Digital & Dirt
00:18:58 · Katie Burwell, Alex Grieves, Ian Dallimore, Barry Frey
[00:18:58] S3: Oh, gosh. I mean, I'm incredibly bullish that I think more advertising is headed outdoors. I think we're winning in... Against search. I think we're winning against digital. I think people are getting very fatigued. So I think for for our medium, that's really exciting, but I think it's it's moving faster. I think AI is coming for a lot. I think we need to keep high quality creatives in [00:19:19] S2: the mix because I don't [00:19:20] S3: think people wanna see AI up on billboards. They still wanna see those big, big, bold messages that make us feel something. [00:19:25] S0: Yeah. I love it. And you're you're at the leadership role to do that. So I'm extremely proud of you to watch your growth within AdQuick, and I appreciate your time. Thank you, my friend. [00:19:33] S3: Thank you so much, Ian. [00:19:41] S0: All right. This will be fun. Alex, global head of programmatic at Billups. Good to [00:19:47] S2: see you. Good to see you. [00:19:48] S0: Let's spend the first two minutes just talking about last night. [00:19:51] S2: Okay. We covered a range of topics. [00:19:53] S1: We did. [00:19:54] S2: Everything from crawfish, broil. Which [00:19:56] S0: you're in? [00:19:57] S2: I'm I'm keen. I wanna try it. [00:19:59] S0: We got shushed at by a grown man at a jazz bar. [00:20:04] S2: Yeah. Yeah. We were being a little bit... Well, I think we were having too much fun for jazz. [00:20:08] S0: Yeah. What was the statement he said? He said,
00:20:08 · Ian Dallimore, Alex Grieves, Jim Norton
[00:20:08] S0: Yeah. What was the statement he said? He said, [00:20:10] S2: Your conversation is fascinating, but I'd rather listen to the jazz. Yeah. And he didn't... He only had half of it. David heard the full story, he would have been... He he would have probably preferred to listen to it. [00:20:20] S0: Would have came over and listened to us. He wouldn't have let him in, though. [00:20:22] S2: No. No. Definitely not. [00:20:23] S0: And then we had a good time. I was texting. Shout out to Ben Billups, founder of Billups, or Whatsappin. Which is crazy because I'm pretty [00:20:30] S2: sure he's in EMEA at the moment. He's out there. He's awake. Replying to immediately, [00:20:34] S6: of course. [00:20:34] S0: Is Zarkin? It's no surprise where he is. So speaking of that, so let's talk about it. We're here at the DPAA. We're early morning, so you maybe haven't heard a lot yet. But what... What's the one thing you're excited to hear and take away back to the team? [00:20:47] S2: I think for me, when I come to these events, I wanna walk away with something that excites me that I can then take back to the business, to the team, something that's innovation, something that is genuinely gets me excited. Right? So whether it's, I don't know, whether it's something around data, whether it's something around measurement, whether it's something like a development in creative, but something that means I'm invigorated leaving. That's what I'm looking forward to walking away with.
00:20:47 · Alex Grieves, Ian Dallimore
[00:20:47] S2: I think for me, when I come to these events, I wanna walk away with something that excites me that I can then take back to the business, to the team, something that's innovation, something that is genuinely gets me excited. Right? So whether it's, I don't know, whether it's something around data, whether it's something around measurement, whether it's something like a development in creative, but something that means I'm invigorated leaving. That's what I'm looking forward to walking away with. [00:21:09] S0: Yeah. And I love that because your role is then to ingest it and then share it back with clients. Is there something that clients are asking for? Obviously, automation is important. Out of home and programmatic have helped solve for that ish and have continued to evolve. But what clients asking for you for right now?
00:21:26 · Alex Grieves
[00:21:26] S2: I think there's two key things, right? That I'm trying to solve for desperately. The first one is when we're talking around out of home and we're talking around programmatic. Cool. But we're talking about them in two different facets. How do we bring them together? So we're going to clients and we're talking about an integrated solution. And the challenge with an integrated solution is people come to you and they use the word incremental. They want proof. Okay. Can you prove to me that this was a value to do to add programmatic on top or vice versa with directs? That's that's a problem we're trying to solve. We've got a couple of tests already under the way. I haven't got the results, so I can't tell you the good news yet that hopefully is coming. But that for me is exciting because if I can go to a client and go, you're running this direct plan, which is great, I would now say tomorrow, if you want to run programmatic, you can extend your audience, you can extend your time and market, flex, all the usual benefits. But imagine if I can go to them with a stat and say, this is what we've done with this similar client. Then suddenly they go, well now I'm interested, right? Because you've proven it. So that's the one thing. And then the other thing that the clients are enjoying from us is that we offer a client first diagnostic solution, which is quite rare from what I've seen in market. The fact that we're going, what's your problem? We'll back into it rather than going, it's got to be with this partner and then we'll use whatever capabilities they've got. Again, it's trying to make that simpler for everyone because if you've got, let's say, four or five DSPs you're using, there's a lot of options. So like, how do you make sure that you're taking all those options and giving it quickly to a client? Sure. Again, doubling down on speed.
00:22:49 · Ian Dallimore, Alex Grieves
[00:22:49] S0: Yeah. And one of the things that you're you're saying on a deeper level is out of home specifically. So you've dissected out of home and programmatic out of home, but out of home specifically has always lived in this silo off on its own and not measured along. And shout out to Sean Spooner, who's the data scientist who is... [00:23:05] S2: He's he's many things, but he's just incredibly intelligent. And I know that if I've got him on my side, we're going to solve it at some point. Yeah. [00:23:12] S0: Yeah. And that's uniqueness. Right? But it's... When you're talking about true omnichannel, you know, people got... Get caught up in the word omnichannel. But at at the end of the day, if you strip down what we're doing, both on the vendor side, publisher side, on the agency side, at the end of the day, consumers don't care. Like, it's funny. I even asked my wife and my kids like, hey, do you know how that buy happened? And they're like, what? So in that universe, we have to break down those silos and think of all media as one. Because again, we as consumers, we're wake up, look at our phone, maybe it's TikTok, maybe it's Instagram. You're hit with ads, you hit the road, you maybe see digital, subway, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So in that same conversation, when you're trying to talk about incremental just and out of home, are you pushing back as well and saying, well, what's the full plan of this campaign and what other media is involved in it? I know that becomes difficult.
00:24:02 · Alex Grieves
[00:24:02] S2: It's hard, right? We're an out of home specialist proudly. And I actually don't think we should ever shy away from that. I think we should be confident on that. And I think we should go to agencies and a lot of agencies who are running a lot of their programmatic, they look at us they go, well, how are you going to help us? Because we've already got a programmatic team. I always respond with, okay, you have got a programmatic team. Do you have a programmatic out of home specialist? Because it's not programmatic, it's not out of home and it's in this sort of gray area. And a lot of time they go, no, we have actually had a couple of challenges with X and Y. So we actually are providing a solution. And there are DSPs out there that allow you to do data sharing so they can run a campaign themselves. We can run the out of home part of it programmatically and they can retarget. And they're now loving that because they get all of our expertise, they get all of our tech, all of our planning, at the same time they don't lose anything. So they're going, well, this is now really interesting from an omnichannel point of view because we can measure the whole plan. And we've done that before previously. I've managed plans where I can see the digital, the audio and the out of home. And we're looking at providing a benchmark of each from a measurement point of view in brand lift or whatever it is. And then we're also looking at the combined. So who plays best with each other? And I've done it three times now and the two times that we've seen the most interesting result, it's always actually been out of home and audio. They show the best performance together. So that was a really interesting part for that client because they were like, well, now we know we need to somehow sync them. And