00:44:31 · Michael Provenzano, Ian Dallimore
[00:44:31] S1: I'm sure there's still faxing. [00:44:32] S0: Yeah. There's still faxing. But you're also trying to change not only the mindset of of an industry that's done something for literally probably sixty plus years. It's like sign, billboard, I want that. Yeah. And you had you had the vision because there's other media that exists online, mobile at the time, and a little bit of social that was selling this audience base, this impression So based twofold, you're trying to introduce yourself as like, hey, we're Vistar Media. Oh, and by the way, there's this thing called programmatic advertising that you you aren't even automating what you do today, but we wanna we wanna automate. And, by the way, I don't wanna sell your specific panel. I want to sell a conglomerate of panels and I'm going give you some data, some carrier data, and we're going to do. So the challenge there... There's a lot.
00:45:23 · Michael Provenzano
[00:45:23] S1: Yeah. And of course, it's gotten more complex over time. Yeah. But look, I think there's generally like people you're trying to sell to your audience. We we struggled early on understanding. Did people have a problem or not, or were we creating a problem for them? So, you know, I'll give you some basic examples, like if you were a seller at a large media owner and you were making good commission every year, you didn't need programmatic, like your life was good. There's no reason to have programmatic involved, like you were very happy. If you were a public company and out of home, and like Lamar producing great dividends, performing extremely well, there's nothing that you needed. The market was happy with the result of people who you had to report to at the end of the day are happy about what's going on. My whole thing was like, I think we can do more. Like, I was like, I think that the industry can grow faster. I think there can be brands that you haven't seen spending, spending it out of home, and let's go do that. And you have to be hungry to do that. Yeah. It requires a hungry. It requires a having nothing to do that. And I think you have to find the people within any organization who who need that too, who are hungry, who want to unlock that future, because the current reality is not giving them enough. Mhmm. That that was a big challenge in an industry that's so well established, has a huge legacy, because there are people who, again, even today Mhmm. Don't need programmatic. It's okay. Their lives are completely good with with or without it. But I believe for the future, the industry, future employees of this industry who need to build their their own legacy and their own careers, something had to happen because there wasn't enough growth to handle that.
00:47:24 · Ian Dallimore, Michael Provenzano
[00:47:24] S0: Yeah. And it's interesting because you have to find those curious people within those out of home organizations even just to have that conversation. [00:47:33] S1: Yeah, it's brutal. I I was lucky with you because you're just like, hey, I'm that guy, I'm like, great, I found him. [00:47:37] S0: I think I literally said that to [00:47:38] S1: I didn't even look. [00:47:39] S0: Didn't even look. Yeah. [00:47:41] S1: But yeah, it's really it's really tough to find and and then, you know, it's a tough conversation because, you know, if you're working with private equity firms, right, they're investing companies, you know, 10 to 30% growth, steady growth, whatever it might be, and, you know, if you're getting VC funding, they expect you to have some exponential growth, and everyone's got different expectations of what quote good is. [00:48:06] S0: Right.
00:48:06 · Ian Dallimore, Michael Provenzano
[00:48:06] S0: Right. [00:48:06] S1: The out of home industry had like a two and a half percent CAGR. And again, for some people that was absolutely cool, absolutely fine. Right. You you know, for someone like me who comes from these high growth software startup world type of type of thing, I look at that I say, what's going on here? Like, why don't we all try harder? Why don't we do more? Why isn't there isn't there more we can do? And so I think understanding that, and like you said earlier, taking the time to see things from other people's perspective, I learned to appreciate that and realize, well, I'm not going to try to convince the person who doesn't need this that they need this. I'm gonna just find the people who do need this Right. And spend time with them Spend [00:48:47] S0: and grow there. [00:48:47] S1: Help them grow. [00:48:48] S0: Yeah. And it's... So obviously programmatic has evolved significantly. We kind of touched on that. So it... It's interesting because Vistar has always been and the platforms have always been kind of like, oh, yeah, we can do that. And what... Where where's the outside of the people, but the technology side of thing, where where does that success happen? And is it... We always talk about that. Like, what's what's the next innovative thing? And for innovators like myself and yourself, you kind of get to a nervous point where you're like, okay, I think we've reached the top of the
00:49:18 · Michael Provenzano, Ian Dallimore
[00:49:18] S1: mountain, like, now what? For sure. It's it's close, right? I mean, we we have a fairly immature marketplace at this point. I still think there's big leaps we can make in measurement, but I always go back to that, which is another reason why, again, super excited on the T-Mobile side, but, you know, measurement is something that brands will never say they don't want more of. Right. And to be better defined, they want more clarity of how it works across multiple channels of advertising. These are things that, you know, we've just scratched the surface with. And again, it was a it was a binary jump for us. It was there was no measurement really in out of home, now there was some, right, in terms of attribution showing results. So that's a great accomplishment over the last fourteen years, but we just scratched the surface when you look at it compared to some of the most measurable forms of media. So closing that gap is just probably still a lot of technological innovation to be done there, which is cool. And then again, you know, retail media is a hot topic and any of these hot topics in in in the space, I always think about like, is it actually applying to us yet? Right. For retail media, it's they're really talking about online e commerce media today. Yeah. For most of money goes. Yeah. [00:50:33] S0: Amazon, banners.
00:50:33 · Ian Dallimore, Michael Provenzano
[00:50:33] S0: Amazon, banners. [00:50:34] S1: Yeah. But it's crazy because if you if you look at the math, it's like 85% of what we buy in The US happens in store. Yep. So it's like, well, maybe we should be focusing on that side of it. Yeah, because it's like optimizing that revenue and increasing that opportunity by way more valuable for brands and the retailers themselves. So, those are things that there's a lot of opportunity for innovation coming down both those paths. [00:50:59] S0: Yeah. And we we always hear the word, I say it's a nauseum, but the omni channel approach and, you know, at the end of the day, I always use this phrase, it's like, or comment, it's like, like, take your advertising out of home hat off or, you know, media hat off. It's like, look, at the end of the day, consumers aren't asking for ads. You know, we're we're curious. So if you if you reach me at the right moment in time, so that that evolution is going to be interesting and continue to evolve. Do you feel that there's going to be this consolidation of screens, but then the experience just becomes more seamless with... Look, that's the thing I'm most jacked up about for you with T-Mobile is like, you're now integrating in with a company that like, they live in the world of the... Full journey. Full journey is what it's all about.