time, you can get that frequency, you can get that impact, right? Get some transit shelter posters, right? Maybe get some above ground posters in the high density areas, right? So that's usually what that mix will look like. It'll be like transit heavy with a mix of sort of like above ground transit shelters, posters, that kind of stuff. Not so much kind of like things like highway billboards, for example, right? You're really looking to kind of, especially in the downtown, that's your approach. Now in a place like Houston, or even in Calgary in Canada, same thing, very similar. Everybody drives. Everybody drives. It is super sprawled. There is no transit to speak of. So how do you create the same, how do you create the same impact, the same lift, right? Like the same results that you want to drive when all you're dealing with are like a highway billboards, right? So now it becomes that that geo thing becomes so much more important. It's like, okay, in these zip codes, I need to buy every goddamn billboard that I possibly can. Essentially, like that's that's literally what it is, right. And you got to make sure that the billboards are the right ones right in the right areas. They're not hidden by like trees or on the wrong side of the road or whatever. Yeah, you got to see it, right. But it really requires a lot of like planning and what because you don't have the because you don't have the dwell time piece, what you really need to hit on is frequency and impact. Right. So in Calgary, we bought shit ton of boards. I'm allowed to swear.

Tim Rowe: Yes, I'll go back. I'll add a bleep, but it'll be misplaced and ironic.

Simon Mills: So okay, you buy a shit ton of boards, right?

Tim Rowe: That's a specific measure, by the way, shit. I would agree and metric shit on metric shit on is the is the obviously the translated version.

Simon Mills: That is the scientific measurement of quantity. So you buy all the boards in your two sort of FSAs, your zip codes you're going after. And you kind of plan it out, right? So you say, OK, these are kind of the exits off of the highway. These are the highways. These are the major arteries, right? These are maybe some of the stoplights where you can kind of get a bit of dwell time. You kind of plan it all out. And you just get that frequency piece, right? We're just like, they're just seeing every goddamn board just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right? And then ideally, they're on the commuter routes where they're going to or from somewhere, maybe they work, they play, they live, whatever. So you really and you're really kind of driving that frequency. And you do it over time, right? So my rule of thumb for most cases, campaigns need to be at least six to eight weeks. So what you can actually do is buy six and then get the two bonus weeks on the back end so you save yourself a bit of money. But you've got to do at least six weeks to really make it work because you need that sort of frequency over time, right? There are certain exceptions to that rule, which I can talk about later if you're interested. But that's sort of the premise. So you buy the board. So in Calgary, we bought all these boards for six to eight weeks. And then we've solved the frequency piece. dwell time, you know, it's a bit tougher, but we kind of did it with some stoplights and whatever. The next piece of impact, how do you get impact? So we what we did, we wrapped six delivery trucks, fully wrapped, and they drive around our FSAs, our zip codes, doing B2B deliveries, where B2B product is a decline for B2B product. So now you have these humongous trucks driving along the highways, driving along the streets, making their little deliveries, stopped, you know, stopped to make the delivery stopped at stoplights. And there's big blue trucks. You can't miss it. And there's six of them in two FSAs. Right? So there now you've solved for impact, right? In a market where otherwise

Tim Rowe: And everywhere. Back to that, you know, you can run, you can hide, but you can't escape my six box trucks because you're in traffic stuck behind them. Correct. Correct. It seems obvious. But why the trucks specifically? You know, you could have probably found a mural or done something, you know, that looked really good on social. And not that trucks don't I love trucks, all my truck side, you know, folks out there, you know, I love you. But why trucks specifically for this use case, availability of media, right.

Simon Mills: So in the Calgary example, it's just boards, like It's just, you just have boards, like there aren't really murals, people don't really walk, at least in the in the sort of FSAs that we were going after. It's super suburban, like people don't walk, right? It's everyone's just in their car. So it's like, how do you reach them? It's like, you just have limited options in terms of the media that you can buy, right? And I was looking at things like car wraps could be another interesting one, right? Like, you know, a few different things that are kind of like on road. uh, on road media, I guess what you call it. Um, but we landed on trucks for the impact piece because that was really what we were missing. Um, right. Like an ad van, for example, could be interesting, but that's more like, it just drives around for, you know, on your route for a certain number of days or whatever. It's like, it's kind of expensive and it's more made for like events and stuff. But this is like, the price was, the price was right. Um, and it just has that impact. It has that, just that, that, that wow factor.

Tim Rowe: And this was b2b sass. Yeah, yeah. Right. And kind of I, I guess the right word is ironic, right? of a B2B SaaS company, it's a software company, they don't have a physical product, but the authority of the trucks, that format specifically, creates this feeling of some, right, it is not real. We had a guest on a few episodes ago, incredible, incredible marketer. Her name is Lane Cox, and she did a lot of the early work with seamless, you know, Grubhub, Sliced.

Simon Mills: She pioneered the MTA at a home sort of thing. She's the OG. Every single B2C brand. Yeah. Right.

Tim Rowe: So, and that was, that was something that she talked about specifically for slice was creating this feeling of, yes, it's an app, but it's real. It's a real thing. It's tangible. Yep. That effect is, I don't know what it is. There's probably someone who has a PhD after their name that can explain it. But using that for the B2B SaaS piece, I think is brilliant and exciting. I sit here, I look out a window, my desk is kind of on the first floor of my house and it looks out and there's trucks that go by each day and they're delivering stuff to the neighborhood. And most of them are just blank box trucks. But Raymore and Flanagan has a frequency of about 50 with me because I see the truck drive. They must, I don't know, everyone must be getting a new couch, but it drives by my window. That's not me shilling for out of home. That's just me looking out my window every day as I sit here in my, you know, office space in the burbs, as a matter of fact. So there's not a lot of billboards out here either. Uh, or many, many, you know, formats available. One of the things that I think gets kind of overlooked and is probably the most important piece, really, frankly, for measurement and seeing a positive return is the creative. How important is creative?

Simon Mills: Very important. Very important. It's the thing that people see out in the world, right? You can do all this work. Go no further. You can do all this work on the perfect media plan and all the best placements, and you've negotiated the shit out of it, so it's got a great price. And then if your creative flops, the whole thing falls apart. So when it comes to creative, I think there's a few things. And this is kind of me putting on my performance marketing hat a little bit. But I think a lot of these principles actually are really important with out-of-home. And I see a lot of out-of-home advertisements that they miss the mark on the creative, because you look at it, and you're like, who is this for? Or what are they saying? Right? Simplicity and directness is actually the way to go, especially when you're looking to drive a response. So if you sort of just like, I guess the high-level things, right? Number one is like, yes, have copy, but it cannot be paragraphs of copy. It has to be simple, simple and big. Number two- Do not make me think. Exactly. What are you trying to communicate, right? In like three lines, right? And it's gotta be big, because people are gonna be driving by, they're walking by. What are you trying to communicate? succinctly, and in big letters, bright colors, right? Like whether it's like a blue or a yellow or like just make it really pop, you know, again, unnatural against the environment. Yes, yes, contrast. Exactly. And then the sort of few other things, the logo, the logo probably has to be bigger. Whatever your design is, it probably has to be bigger. I like to have it either in the like on the top left top middle, A lot of people put it in the bottom right, but if you think about someone's eye pattern, how they read, right? They start top left, they read across, across, across. So if you put the logo in the bottom right-hand corner, that's the last thing that they see, and they may not even see it. So they'll read the copy and they're not gonna know who this is for. Put the logo at the front so you see it right away, top left. The last thing… It's like a call to action and like a CTA of some call to action and then like some sort of like I just put the website, the website or like a custom URL. If you want to really kind of go ham on the on the direct response piece, put a custom URL, but the very least have some sort of like CTA visit us at check us out at learn more, you know, buy now, whatever it is, and then a website, right? Whether it's just the website, just the homepage, that's fine. If you want to have a custom URL, put a custom URL, right? But you have to have those core tenants. Unless you're really just going for pure brand play. But if you want any level of direct response, you need to have those things in there. And I know a lot of designers, it's always a debate sometimes with the creative team and the designers because it doesn't look as clean or as nice. And I get it. But there is a balance that you can find. I call it branded, performant, creative. It's on brand, performant, creative. There is a way of doing it. That's a whole chapter. Yeah. But there's a way of doing it.

Tim Rowe: I love that. And kind of just that simplicity of letting, letting people know you want them to do something next. Hey, you've seen my message. Please now go to my website. Hey, I had a good time with you. Would you like to go on a second date? Right? Right. A kind of simple here. Just be just be direct.

Simon Mills: Right? Just be direct. You know, if people see the thing and like, oh, that's kind of interesting. You want to learn more. It's like, don't make them search for it. It's right there. Right. Like you just you want to make it as easy as possible for people to like to find you.

Tim Rowe: It's the whole point. Something that is gaining more steam, people ask sometimes, you know, can you use QR to measure out of home? I say, I don't like QR as the barometer for did out of home work, yes or no. I like it for shortening the buyer's journey and connecting someone from one place to another. I like it for those reasons. And there's some great options that are insight rich. What are you seeing around QR? Do you get questions about QR? That's something that seems to come up pretty often.

Simon Mills: Yeah, I mean, I'm not a huge fan. I think it can work, especially if you're looking at like a transit shelter or like a station poster, if the placement is right. I would use it as additive to what I've already talked about. I would not use it as a replacement for. I think the QR code can be fun, especially if it's like a fun execution, right, or something like that. And like, it can actually be really interesting, you know, mobile app download, perfect example of a QR code. But I would have that in addition to the website. In addition to the brand, right, the QR code cannot be the only thing and be like, Oh, people are going to be so curious to like, scan it. No, they're not. You're not that interesting.

Tim Rowe: You're only that interesting to your family. I apologize. If no one's let you know that yet. How about negotiation? How important is negotiation? We talked a lot about CAC earlier. And obviously, how much you spend is a piece of that formula. Why and how I guess does does the code got? Why and how do you look at negotiation as a piece of the puzzle when putting all this together?

Simon Mills: It's my favorite part. You're sick. It's my favorite part. It's the part that I love the most. When you think about like for a direct response campaign, or even just sort of a results driven or performance driven campaign of some sort, there's two factors, right? There's like the response rate and the number of conversions, quote unquote, that you get, and it's the cost for each of those conversions. So on the same amount of media, if you're able to lower your cost, you have a higher likelihood of hitting your CAC target. It just becomes more efficient. So the negotiation piece is very, very important. Typically, my rule of thumb is I need between 30% and 40% off rate card always. That is what I push for at all times. Depending on seasonality and whatever, sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. More often than I do, I do get it though. And you can get a bit creative with it, but that's really what you should be targeting is like 30% to 40% off rate card. And sorry for all the reps that maybe are listening.

Tim Rowe: that someone just pulled over someone, someone, someone just pulled their car. I'm getting nasty grams right now. But I think, you know, and this is a different, this is a different podcast for a different day, but it's something that. I've been adamant about since kind of coming into the space, which is. We need to find market efficient pricing. It should be dynamic based on seasonality, based on demand, based on category, based on objective, right? That's the reasons, one of the reasons why. Meta Amazon that these mega platforms make so much money is because they are outcome based relative to. the objective. So yeah, I think that there's there's such a larger conversation to be had about how do we and there's stuff that's underpriced to frankly, there's a ton that's way underpriced, right? And and that's, you know, that's that gets me excited as a marketer is you know, the arbitrage piece, but Pricing is a, it's a struggle bus. It's a struggle bus. And, and I think that the, the right way to approach it is like you just described with the business outcome in mind and to have someone that's tenacious on the attack and, and likes to do that part. Um, which can kind of be a turnoff, I think for, for a lot of first time brands that are experimenting or, you know, thinking about out of home is like, Oh, it's a super manual process. Or I have to hire an agency.

Simon Mills: Yeah. Or me, it's just a one man operation.

Tim Rowe: Or just hire Simon because he likes negotiation and he obviously knows how to do this stuff. So Simon, is there anything else that we might not have covered off on the creative negotiation side? I think it's so important that you get those two pieces right.

Simon Mills: Anything that I might have missed in there? I think on the negotiation piece, just a couple sort of like, you know, maybe quick tips or things that might help folks. Number one, if at all you can buy in Q1, Q1 is the best time to buy. Everyone has blasted through their budgets in Q4. So if you're in a business that's not seasonal, do it in Q1. Your money's going to go farther. You'll have more leverage on the negotiation side in terms of getting pricing, more availability. You'll have choice of basically whatever you want in terms of availability. And then the other piece that I would say on negotiation is… Well, two other things. Number two, it has to be a win-win. You don't want them to feel like you're squeezing them because these are relationships. And the folks that I work with, I have very good relationships with and they know that I'm aggressive on pricing, but they also know that I bring in business. And then I do kind of believe in the channel and like to work with them. And they know that they're always my first call when it comes to this kind of stuff. So it is like a relationship building thing. It is a win-win. You don't want to screw someone over too, too much. You just want to get a good price to drive the business up. And then the final thing is price is one lever. It's obviously the most important lever. But when it comes to media buying, it's about value. So what I like to do is say, listen, my budget is $100,000. So as a rep, you're going to get your commission. you know, on 100k, that's fine. What I'm trying to do is get as much media as I possibly can for the $100,000. Right? So it's not about lowering that budget and like cutting into their commission. It's just getting as much value as you can. And what does that look like? Right? That looks like obviously just reducing the rate card price as much as possible. That looks like bonus time, right? That looks like I've gotten free stuff, free boards, right? Like, you know, waving production, right? There's a whole series of levers that you can kind of pull to get to get to an outcome that works for everybody, right? So that's something else to kind of keep in mind, especially when you buy in q1. You know, typically, if you ask for the availabilities, you know, hey, I'm looking to do buy from like February to April, ask for the availabilities into like, May and June and whatever. And you'll see that it's probably going to be like kind of empty. So you can kind of bake you can pay for six weeks of media and get eight to 10 weeks. Those two to four weeks are going to be, they're not going to be guaranteed, but you have a high likelihood that most of that shit is going to stay up. So why would you pay for it? So then you can actually take your budget, squeeze it into the six weeks and buy a shitload of stuff, and then know that you're going to get at least two weeks on the back end. That's just going to stay up. So your duration is actually eight weeks. So you get 10 weeks of value for six weeks of the cost that you've negotiated down. A few little, few little tips on the negotiation side.

Tim Rowe: Those are some damn fine tips. And for obviously any of our media sellers in the audience, business development folks, take this as great feedback directly from the customer. This is, we're trying to create win-win-win outcomes here, where positive sum games, everyone goes home with a prize. And also something to think about here too, from the brand perspective, I'll just add, are market dynamics. Right now, we've got a Hollywood strike going on. Entertainment's a huge spending category on out of home. Well, they're backing out of all of the space and short-term things. And there's a lot of space that is going unsold. And you have political season coming up and TV. So advertisers are being forced off of platforms and to have to consider other channels or look in other places. So It's just generally a great time. I think there's, it's always a great time. It's always a great time to do out of home, but right now, and as you said, going into Q1, there probably couldn't be a better time right now. If you're thinking about it, it might be a time to pull trigger. Absolutely. How are you working with brands today? What is maybe give give folks a little bit more about kind of what you're up to. You know, you're doing your own thing solopreneur, you've got an incredible, incredible service available and working with brands. So I'd love to learn more about that. Tell folks what you're up to.

Simon Mills: Yeah, yeah, I am. So I work with brands in three ways, primarily. Number one is the traditional media agency model, media buyer. So running Facebook, search, affiliate influencer, doing out-of-home campaigns, all the traditional media buying stuff. Second way is as a fractional or part-time kind of growth. So that's a bit more involved, joining all the meetings, working with teams, and just being growth generalist across everything that's… Anything and everything growth-related that needs to happen. So whether it's doing CRO, whether it's doing lifecycle marketing, whether it's doing referrals, whether it's building growth projections and targets and models, whether it's either managing the paid media directly or managing the contractor agency or person that does the paid media, anything and everything. And then the last piece is more so like the ad hoc project-based stuff. So again, some CRO stuff, some media buying stuff, that kind of thing. So yeah, those are kind of the three buckets that I play in. And I typically work with B2C startups, kind of like feed to Series A. Series B is really kind of where I thrive and where kind of my background and experience lies. And yeah, that's kind of, I've been at it for about a year and a bit. And so far, so good. It's been super fun.

Tim Rowe: Congratulations. I think it's incredible timing, obviously, with everything we've talked about here today. So I'm hopeful that this episode specifically has been helpful, has educated, enabled a lot of folks. We use Latin long. Give folks the Latin long. How do they get in touch with you? Where do they follow you? Where do they learn more?

Simon Mills: Yeah, definitely. So you can connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn, just like Simon Mills. or my website is GeorgeStreetGrowth.com. I actually also am thinking of, depending on how people feel about it, maybe writing an ebook all about out of home, basically everything that we discussed, all the learnings that I've had over… I've spent, I think, over $2 million on a home in the last little bit across Canada, the US and the UK. You know, I have been able to, generally speaking, drive pretty good results for my clients. So I'm thinking of putting something together there. So if you are interested, yeah, let me know. There's a little sign up on the on the website.

Tim Rowe: Cool. We'll make sure to include everything, all the links, email so that folks can get in touch. That'll be in the show notes below. Simon, I can't thank you enough for being here. Awesome. Yeah, this is great. I had a good time. Absolutely. Same. And if you found this to be helpful, please share with someone who could benefit as always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast review. That's how you help us grow. And we'll see y'all next time.