Digital & Dirt
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
00:25:21 · Ian Dallimore, Alex Grieves
[00:25:21] S0: it's very obvious. Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because we're a visual being. We like to see great creative. We like to be delight and surprised. And also audio, it's why podcasts have blown up is people want long form. They want storytelling. So this world of we're we're struggling with, like, quick hits and... And look, YouTube shorts dominates. Right? And as I was driving back last night, back to the hotel to meet that chaos in the hotel lobby, which I thoroughly enjoyed, It was interesting because I had a moment and I thought, and that's... This is gonna be my question, but as I was driving, I saw people and I don't know why we went through Times Square, but I saw everyone. They were doing content and they were doing content. So now in a world of content creators, and it's why the world of content creators, the creator economy air quotes, how does Out lean into that? And how does brands like yours that have influencers and have content creators, how do you discuss that universe in out of of home? [00:26:19] S2: So for me, I think it's very hard to get all the right people in the same room. And I was at Holco previously and it was still hard there and [00:26:26] S0: it should be easier.
00:26:26 · Ian Dallimore, Alex Grieves
[00:26:26] S0: it should be easier. [00:26:27] S2: And now I'm a specialist, it's slightly different. But for me, I always look at it from a creative point of view. They have incredibly interesting creatives. They're relatable creatives. They can make it contextually relevant. So it's like, how do we take that that's already made and bring it into out of home? So therefore we're able to surface that content more than once, twice. We can have it on multiple channels. So then you're doubling down on frequency in that sense, but also just getting that relatability because I know when I see, when I'm looking at reviews and I see someone that I know or I recognize or I trust, I'm immediately going, yeah, I trust what you're saying. But sometimes we don't have that with the album because it's almost like a completely different piece of copy. Well, how do we take that copy and bring it in? Actually doing that for album isn't that hard. Especially with AI now coming in to assist with creative assets sort of creation or resizing, it's a lot easier. So how do we take that amazing work and double down it and use it twice, three times, whatever it is?