Beyond The Billboard
00:03:08 · Remi Du Preez
[00:03:08] S3: Yeah, so the evolution started for me. I mean, I started in the out of home industry in 2009. Prior to that, I was in media recruitment based in Cape Town, doing recruitment in The UK across multiple channels. Funny enough, I actually worked with Nicole Lunsdale, who's, I think, currently the Chief Operating Officer for Kinetic Worldwide. And she was a production manager then. And I couldn't find a production manager for her. I could find suitable candidates for all kinds of roles except for out at home, which has led me to believe that people just never left or the community was small enough that they knew each other and they could move around. So on my one year anniversary, media recruitment resigned, decided I was going to go sell. Billboards literally just led with my intuition and my gut. And funny enough, which has been a lot of my driving force over the years. And having worked within the sales environment in some really grueling sort of Wall Street kinds of sales, I had a thick skin but always been like very customer centric. And I noticed back then, were doing printed billboards. But I wanted more. I always had this ambition to wanting to prove to clients that out of home was really working. So as we started going through transitions from static, then we started including the transit media, then digital billboards started coming around in 2017 for us at the time. But still, that sort of measurement angle was never there. I think everything changed for us during COVID. During 2020, the tractor was very fortunate. It had enough money in the bank that people didn't have to stress about their livelihoods and their jobs. And it gave us a unique opportunity where we because you didn't have to stress, and you weren't focusing on customers anymore. So I could really throw myself into that mindset. You could work with your gut to see, well, what does the market want? It wanted flexibility. It doesn't like contracts anymore. It wants to be able to step in and out of agreements because levels of lockdown were changing. It needed data. Like how many people are actually on the ground? So all of these things that the market wanted was a perfect fit for what the programmatic landscape could offer at the time.
00:05:11 · Remi Du Preez
So early on in 2020, I got introduced to the team at BroadSign, started working with base systems, started working with, I think, the Amnet team at the time, and ran one of the very first sort of call it, impressions based buys with I think it was BMW at the time. Thereafter, I mean, that's just whetting the appetite. It just cracked open the bottle. Now you want more. There needs to be more to this. And I immediately saw that at the time the tools were lacking. How did clients buy it? I went and grabbed the high stack team, pestered the executives, got doors shut in my face. Was like, guys, you need to come to South Africa. I'm telling you, it's going to explode. You need to get here. Then started organizing webinars, etcetera. So we led with sort of just like a gut feel of what the market needed. We needed tools for clients. And then we needed the rest of the industry. Because it's no good in having one media owner programmatically connected. That's not appealing. It was meant to be across entire industries. And that's also, I think, where the heart started leaning more in into the human element. We tend to forget we were working under a lot of stress during that time. We started actually looking above ourselves and looking to the whole industry and how we can uplift everybody. And I think it's just sort of all the components just sort of fell into place. And nobody was leading in that space. And I guess I just sort of ran with it up until the point where in I still remember it was like the middle of twenty twenty one, programmatic adoption reached it adopted quite quickly in South Africa, but then it just stagnated. There weren't more media owners coming on board. I was like, no, this opportunity still needs to grow. But the only way we can get this opportunity to grow is that I need to actually step out of a media owner position and actually move into an aggregator space where I can grab everybody under my wing, show them how we can make money together, and literally just try to unite the entire continent, let alone South Africa. My aspirations have grown outside of South Africa across the entire continent. So that's sort of been how the general journey is. And as of today, it is about coaching teams to do better. It's again about how do we get agencies to do more? How can we service them better? How can they do better for their clients?
00:07:21 · Remi Du Preez, Kirsty Carlson
And how can we just those things that I wanted in 2009 in the out of home space, they are finally here. We could finally measure out of home the way I wish we could fifteen years ago when I jumped into the industry. [00:07:33] S1: Thank you so much, Remi. And thank you for just telling us that journey and just the driving force of wanting to be able to bring measurement and data to the out of home space and through the digital out of home space. What I wanted to ask you is for those listeners of our podcast that don't really understand programmatic digital out of home, could you just give a brief explanation of that to those before we deep dive into some more questions?
00:07:55 · Remi Du Preez
[00:07:55] S3: Yeah, sure. Now, it's quite funny because there's if you ask different markets and different people, you're actually going get up with a whole bunch of different kinds of answers. And I guess the only way to sort of answer programmatic in the out of home space is to sort of see the way we used to do out of home and still do, which is loop based buying. How many spots in the loop? How are we measuring? How many ads are we actually playing? And the key fundamental area from a programmatic standpoint is that a client has the entire control of what they can buy. They can choose at what time of day they want to serve those ads. It is done on an impressions based buying. So we are no longer counting how many ads are being served. Instead, we are looking at how many people are potentially or actually exposed to the ad. And then you can start going a little bit more technical in terms of the tools and text to become a little bit more granular on serving certain audiences in near real time. It is mirroring to some degree what the internet world is very much about targeted advertising at scale and at the buyer's control.
00:08:58 · Kirsty Carlson
[00:08:58] S1: Thanks, Remi. And actually, as we're speaking about this, I wanted to ask you, given where we've come from and where we are now, do you still feel that there's an education job that needs to be done across the industry and not just in South Africa, across the rest of Africa when it comes to programmatic digital out of home? Do you feel that there's a common understanding? Or is there still that education job both for media owners and agencies?
00:09:18 · Remi Du Preez
[00:09:18] S3: So there's definitely and that's actually a really nice question. I got quite a lot of angles to ponder on. Look, as far as South Africa is concerned, from a media owner front, I think the media owners generally understand it. Where they kind of lack is you're finding a lot of outer layers, like not really sure how to get connected. I mean, that's like a whole level of software and hardware integrations that we're trying to do that work to try to standardize the industry. I do notice within agencies so every agency has its own kind of setup. And I've seen some agencies excel. Like, they do quite well. And then I see some guys that are still fumbling. They're not really sure how to do change management, I would say, effectively manage teams, along with all the software and items that you need. And I think one of the key things on agency side we've seen, it's like you've got the digital team, and then you get the out of home team. And guys don't really know who's meant to be responsible for these things. Now, with a media owner cap on, the media owners want to play in the digital money because it's big. But within the agency space, it's still very much siloed of you have your out of own planners who value is positioned as very differently to the digital strategists. And I think that we're teasing that. We're aggravating that situation because we want media agencies to think a little bit differently. Even looking at the old traditional way of how out of home is built, or issue the way agencies present value. I think we need to start getting away from using discounts as the key metric for value. End of the day, clients are in the market to try to sell their product. And out of home needs to be aligned with that. If a digital is, The guys in the performance spaces are measured on how many clients are you getting to my website buying my goods. And yes, in the measurement space in out of home, it is difficult. But it's not impossible. And I think those if we can start merging those two mindsets, then we can definitely media agencies will have more value ultimately to move to clients.