Digital & Dirt
00:01:04 · Barry Frey
[00:01:04] S1: I'm just so excited, firstly, because it's another year of the Lamar Green Room. You folks are just great. You bring little Baton Rouge, little Marlins right here to New York City. It's all green and it's Les Aisles Venton Brule. Love it. As I would say, Ian, you're the best and we love everybody down in Lamar. We love when you come here. So yeah, we got a big day planned. We've got some amazing speakers from entertainment, from media, from politics, from marketing, from agencies. And I'm just so excited. Major CMOs, the CMO of Microsoft B2B, the CMO of Major League Soccer. I've got a very fascinating conversation with the CMO of American Eagle Outfitters speaking with David Sable, the Vice Chairman of Stagwell, how they understood what was going on in the Sydney Sweeney controversy, and they managed it to perfection. I think it's gonna be a master class in marketing. We've also got a man who is brilliant to finance here. He spent eleven or ten days in the White House, depending how he sees it or Trump sees it. Anthony Scaramucci, amazing insight of Bitcoin follow-up, a former golden guy. And just what a day. And then we've got a major real marketer. We've got she's a real marketer of her own brand and her name. And then she's a real marketer of masculine. And she's also a real housewife of New York, Mary Leachie. And then because there's always been a great association with Broadway in the West End and Times Square and Piccadilly, we always like to bring the actual Broadway performers here. And now we've got the amazing Book of Mormons going to sing and dance on our stage, and we have that every year. And it's wonderful. And the reason I do that, Ian, is also I'm a big believer that if we're going to market an industry, we're going to educate people. We also have to inspire and entertain. And that's how that's how people embrace it. And everything we do is about being in the real world. And that's the excitement and the authenticity. You know, when you're a medium that's not served into an echo chamber, when it's served at a one to many in public, You have to be authentic. You have to tell the truth. You have to be credible. And that's the power of the real world in real life advertising, which is this is our time. You know, when you look at ads, are they real? Are they fake? Are they AI?
00:03:18 · Barry Frey, Ian Dallimore
We know that when it's outside the home and it's one to many, it's credible. And that's the brilliance of our medium today. It's the brilliance of Lamar advertising. And we're just so excited to celebrate the intense and wonderful growth of out of home for today and tomorrow. [00:03:34] S0: Yeah. And what an amazing lineup of brands. Know whenever we were preparing to come here, I was blown away. And look, we've been doing this for quite some times as partners, and I'm always fascinated. You know, we talked about it last night and I'm very honored to be able to be a guest at your dinner itself. But when I stop and look at the agenda and you look at the people and you've always orchestrated like the perfect touch of people in the right place, right time and moments. When you're putting this together, like what is what is the mindset? Because I told you last night, like you're you're a lost art because you methodically know what the speakers, what their thoughts are, what the industry as a whole needs to want, feel, and ultimately, at the end of the day, leave, take it back and go make ourselves better, both for the brands and for our individual companies. But what's going through your mind?
00:04:23 · Barry Frey
[00:04:23] S1: That's a great question. So there's a few things about me that I've learned over the years. One is I'm intensely curious. And I'm curious about people, about what drives them, what makes them tick, how they do in business professionally and personally. And then I love the idea of just really exporting the knowledge and the capabilities of this wonderful medium. I've spent my life building media. I built cable TV in the early days with Ted Turner going on sales calls. I built out sports at the NBA, running media for David Stern. And in cable vision, I built out the advanced advertising platforms and interactive and mobile digital. And then I built TV channels around the world. And I'm just so loving this job now. Sounds like a McDonald's ad or something. Yeah. Where we get a chance to really tell people the power of this industry, as I just mentioned earlier. And so when we curate this, it's a combination of marketing, education, learning, inspiring, entertaining. And because what DPAA does best DPAA connects, you know that. And I love that personally. So I get to know people kind of a real visceral level. And I love connecting them, you know, like I said, what makes them tick, what their passions are. And DPAA is kind of like life. The more you lean in, the more you get out. If you sit on the sidelines, we don't want you as a global member. But if you lean in and you want to grow your business, you want to grow yourself, you want to grow your career, then we're part of the fact we're going to talk today about how wonderful our women's empowerment program is. We do as women's empowerment digital out of home. So we're going to be talking about how we've been raising women up because this industry needs fresh ideas. It needs more diversity of thinking. So that's another thing that I just love doing, growing the industry, growing companies and growing people. So we're going to talk a lot about that today. And that's this is kind of the culmination curation in the nation, but actually all nations of what we do at this event.
00:06:17 · Ian Dallimore
[00:06:17] S0: Yeah. And this year's theme, as you've kind of spoken, it makes sense because the next question is, the theme this year is around real connections. And there's so many different ways to play on words because I know the way your mind thinks, you know, it's technology, real connections. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I was having a conversation last night at dinner with Jim Norton at OUTFRONT and I said, you know what's beautiful about this industry is two giants are able to sit next to each other and have a true meaningful conversation connection. That's that's the theme today is around real connecting and connecting
00:06:50 · Barry Frey
[00:06:50] S1: as humans and our medium connects so well to you tonight. I just love that. If I could make an editorial comment, mean, you and Jim Norton are the future of this business. You're both smart. You're both personal. You have a really key sense of sales and marketing and of digital and of all media. So I just look forward to the two of you thriving and just growing in your roles because, you know, without Fronting Lamar having two amazing leaders like you, you folks are to be running the world, I think very soon. And I'm very excited for that because you're both really good folks. You know the way I operate. You know, if you're a good person, I love you. If you do anything nasty or dark, you're out of... Yeah. We've kicked people out of the association if they've done anything underhanded. Right. Because I believe in treating people right, which I know all of you do actually, Lamar. And I sleep at nights. I do the right thing. And this is really important to me as well as getting to know people, growing people and growing passions as as we detail. So real connections is a theme that we always open with a kind of a funny tech that I was in a three d spaceship one year. Still my time. I go one year. I was on top of the Paramount Building, which as of last week is a sky dense building. But this year, because it's about real connections, as you so aptly described, I had a wonderful poet. He's a Emmy nominated poet. They talked about us connecting. And that's how we grow together. It's what I do every day. So it makes me personally very happy to see how you bonded with your other large competitor because at the end of the day, we all grow together once again, personally, professionally as a sector. And we all have to tell the story of the power of the sector together.
00:08:29 · Ian Dallimore, Barry Frey
[00:08:29] S0: And to add to that, you know, beyond just the large format companies, Lamar OUTFRONT and others, but also the long tail of your members and, you know, from the programmatic standpoint, it makes this industry stronger, especially from programmatic, but just all screens. And what I love about the DPAA and what's going to go down here today is truly that. It's a publicly traded company shaking hands with a young startup that has place based screens that is equally as powerful in a consumer journey as others. That's where I love that you kind of marry the two together. [00:09:02] S1: And so, Barry, in many ways, because it's deeply connects so many of the companies we have introduced to each other, bought the other companies or they subsume them. Or they've done investments with them. And that's what we love to do by connecting. We're fueling the industry every which way because we're getting people to understand and trust each other and do financial equations, too. [00:09:24] S0: Yeah. So last question, as we kind of wrap, because I know you got to hit on stage and kick this thing off. AI is a conversation that is prominent in everything that we do in the ad space. But it's interesting, right? Because as much as AI is prominent and will help us automate, help data, help us better storytell, the physical and shared experiences and culturally relevant moments become the most iconic thing in the world. And lo and behold, there's digital out of home and video out of home everywhere just kind of seamlessly a part of it.