Madvertising by AdQuick — Advertising, Marketing & Ad Tech Podcast
00:00:00 · Adam Singer
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, listeners, and welcome to the latest episode of the AdQuick Madvertising Podcast, a podcast that explores the intersection of creativity, technology, content, all of the things that you care about. Today, we have a special guest. We have Barry Frey. He is the president and CEO of DPAA, the Global Trade and Marketing Association focused on the growth and digitization of out of home advertising. Barry has spent decades working across media, marketing, TV, digital, and ads, including leadership roles at Turner, TBS, TNT, USA, the NBAA, Cablevision. He's been there, done that in the ads and media sector. Since then, he's been one of the most prominent advocates for the evolution of out of home and digital out of home and bringing the medium into the broader, digital and programmatic advertising ecosystem. He's one of the best voices in the industry, for the ad format that is really the the favorite ad format of Americans and users around the world. As our listeners know, out of home ads are the only ads people actually take photos of, share with their social networks, just not interrupting them on their devices or when they're with their family watching shows. And this partnership that we've recently announced to them is especially interesting around making out of home more measurable. All of you have already heard about outcomes. But today, we have Barry on the show to talk about the DPAA, to talk about, some lessons from his life for marketing and media pros, and I'm just excited to get to talk to him. He's such a smart and interesting guy. He's had such a storied career and continues to give back to the industry. Barry, welcome to the show.
00:01:44 · Barry Frey, Adam Singer
[00:01:44] S1: Adam, you are too kind, and will you come with me in every meeting and do a preface that you just did? [00:01:50] S0: Yes. You know, I'm I'm happy to do that for our guests. I can come in and do the podcast intro. If if it helps you sell, if it helps you establish credibility. No. It's a it's a fun thing, and I like doing the podcast and radio thing. [00:02:03] S1: It shows, and you do it very well. And you're one of the smart bright lights in the industry, so we love partnering with with AdQuick and with you, Adam, and and Chris, and and Katie and the whole gang. [00:02:15] S0: Thanks. We appreciate that. I I think there's definitely mutual admiration here. And, you know, being at your events, there's always such a positive energy. So it's so great to get to talk to you one on one. You know, we obviously work together in meetings internally and things like that, but the podcast is cool because we can share a little bit about what's in your head with the industry. So let's start with the DPAA itself because I think, like, probably 95% of earlier centers know what that is, but they're probably the 5% who don't know. So, if you could give the spiel to them and tell us, you know, what exactly the organization does, why it's interesting for media owners and marketers, and basically what it is.
00:02:54 · Barry Frey, Adam Singer
[00:02:54] S1: Sure. So thank you. As you articulated elegantly, we are the global trade marketing organization, and we're dedicated to the digitization, the innovation, and thereby the growth of the out of home advertising world all around the world. And, we do this by connecting all of our members and our agency members and our brand council members to basically understand the space, see the innovation, and grow it all together. So it's very meaningful for all constituents, be it brands, agencies, media owners, programmatic companies, data companies, and we also work closely with the business press to help them understand what we're doing. We started... I I started here about thirteen years ago. We had 22 member companies of the original, more forward thinking set, and now we're coming up on about 240 member companies in every continent around the world. [00:03:52] S0: Yeah. That's really impressive growth, and, I think it really speaks to your leadership that you've had, you know, 10 x growth. 10 x is the number... You know, every tech company wants 10 x growth, and you're doing it with the trade association. That's awesome. [00:04:05] S1: Got a great EBITDA too because as an association, we have to be EBITDA positive every quarter, so that works as well in the... In that level.
00:04:05 · Barry Frey, Adam Singer
[00:04:05] S1: Got a great EBITDA too because as an association, we have to be EBITDA positive every quarter, so that works as well in the... In that level. [00:04:14] S0: So in your time at the DPA, do you wanna talk about a little bit what's changed, I guess, most dramatically about out of home? And if you wanna go... Even go further back than that, because you've been in the media industry a long time, like, what's different now than, you know, ten, twenty years ago?
00:04:32 · Barry Frey
[00:04:32] S1: Well, certainly, the digitization of out of home is most prominent, where one, as you alluded to before, where so much of traditional media has been negatively compromised by digital, we are actually enhanced by digital, and we enhance other media. Be it social. We work very well together. So that's been the biggest change, and therein what comes from digitization of the media is better targeting, better addressability. We can serve ads by time, by weather, by news. We can serve it by the audience in front of the screens. So it's very addressable, very targeted. You know, in the old days, you'd have a billboard, and it would say, you know, turn right here on the side of the road McDonald's, and that would stay there for years. Now we can change the ads, like I said, by any indicator that we like, which of course makes for the brand a much more targeted experience, limiting waste circulation. In terms of big events and elements that happened, certainly COVID was demonstrable for us. I felt like the therapist every day talking to my media owners where they had expenses and and costs and staff, but no eyeballs. And what we did though, which helped accelerate the industry, is we went down hard on programmatic. So we doubled down on programmatic. And why? Because programmatic enabled the shifting of advertising to go from where people were not to where people were. So they may not have been in office buildings, but they went to gas stations. So they shifted the advertising there. And this happened all around the world, basically, where we promoted our programmatic members. We introduced a lot of members to each other. Some members had great product, but small sales staff, so we introduced them to members that had large sales staffs. And that was a real turning point where generally, and as I could say, bigly, to quote somebody, really accelerated the growth out of home advertising. Like so many times when there's kind of bad news that happens, it instills creativity to happen and innovation to happen. So we did that during COVID as as an event there.
00:06:54 · Adam Singer
[00:06:54] S0: Yeah. And I think everything that survived COVID and out of home is a great example because now out of home is at all time high revenue. It's like it it really shows what's, antifragile. Right? What, you know, may have, you know, taken some sort of risk or or or fall but came back even stronger. I think that speaks to the quality of the medium and and really all of the companies that came back as well. Like, those companies clearly had things that were important to the world that that were durable, that were going to last through, you know, a filter like a like a pandemic or or some big event. So I I think especially because of actually a lot of things during COVID, like people glued to their devices. I think now we're seeing even more resilience in things like travel, in out of home ads, in, you know, people going to movies. You know, a lot of the new Gen Z focused movies are not high budget, like obsession and backrooms are generating, you know, incredible revenue. We just had the new Christopher Nolan movie. So I think we're seeing the world return to how it normally was, and and I think it's healthier. It's better. We shouldn't just be on our screens all day. Marketers should do bold, ambitious things. Because, really, at the end of the day, like, you know, if if if I'm just going through my own media habits, I couldn't... I'm probably served, you know, probably hundreds of ads a day on my phone and on my computer and on my TV. And I remember close to none of them, and I can actually recall the cool out of home ads I saw, not just because I work in the sector, because I take a photo of them. I share them with my friends, and I'm like, wow. This company really believes in this message. They're spending all this money for, you know, this big splashy campaign. I'm obviously biased. I'm a marketer, so I pay attention to them. But at the same time, I'm not the only one who does that. So I'm not unique.