Ep. 297- GUEST:🏬OUT-OF-HOME Advertising [for all company sizes – business and consumer!] w/Co-Founder OneScreen.ai Greg Wise!

Welcome to do this not that the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this not that.

We are back for do this not that podcast presented by Marigold.

And we are talking about a topic today we have never Talked about in 350zillion episodes of this thing, which is out of home advertising and marketing. And I got the guy, Greg Wise. You may know him if you know anything about out of Home. He is a co founder and chief customer officer at OneScreen AI.

They are the beasts in out of Home and he'll tell you all about his background. He's an old HubSpot guy. He's awesome. Greg. Welcome to the podcast, man.

Hey, look, Jay, I appreciate you guys having us, having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Excited to talk out of home.

Amazing. And yet you're in home right now while you talk about out of home. The irony is amazing.

It's part of the irony behind the. The actual story behind how we started too.

Oh, well, here we go.

I'm going to open up for you before we get into how everybody, I mean everybody listening, whether you're a giant company, a tiny company, a startup, whatever, out of home is for you. And we're going to get into exactly what you can be doing, should be doing and testing. But Greg, how did you wind up doing this stuff?

All right, I try to make this really short. So you mentioned I'm a former HubSpot guy. I was pretty early stage there, helped build out the E Commerce team.

So sort of like a startup within the startup, went public the whole ride, phenomenal journey. Left SAS to go into commercial real estate. Still had a love for marketing. Had a love for real estate. Those two things come together, have a baby.

I start to learn more about the out of home advertising industry, realizing I know nothing about it and a lot of my peers and folks in the performance marketing space didn't either.

Let's go see if we can modernize this space because it does need. Still needs a lot of modernization. And that was it. So I mentioned the in home thing, but we incorporated the week of lockdowns.

So starting out a phone company when everyone was locked in the home. Yeah, yeah.

That's a horrible idea to start at. What?

No one Terrible idea, Terrible idea.

My co founders and I sat across from each other and said, well, you know, shit, if we can make this work, we might, you know, we can make anything work, but we might have a shot here. So here we are five years later.

That's amazing. And you guys are crushing. You guys are huge players in this out of home space.

Let's define for a second before we get into like actual stuff people should be doing. When I think of out of home, when I first became aware of you all, I'm like, oh, they do billboards. That's exciting.

But really give us kind of like the laundry list of like when we say out of home, what do we. What do we. What is the gamut of what out of home actually means? We talk about out of home marketing and advertising.

And this is part of that origin story, right? Is the average marketer right in.

And I'll be very literal, the average millennial marketer who for the past decade has sort of morphed into this like finance marketing person, right? They know a billboard, but there are so many different format types, which is part of what is makes it so powerful and fun. But think your billboards.

Think bus shelters, right?

Think the ads you see in airports, wrapping a vehicle that moves, literally if it flies, drives or floats, or if it's stationary and you can put an ad on it and it exists in the real world. It is classified as out of home advertising. Even things like in stadium ads that you guys see at Fenway Park.

I'm here in Boston or in TD Garden, big Celtics fan. Go Celtics. So all of that, I mean, there are formats that come on every month, new networks. You can build sandcastles on the beach.

That's an out of phone format. You can do drones, you can do projections. We dropped experiential for one of our clients.

We dropped a wrecking ball on a Mercedes in the middle of New York City.

It is unbelievably vast, but also was one of an opportunity for us to sort of defragment it and kind of build this all in one solution to house all of those formats. But it is vast.

That is, that's what that's really what got me excited, I'll tell you the other thing got me excited because a lot of listeners here are business to business marketers or they're trying to work with certain brands specifically. And, and I don't know why I never thought that you could do this, but it kind of blew my mind.

You talked me through about what it's like to run an account based marketing program using out of home where you can and tell me if I got this right. Let's say that there's 50 companies I want to work with and I give you the physical address of the headquarters of those companies.

You can run essentially out of home.

But targeting that location for those 50 companies to, to get the awareness of my brand in front of those specific company because they are my perfect icp. Did I get that right? Is that what people do?

Yes. We didn't realize, Quite frankly that B2B was going to have such a big impact or out of home would have such a big impact on B2B.

It's not like we're the first ones to realize that.

It just so happens that a lot of B2B tech, high growth startups, even legacy B2B haven't really traditionally done much out of home because everything has been performance driven in terms of the marketing stack. But as we go we realize that these marketers and companies are thinking more about brand.

So that's first and foremost is that there are probably a lot of folks listening, thinking maybe they're marketers or CMOs, VPs of marketing who are trying to fight the good fight internally, trying to convince a CEO or a board, hey, we have to focus on brand.

And then they're getting the whole, well I, I put a dollar in how much we're getting out and it's like that's not how marketing is going to be working going forward. Right. So enter out of home and with B2B, think through those target accounts.

You have a sales team and maybe you have a list of accounts you want to break into or you want to expand within out of home can be used as air cover for your salesforce. And it works.

And part of how to do it is not just finding a billboard close to company's headquarters, it's using technology that we have and geofencing headquarters and especially in a remote or hybrid environment that we're in. And this is why we see the application for this data geofence.

The headquarters figure out exactly how the employees get there, meaning the roadways that the employees take to get there and then also where they originate from. It's all based off of anonymous cell phone signals, so there's no pii.

We can see what zip codes they live in, where else they go outside of just headquarters. So where do they spend their daily journey? Right.

Where they shop, where they live, where they work, where they play, how they spend their money and their time. That's how we map out what billboards or bus shelters or other inventory to target specifically as part of an ABM program.

That is so cool. And before I get into how I want to use this for my business.

Yeah.

Is this for everybody? Like let's say I'm, I'm a small, I'm a small guy. Okay. Or girl. All right. And I have a small company, but I want to do some out of home stuff.

Maybe my, my business is, could be a consumer brand and we're very geo focused and we want to build up awareness for our, you know, whatever locally. Or is this, it's out of home only for massive companies to run campaigns? No.

And I go back to the breadth of the inventory and that's made it much more accessible.

So just the selection in the kinds of inventory that you can use, data has allowed this to be more approachable for smaller companies, for startups, for the folks who don't have really big teams or big creative teams. It's all about where, like what market, how targeted you want to be, who your Persona and target ICP is and what the objective of the campaign is.

But large or small, there is something you can do. There's something in out of home for you. You don't necessarily have to go blanket New York City.

And in fact, for those marketers who are thinking maybe it's too expensive, you don't necessarily have to, and quite frankly oftentimes shouldn't be thinking about New York City or LA or San Francisco or Chicago. There is so much opportunity in tier 2 or tertiary markets where that smaller dollar amount can actually stretch much further.

So we actually recommend that a ton because we work with a ton of smaller emerging high growth companies who have not been around for 50 years, who don't have giant marketing budgets. We grow with them. There's always a way to start.

A literal example for folks that are listening is you can do an LED truck for 500 or 1,000 bucks a day, for eight hours a day. An LED truck, it's a mobile digital billboard on wheels, three sides to it, full motion.

It plays sound, it's gorgeous, it's nascent, so it turns heads and you can drive the thing Wherever you want. That is called hyper targeted ads that move, placing anywhere you want. And that is fairly low cost.

Yeah, and I love that. And listen, your company's awesome, but independent of your company. Right? If I'm just. Okay, I love that idea.

I'm gonna get this truck, I'm gonna do all that. You could just go LED trucks and call one up and crush it. Right? I mean that's totally not that hard.

No, you absolutely could.

Look, always recommend working with some sort of a specialist or having working with someone who has done it before, but you absolutely could do that. And it's a great way to test it.

Yeah.

Plus for free you pay for the media space like an LED truck. But there's the social amplification element of it. So go take pictures of it. Go hire a photographer, a videographer.

Look, these are things we do for our customers as part of their campaigns, big or small, because they're able to leverage it. They're able to use the content for blog posts, for social posts. So it extends even beyond the physical world to the social media world, if you will.

And that is usually also pretty low cost.

So I wanna give a real world example. And I know I got a lot of HubSpot friends that are listening to this thing and they'll probably be angry at me, but that's okay.

So HubSpot has their big annual conference called Inbound. It's in San Francisco this year. Now we don't exhibit at Inbound, but I love Inbound, like my favorite event of the year.

And my own company puts on this massive virtual conference called Guru Conference that happens after Inbound. And I want to get as many of the people that go to Inbound to attend my virtual conference that happens after Inbound.

So I reached out to you and I said, hey, I said I'm not exhibiting there or anything, but can I kind of like from an out of home perspective, take over Inbound, have trucks and stuff and whatever promoting my guru conference to all the people going to Inbound. And you're like, yeah, we can do that. Is that a play that you could do at an event like that or am I a unicorn?

No, we do a ton of conference and event plays. Oftentimes that's a little bit of like an entry point for folks before they do a large multi city brand awareness campaign. But absolutely.

So Inbound is a great place to do it, quite frankly.

We've spent our budget, marketing budget on doing a campaign around Inbound a couple years ago and we spent about 70k and to your point, we did a fleet of wrapped cars.

So those are Uber and Lyfts that are wrapped in your branding that can be driven, give free rides to people that are going to the conference from their hotel or from the conference to a social event. You can do things like the LED truck. You could also think about getting people at the airport so when they land.

You can also look at inventory from the airport Logan to the seaport where the conference is located. What out of home, like billboards and other traditional are on the way to get people when you land on the way.

And then while they're there, right, there are also out of the box ideas. We always talk about out of the box. We did walking billboards. So we hired four people.

They put on these like proton packs with our branding on it and they basically walked back and forth outside of the entrance greeting people, had our branding and had our messaging and it went nuts. Everyone was talking about it. HubSpot may have not been like super happy with the fact that we did it, but we did it. And that's part of the point.

We also did static moving trucks as well. So the LED truck. But also there's a static truck that's on wheels as well.

And oftentimes for events and conferences, they might be in places that there isn't a traditional billboard close by. So the ads that move like wrapped cars can make a ton of sense.

You know, I think in general, what I hope this episode does for people is to open their mind up a little bit creatively. Say, you know what? I am trying to get my brand front and center in Miami.

I am trying to be a part of, you know, an event thing over here and have a bigger presence or I have these targeted accounts that I want to go after. And it's not just running social ads or email sends or Google Ads.

And the traditional stuff you can do, stuff that's really grabs people's attention and that's where we're at now. We need to grab, you know, people's attention. So I'm curious about something. What is the, in your opinion, the best use of your out of home dollar?

Like what media exposures? Like this is the crush it. And what is like the biggest waste of money? Like, don't even do this.

You know, people like, like an ad in Times Square that' waste. It's good for your ego. Like, what is it?

You kind of answered that part for me. It is. I was. Well, I was talking about this this morning. It really is. Times Square can be great 50 million visitors a year, whatever the stat is.

Right. But a lot of that audience, you have a lot of tourists and it's super distracting. And of course there's a sort of like this ego play there.

People want to take a picture, fine, spend under a thousand bucks. Go get a picture taken in front of the billboard while your ad plays for 10 seconds. Do it if that's what you want to do.

If you really want to drive measurable business impact. Right.

Whether it's web visits and conversions on your e commerce site or it's actual lead gen for your sales team doing something that's more targeted based around your icp, that would be, to answer your question, the mistake people make is thinking about number one, you have to do a tier one city, you have to do the middle of that city. There's data now that you can use to be more targeted. And when you're more targeted, you don't have to spend as much as you think.

So wait, is it literally just like a thousand bucks? If you wanted like a 10 second exposure in Times Square, is that literally how cheap it is?

Yeah. So there's probably, I don't know, 15 different media owners who own all those screens.

So when you're in the middle of Times Square, you do a 360 circle. There's different owners who have access to those screens. Some give you the ability for a very short amount of time to buy a, to buy a quick spot.

And people usually do that. You'll see creators, creators go do that. They take a picture of themselves in front of the billboard. Maybe they paid 500 bucks for.

You're not necessarily getting like the best digital billboard in Times Square, but you are able to do it. I mean, there are different ways. Yeah. To play with that one.

I think that's pretty cool. All right, so last thing here is your family incredibly disappointed in you in that for many reasons.

But I was LinkedIn stalking you and said on there that you taught undergraduate courses in genetics of heart disease. So it says to me, they probably thought he was gonna go be a doctor or something.

And now at your family dinners are like, oh yeah, Greg sells billboards and toilet seat ads. Like, are they disappointed in you?

So that's funny that you picked up on, you picked up on that. University of Wisconsin, Go Badgers. Die hard fan. But when I was there my senior year, I was able to actually go teach some of those courses.

Not as serious as you might think, although I was pre med for a couple years, Jay, so there's that. But organic chemistry did not agree with me.

I actually, believe it or not, for those listening, SAS technology, the world of AI, it's fascinating, it's fun. Billboards. When I say to people I do billboards and they ask me that question, why? Right? I thought you were set in SAS and like technology.

And a lot of people who say they don't even know what technology is, and I'm like, that's what I love about it. It's tangible, it's physical, it's different, and it's old school. And it's going to be here forever.

It's been here for the last 200 years, it'll be here for the next 200 years. I'm proud of that because I've seen what pure SaaS looks like and it's great.

But if you actually look around and talk to people who've had success, a lot of it's around real estate and a lot of it's around some of these more old school, traditional businesses. We're infusing all that great technology.

So to answer your question, yes, I do billboards, it usually actually sparks a pretty interesting conversation. I'm really proud of that. The out of home industry is different. It's on fire right now. I can't even tell you.

The one thing my family hates is that when we're driving, all I do is look at the billboards. My kids love it though, because they see these signs in the real world and they get a kick out of it. And they always ask me if that's my billboard.

And when it is, it's just a lot of fun. And they work. There's a lot of folks out there want to know, like, does it work? They work. And we're using data to actually prove it.

So it's not just an awareness play anymore. It's a true performance channel. It's a lot of fun too.

I love billboards, especially down here in Florida. Like, I always see this billboard. It's like writing an email, subject line. It just says in giant letters, your wife is hot.

And then below it says, you know, let's fix that. This air conditioning company is great. I mean, stuff like that is amazing.

Think about it. When I was in college and took a business course and it was marketing, it was all about creativity, right?

And you wanted to sort of come up with that next big campaign. Then marketing really turned into a finance gig. It's refreshing dashboards, it's looking at spreadsheets, inputs, outputs.

The pendulum is going back, it's changing, it's shifting the creativity is over half the battle. Jay, when you do out of home, it's what are you going to put on the damn billboard?

Right, right. Yeah.

It's a canvas that a lot of folks aren't used to. And now we're starting to see the resurgence of creativity and I think you're going to see a lot of really fun campaigns in the next year or two.

It's just going to take off from there.

I love it. All right, so before we wrap up here, tell everybody how do they get in touch with you? Follow one screen LinkedIn all.

But we'll put in the show notes. But. But tell everybody what's up.

Yeah, look, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also email me Greg@Onescreen.AI. i hesitate to give my phone number. I was just about to and then realized probably not. But hit me up anytime.

Even if you want to just like talk shop. I'm happy to be a resource for any of your listeners anytime. Quite frankly, that's what I'm here for. I like to pay it forward.

So use it LinkedIn to actually connect. Let's network, let's talk. And if you want to do some out of home, even better.

Amazing. Yeah. Follow greg on. On LinkedIn. Greg wise will put it in the show notes. OneScreen AI Greg, thanks for being here, man.

I appreciate, Jay, you having me. This is fun.

Yeah. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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