Matei Psatta - Co-Founder & CMO of Blindspot Speaks on Fractional Advertising on Digital Billboards

All right, welcome back to the Casey Adams show. Today we are joined by Matei Passata, the co founder of Blindspot. Thank you so much for coming the show today, brother.

Thanks for having me.

Of course, man. So as we were talking about right before we got started here, I came across your company Blindspot probably like a week ago when I reached out and overall from what I know, you guys activate billboards across the world at different activations. I don't want to butcher it. So please give us a quick high level of what blind spot is before we dive in there.

Sure. So the elevator pitch is that Blindspot is a platform that is self service platform that enables fractional advertising on almost any digital billboard in the world. What that means is that historically if you wanted to advertise on a billboard, you had to go through an agency or figure out find the contact of, you know, someone from the landlord side. They would usually lock you in long term contracts. So you can't really say, oh you know what, I have 500 bucks, I only want to buy a few hours for today. Now you can do that type of stuff. It's great for advertisers that want to test out this channel without having to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it's great for larger brands that get flexibility as well and don't have to book everything 24 7. And you can just say, you know what, I want this specific neighborhood between 6, 7am and 11am and I want this specific, I don't know, I want the subway from 6pm to 8pm because I know that's when the rush hour hits and I want to get more bang for my buck. So it's basically we frame it as the most flexible way of running a campaign on a billboard. It's interesting because we've done a lot of crazy stuff to kind of prove what, what's able to, what you're able to do with this. I think our biggest kind of achievement was running a campaign for ourselves that became the most upvoted Reddit post ever. And that was kind of us proving that, look, this is how you use the platform.

Yeah. So what led to that being the most upvoted product hunt campaign?

So I think that was, it was a lot of things. It's usually a perfect storm. Right. With any viral thing, I would be lying if I would say, oh, we knew exactly what we were doing. We, we had, we knew this would get some attention, but we had no idea it would become so popular. Right. So we did this during the whole GameStop saga back in 2021, when GameStop was, you know, everybody was talking about it on Reddit, the Wall Street Bets subreddit was blowing up, and everybody was, you know, pumping the stock, and there was a huge discussion around, what is happening? Is this real? Let's figure it out. So while people were kind of jumping on the train, we figured out timing, and we realized that people were trying to make this moment a legit one. Right. And what better way of showing that you're legit than buying a billboard, which is usually prohibited. Right. So what we did is we used our own platform to put essentially a meme on a billboard, and we put the message, gme go brr, which is one of the memes that was going around. And brr is the sound the money printer makes. Right. When you're the money counter.

Yeah.

So we put that meme on a billboard. It cost us, like, 20 bucks to run it. It was a billboard next to Times Square, and we took a video of it once it ran live, and we posted it on Reddit, and it gained traction immediately. Like, I still remember this. I didn't have notifications off on Reddit on my phone. And when after it got approved, I was getting so many upvotes and so many comments, and, you know, the. The post was getting so much. So much traction that my phone was literally vibrating off the table. Like, initially, I thought it was an issue with the phone. I was like, oh, this is so weird. And then I realized, oh, my God, this is popping off. This is actually working. And then we got a lot of attention from the press. We got featured in, like, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal. Everybody talked about it like it was. It was insane. And. And to this day, the video of that billboard is the most upvoted Reddit post of all time. If you go to Reddit, top all time, you'll see the. You'll see the Reddit post.

Yeah, that. That's insane. So bring me back. So that was in 2020. 2021. You said, when it comes to blind spot the company, how long have you guys been working on this? And, yeah, I think before we, you know, dive into the. Where the company is today. Like, where was the company back in 2020 was that launch phase?

So we had kind of two phases because we're a marketplace. It's always a supply and demand type of situation. Right. So we launched officially in 2018. We were part of Techstars Dubai. We're originally from Europe, so that was kind of our first. Europe is Especially from Eastern Europe, as you. But some people might be able to tell from my accent, and Eastern Europe is not a huge market for digital auto forms. So we always knew that, okay, we're going to do some trial and error here in our local market, but the point is to go international because we need to in order to access a large market. So we went through techstars Dubai and then we figured out it's very difficult to do a proper tech integration with these billboards because they have archaic tech or they have a very straightforward integration that doesn't really allow you to do this type of flexible buying. Right?

Yeah.

So their term of programmatic is very old school. It's built for large advertisers who don't want or not necessarily don't want. This type of flexibility is not on their immediate to do list. Right. So agencies kind of want to just, you know, spend the budget as fast as possible, get the numbers up and that's fine. So they don't have the same incentives as a startup that's trying to get proper ROI from a campaign because for them it's life or death. Right. If the campaign doesn't work, they might go under. So we had to do a very custom integration with all these billboards. It took us a while. So essentially it took us a few years to finalize all. The tech part. The tech part is not. It's extremely complicated in the sense that it has a lot of moving parts and we had to connect a lot of extremely archaic technologies and figure out kind of a universal adapter for them and take all of these different ones. Like you have a thousand different landlords, you have Lamar, you have Outfit, you have Clear Channel, you have jcdeco and a ton more. And we had to figure out how we're able to integrate all these into a single platform. So that took us, realistically, three years to do. And in that time we tested out a lot of the demand side, so we figured out what works or what does. So we launched officially commercially in the US in 2021 with the GameStop. So essentially we've been around for six years and the past three years have been focused a lot on demand generation, while the first three years were more kind of building up the back end of everything.

Yeah, that's incredible. And even on your website, you know, you have billboard access all over the world, you know, at these key locations. What locations for people that may not know do you guys primarily target? And also too, as a founder, like, what led you to pursuing this industry when it Comes to billboard advertising and this self serve model.

Yeah. So in terms of, in terms of inventory, most of our businesses in the U.S. so most of our inventory is in the U.S. we have inventory. I think it's over 50 countries right now. Basically every major market that has a significant digital out of home presence. So a lot of digital billboards. When I say billboards, it can mean any type of digital screen, a TV in a subway. If it run, if it runs ads, it's very likely that we have it connected on the platform. We, we showcase maybe 60 to 70% of what we have connected because there's still markets that we haven't really activated yet. And we do it on demand for clients. For example, Canada, if you go to the platform, you're not, you're not going to see a lot of inventory. In Canada, we do have that inventory. We just haven't focused on making it publicly available. But we do have clients that come to us and ask us, hey, do you guys have Canada? And then we activated for them and we're able to run a campaign. But if you go on the platform, you'll see, you'll see all of the US coast to coast, so you name it. Anything from the Midwest to major cities, you'll see a lot of Western Europe. So the uk, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, that type of stuff. Yeah, you'll see. So you'll see a lot of, a lot of stuff in central Eastern Europe as well. Because we're from there originally. The major markets that you see there are kind of US and Europe, but we do have a lot of stuff in Latin America as well that we haven't activated and probably Asia as well. We've done some campaigns in Asia, but that's further down the line for us. Like we haven't focused that much. And in terms of how we came up with the idea, it's, it's kind of the classic story. And I feel this is all the founders that are really passionate about the idea have I have a shared experience with. We had this problem ourselves. We were working on a totally different product. It had nothing to do with advertising and nothing to do with billboards. But we had a really fun idea to do something on a billboard because my background is advertising and marketing. So I had this fun idea of, hey, it would be really cool. We could do a PR stunt by putting this on a billboard that everybody would talk about.

Everyone wants to be on a billboard. You know, that's just as a founder, a business owner. Yeah.

So we went to the guys who owned the billboard. And we said, look, can we pay for a few hours? Like we'll do a last minute thing. Do you have any time available today? And they told us, oh, we have plenty of time. We only sold 50% of our inventory. And I was like, okay, brilliant. I'll even pay a premium for it. I don't want the discount, just. But I only need a few hours. I don't want to book it for a month.

Yeah.

And they said, oh, sorry, we can only sell it. I think their minimum was like two weeks.

Wow.

We can only sell it for a two week minimum because that's how our whole organization is built. Like we have to set up a contract, you have to go through a vendor vetting process. It's a whole thing, right? Yeah, that was weird to me. And they basically told me, look, if I would sell you a few hours, it would be like $400 and it's not even worth it for me. Just the fact that I have to go through all my internal process. It's not worth it for the company. And then for us it was okay. But what if we automate all that? Like, sure, it doesn't make sense to get on a call with someone to sign a contract for a. You know, imagine if any B2B SaaS you would have to do like, like a car sale, right? You would have to talk to someone, sign a contract like that. That wouldn't work.

Yeah.

So we thought about the same thing. What, what if we commoditize it and make it available to everyone and even for large brands, make it more flexible because they don't want the headache. Like digital out of home for large brands. I'm talking like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Apple, that type of stuff. Their media budget, the share of out of home is like 5%. Anywhere between 5 and 7% depending on the year. That's not a lot. So they don't want a lot of headache with it. So the moment they get locked in into complicated stuff, that's annoying. So they come to us and they can actually put that money to good use and not focus on it that much. Just say, you know what, I picked the best hours, I picked the best locations, and now I can let it run because I know it's doing its job. So yeah, that's how we came up with the idea. We kind of had that problem ourselves. And then we realized, look, this is something that I think would have a lot of value if we're able to fix it. And we went on that journey and we're still Here.

Wow, that's incredible, man. And talk to me about what you were doing prior to pursuing this venture, your entrepreneurial background. Talk to me about what inspired you to just become an entrepreneur and builder in the first place as well.

I think it's interesting. I think you're kind of built. I know there's a huge debate around this, but I think you have the DNA to be an entrepreneur or you don't. And usually that comes with. You have to have a very high level of dissatisfaction about the things around you. You know, you have to be. You have to be pissed about something, you know, and my background, like, my background has been advertising and marketing. Like, I used to work. My first job was in pr. I was in. I was working in a Romanian PR agency. I did the social media part of it. That was like, back in 2010. So I started. Yeah, I'm. I'm old. 2010. We're doing, like, social media when Facebook was just popping off. Then I moved to Leo Burnett, which is one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. And I was doing digital strategy for a lot of big brands like png, Samsung, Deutsche Telekom, stuff like that. But I always kind of felt like, look, we're not doing enough. I think we could do more. I learned a lot of stuff, and the moment I. I learned something, I said, okay, what's next? And in an agency that's only incentivized in the beginning, once you get a certain level of seniority within the company, your incentives are kind of okay. Now sit down. Your job. Don't worry about it too much and just avoid headaches. And for some reason, that didn't, you know, really resonate with me that much. It. It does make sense for some people, and I totally get. Then I switched to. To be the head of marketing for one of the largest online travel agencies in the. In the region. They were doing, like, $100 million in revenue. And that was like, my first contact with an entrepreneurial journey, because this was like, a. Up to a point. It was a bootstrap business. Then they raised some money, but it's essentially the day I got hired. They gave me the company's P L. And they told me, figure it out. And I was like, I don't even. I've only heard about P. Ls online. Like, I haven't actually seen a real business piano. So I sat down with the. With the founder and the. The CEO that's been a huge inspiration to me to this day. And he taught me the basics, you know, Like a crash course into entrepreneurship. And that kind of came to bite him back because one year later I got funding from my own business and I was like, see ya. Thanks for the, thanks for all the free advice. I mean, but that stuff happens, you know, it's. We onboarded brilliant people and in a year they started their own business because they loved the idea so much. So that's how I kind of got here. Most of us, my co founder is my co founders as well. We're first time founders, so this is our first time doing this. But I think, I think all of us were unhappy with the way things were being done and we wanted to try our own version of things. Even if maybe it's a worse version, maybe it's not going to work, but we wanted to at least say, you know what, we try. And that's what got us here so far.

Yeah, no, it's, that's incredible to hear. And even too, just seeing an industry that people pass by and see every single day and the ability to understand like, hey, this is archaic in terms of how people are approaching it. How do we create a modernized solution where we live in a world where you can sign up for Netflix and cancel same day, where you don't have to have these. From a consumer end or an early stage startup perspective, you want to have flexibility and the ease of trying things out, testing this. And granted, this is what the culture has ingrained in us, right? Free trials and hey, let's give this a shot and see if this channel works. Social media, you can post for free. So billboard advertising, something that historically has been larger budgets, bigger companies, you start to see billboards and you're like, oh, those are all the big boy companies, right? The people that are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars across large scale billboard campaigns. Granted, that still happens. But yeah, to see an industry, to be dealing with the problem yourself, I mean, that just goes back to the, you know, the entrepreneurial bug that everyone, at least for me, has been on my show may and most likely has came across themselves. So, so great to hear that, man. When it comes to the types of businesses that you guys first started working with, what did the early adopter phase look like during that launch phase in terms of small startups, big companies, what was the initial feedback as well? Right? Having something that people are so unfamiliar with because they're used to an older way, what was some of the early stage feedback that you guys were getting?

Yeah, so that's a really interesting story. We went through a few iterations when it came to our approach, because initially, because of my background in advertising and marketing, I had a lot of contacts in the European advertising world. Right. So initially we thought, hey, let's start off with big brands and you know, tell them, hey, you can do this in a more flexible manner and it'll, it'll help your efforts. So we started off with big brands and that worked up to a degree. But at some point we started getting blocked by the agency because we were basically becoming a replacement of the media buying agency. Right. When it came to digital out of home, which again is not a big chunk of their, of their revenue, but it is still anywhere between 5 and 7%. So when they realize that we're kind of taking over and we're giving, we're giving the client the freedom and the transparency of seeing prices in real time, like that's another thing that we brought to the table. People in the industry, they don't know the pricing of billboards. It's not like if you ask anyone how much is, how much is a billboard in Times Square, you can either Google it and you'll get some very generic answers. It can be anywhere between X and Y, but it's basically SEO text. But you don't have a map unless you come to our platform where you can actually see NASDAQ is this much. The beast is this much. That small screen on the corner is this much. And then you can actually compare and say, you know what, this one is good for me. Otherwise if you go to an agency, an agency is incentivized to sell you the billboards where they get the highest commission. Right. So it's not really fair. So when we started kind of becoming pretty big, or not big, but when we started having some momentum, agencies started blocking us and we realized, okay, that's kind of a dead end because we're not in the stage yet, but we can have that fight. So we need to be a bit more flexible and we need to help them as, as well with stuff. With, with stuff. So our, the moment it started working for us is when we were targeting mid sized companies that either, let's say usually they're in the point in which they spend a few millions of dollars overall on their marketing efforts.

Yeah.

So they're kind of C to series A, maybe like per year. I mean, and they want the flexibility of doing stuff and testing stuff. So one of, one of our, one of our favorite clients is a company called Adormi. Right. They were recently bought by Victoria Secret and we started working with them I think just prior to that. And they're a lingerie D2C brand. So they built their own company on PPC advertising. And that's pretty much it. So then when they scaled and they became a bit bigger, they were like, you know what, let's figure out other channels. But they didn't want to go through the agency route. But to be honest, we have clients from all types of categories. Like, we have over 16,000 advertisers on the platform right now. And we have people. The smallest campaign that we ever ran is I think a dollar and forty cents. So you can have people that run a billboard on somewhere. Yeah, yeah.

I guess when it comes to, I guess even for my own sake of thought, you know, people that are out there, they hear a dollar for a billboard. Like when it comes to a dollar or even, you know, small prices of a dollar to $10, what is, like, where do you get billboards like that for people that are just like, wait, that doesn't sound real. Like, talk to us about some of the practical examples.

Maybe you'd be surprised. Apart from the spectacular billboards, like the ones that are bigger than life, literally the majority of standard billboards are an average of five to ten dollars per hour. And for that, that's for ten plays per hour. That's the standard that we use on our platform. Obviously you can get more aggressive with the campaign and you can pay more and get more exposure, but basically. So you're based in la, right?

Yes.

So billboards in la, the ones on the highway that you see, are anywhere between four and seven dollars per hour. And we have a minimum of 300 plays. So that means it's, let's say it's 70 cents per play times 300. That is, that's like 200 and something dollars. We increased the minimum, to be honest. Like, we recently increased the minimum just because we are getting a lot of people doing kind of personal ads and happy birthday ads and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And it's, at best, it's not where we want to be. Like, that's nice, we'll do it from time to time. But 99 of the people that come to our platform, they want to promote their business, so they want to spend at least a few hundreds of dollars. Right. But again, technically speaking, if we wanted to, we could run a campaign for a dollar as well. The platform is just not built for that anymore because it. But it's, it's also tough to kind of measure ROI on a campaign that's a $140, you know?

Yeah, no, of course, yeah.

Like the, the. That's the range that we realize. It's 300, it's 300 plays. And if you look at like link NYC and stuff like that, those are like urban panels. It's street furniture in New York that's on eye level and some of it is in Times Square. And the ones that are, that the ones there are like, the minimums are I think around $50.

Got it. Yeah, I think too, just people hearing that, I'm sure founders are thinking, whoa, you're telling me I can just create some type of audio or not audio, like visual, static or video ad, and then run a campaign across these different things? That's cool. And nowadays, right, as you guys did so well with Reddit, it's the ability for a lot of brands to create billboard moments to then translate to social media. Right. That's one of the biggest use cases of live brands. Obviously there's the ability to grab eyeballs in person, but to showcase it on social, to create as you guys did with, you know, creative copy or imagery that can create so much brand awareness from just utilizing that medium as a piece of content. Right.

100%. And it's even more than, like, for larger campaigns. We can do. This is kind of more on the nerdy, geeky side of tech for advertising. So it might not be that interesting for everybody, but we can go even further when it comes to tracking performance. One of the things that we can do is we can actually Collect Mobile Advertiser IDs of people who walk in front of the billboard. So we're able to know if someone who walked in front of the billboard at the exact second when our client's ad was running, went to the client's website and bought something. So that way you can actually calculate a.

How does that work? How does that work? Say it again. When someone walks by, you're able to do what exactly?

We're able to collect it. There's something called mobile advertiser IDs. Right. So each phone, even with Apple Privacy and everything, has a unique ID that's used just for advertising purposes. I don't know. It's you, Casey, walking in front of that billboard. But I know that ID number 145N M99.

Yeah.

Walked in front of the billboard right now. And then I know if you went from your phone to or from your laptop, because you're going to go back home and you're going to connect to your WI Fi, it's going to be the Same ip. And I know if you. Maybe I was advertising new Nike Jordans, right? Yeah. And I know if you went to the Nike website and eventually bought those Jordans. So I can say, hey, I can compare to audiences and I can then say, look, people who were in front of the billboards bought more Nikes than people who were not. Because, sure, they were exposed to other channels as well. It's not like they only saw the billboards. Maybe they saw a TV ad, maybe they heard it on the radio, that's fine. But that's how we compare. That's how we do attribution. We look at two audiences from the same area. One audience was definitely exposed to the billboards and one audience was not. And then you look at the uplift from the audience that was exposed to the billboard and we've seen huge stuff. Like for a, for a dormy, we saw extremely. We saw that people who saw the billboards were. Sorry. Were three times more likely to convert than people who did not.

Wow, that's incredible, man. So good to hear. And even too, just on that technology side, fascinating. I did not know that in terms of that unique ID and that. And that goes for any billboard. Is it a proximity to billboard sort of tag that it gathers or what?

Yeah, so it's essentially mobile data. The billboards are used as points of interest right now and our tech is able. Because we know the exact second when an ad is running, we can correlate the two. But essentially what we're collecting is mobile data. And there's a. There's a few players in the market that collect that data and you're able to use that data for various ways. And for billboards, it makes a lot of sense because it's all location based. Right. That's all, that's all that really matters when it comes to a billboard. It's location, location, location and timing. Of course, because it's one thing to run an ad at 4am on a Tuesday, it's totally different thing to run an ad at 8pm on a Saturday. Right?

Totally. No, that makes total sense when it comes to being in this industry. What has been the biggest breakthrough for you guys so far in terms of working with brands, really finding your product market fit? I mean, again, I came across you guys more recently through a friend that was doing something with you guys and I was like, oh wow, my friend's on a billboard. Then you check it out, you learn more because he tagged it. And obviously, you know, when it comes to people that have shows, people that are have their own brand, they want to do something and promote it to their audience. That's again, how I came across it. What's been the biggest, again, just unlock for you guys in terms of brands finding out about what you guys are doing and just product, market fit overall.

Yeah, one sec. I think we. Yeah, I think it froze. It froze for a second.

Okay, no worries.

Okay. Yeah. So there's a few things that we learned in the process of, you know, marketing the platform. One is because people are not used to buying billboards, we had to be really strict and really a B test on the user experience. You know, because it's one thing to buy a SaaS business or a SaaS product that you kind of already know the logic to. And it's very different to buy digital out of home or a billboard that you've never, it's something you've never done before. So first of all, we iterated a lot on that. Secondly, we're very good at digital marketing because that's my background and that's our background. So we are pretty good at SEO, we're pretty good at ppc, we've become pretty good at word of mouth. So a lot of people kind of hear about us the way you did. And we've also scaled, actually significant. This is a really interesting model. We've scaled significantly our referral model. So we have a custom built referral platform. But because again, ours doesn't really fit, it's hard for us to integrate existing players like referral platforms because it's such a custom product.

Yeah.

But we have this referral model that we've started pushing where essentially anybody can promote blind spot. They get their unique code is kind of the standard type. But the thing is, and we've seen a lot of students use this to make extra cash because we're telling them promote this. And if somebody creates a campaign that's at least $500, you get $100 cash, no questions asked.

Wow.

So we've seen a lot of kind of, you know, small creators and people who don't have a huge audience. Because sure, for a large, like if you go to a large influencer, that's not a big deal. But for small creators that can reach a few, maybe hundreds of people and convince, you know, 10 of them, that's a thousand bucks. If you convince 10 creators, 10 small businesses. We've seen, I know one guy personally, his uncle has a restaurant. So he went to his uncle and said, hey, do you want to advertise for 500 bucks on billboards next to your restaurant. And he said, yeah, of course I do. And the kid made a hundred bucks out of it.

That's great.

Yeah. So that type of stuff has worked really well, especially because, again, we're kind of creating a new category here. So we need to make sure that people keep it top of mind, people talk about it. And for that, we need to do a lot of diverse, diverse stuff. The fact that we're organizing kind of events, like we mentioned off camera, we were talking about Lumos House, which is a series of events that we're doing. We did one in Austin, we did one in Miami, one in New York, and we're doing one in la, by the way, in October and one in San Francisco. So I'm sure we'll meet face to face there if you're in town.

Yeah.

And those have been a great way for us to kind of explain what we're about and explain this type of product, because it's generally a new product. Like, nine out of 10 people that we've talked to had no idea this was possible. And the only ones that knew are kind of in the advertising space. So they knew, okay, I know you can do this type of stuff. Sometimes if you know a guy, he can hook you up, which is true. If you're an OG advertising guy, you might be able to convince some people to hook you up, you know, and give you a freebie on a billboard. But there's no automated standard way of doing it.

Yeah, that's so great to hear. And even too, just the referral program sounds great. I mean, at the end of the day too, right? Like, people that come across things that they like, will refer friends, business owners, especially if they are a business owner themselves, and say, wow, this is a unique concept that helped me create organic content and just spread a message in a way we typically don't do. That's so good to hear when it comes to your co founders. One, I'm just curious, how did you guys meet and what's the backstory there?

Yeah, it's. It's a pretty straightforward story. So I was working with the girlfriend of one of my co founders at the time. She was working in the same PR agency I was working in. And I was kind of pretty good at the whole social media stuff back in the day. And they were working on a totally different project, and they wanted to hire me kind of as a consultant to help them out with social media. That never worked out because I didn't like the product at all. Like, I told them this is horrible. I am not helping you guys with this because it's never going to work. So we ended up not doing that, but we just liked ourselves. We had a really good connection and we had good chemistry. So we kind of stayed in touch and we slowly started. When we had this idea, we were like, okay, let's do this together. Because we have a very complementary set of skills. Like Bogdan, who's our CEO, he's a great product guy and he's really good at fundraising as well. I'm a great marketing guy. And our other co founders, there's four of us have very good operational skills and one has very good sales skills. So we were thankfully extremely complimentary and we each. You didn't want to go overboard. Like, I don't want to do operational side of things. I know that's not my expertise. So I don't have, you know, wild dreams of doing everything. I'd rather have people that are better than me doing things that I'm not that good at.

Yeah, no, I, I love that. So there's four of you guys as co founders?

Yeah, yeah, there's four. It's a, it's a large co founder team.

But yeah, I love that.

Some somehow it's worked seamlessly over the years, honestly.

That is great, man. So good. And you guys are based where specifically? Now I know on Instagram you are a lot of places, a lot of different times. But where do you spend most of your time in the company as well?

So the company is based in New York and most of our time. Most of our time is spent there. My co founder lives in Miami. I used to live in New York, moved to Miami and now I do back and forth, New York, Europe a lot. So I'm kind of half of the year I'm in Europe, half of the year I'm in New York. That's kind of how it pans out. One of our founders is in. Is in the Middle east, is in Dubai because we did techstars Dubai and we still have business there. And one, one of the fourth founder is full time. He focuses on the European.

Got it.

Yeah. So it's basically half of us are kind of us based. The other half Europe and Middle East. Yeah.

So great, man. What for you guys? When you think about blind spot today and into the future, for me, I guess a question that comes up is this is something that is dependent on billboards in the wild and there's a finite amount of them. I don't know about this space. Maybe you know, more than Me. But are billboards, especially digital ones, are they continuously being built? If so, at what scale are they being, you know, taken down for certain areas? Like, I'm just curious to get your overall viewpoint on the, you know, you're building technology for these physical related items which again, people, if they're thinking about it old school, are like, hey, like, how do I get on there? You guys solve that. But then the actual viewpoint of like, hey, what does the future look like for us? I'm curious how you guys think about that in terms of the industry of, I don't want to say depending on, but you know, you're relying on this physical, you know, concept that you guys have to lean into. Which again, curious to get your thoughts on how you guys view that.

Yeah, no, you're totally right. We're definitely dependent on the physical part of the screen. Right. If the screen doesn't exist, we. It's the same because we position ourselves as booking.com but instead of hotels, we do billboards, right?

Yeah.

If booking.com didn't have any hotels because hotels for whatever reason are demolished, then booking.com has a problem, right? Yeah. So we're the same. We're the same way. Thankfully for us, the trend is that more and more traditional billboards, so print billboards are being transitioned towards digital billboards. Like recently, I think it was last year, the digital out of home share of the budget over was over 50%. Right. So until then, you know, digital out of home was smaller and it constantly grew. At this point, it's kind of driving the entire growth. If you look overall like people can. People don't think about this because it's the type of thing that happens without you realizing it. But if you think about it, you've been seeing more and more screens out in the wild. Uber has screens on top of taxi talks. Right. You see screens in the subway, you see screens in the airport, you see screens on the buses. In some cases you see screens on the highway, so you're exposed. You see screens in the cinema when you go to see a movie. So apart from your phone, there's more and more screens around you, more than ever, basically. There's never been these many screens around the potential consumer. Right. And there's also a trend of creating more and more spectacular screens. Right. The MSG sphere in Las Vegas is the best example of this. Right. So that's kind of the, the Taj.

Mahal of digital screens. Yeah, digital screens for something like that, you know, I would assume they own that. No one can just I mean, obviously for large budgets, you can get, you know, on Sphere, but talk to me about that, definitely.

So usually the trend that happens here is when a screen like that appears for the first time, it's usually prohibitive for a while in terms of budget. We have access to it. The budget for it is extremely high. So we're talking over half a million to do anything there. But that's because. Not because it's technically not doable to do anything smaller, it's because it's also. And specifically in the Spheres case, the creative requirements for it, like the production of the visual is pretty complicated and they cover that as well in the cost because otherwise it won't look good and it won't help anyone. It won't help them and it won't help the advertiser. So, you know. But usually what happens is after a few years, once the novelty of the screen is not as high anymore, they start becoming a bit more flexible when it comes to allowing advertisers to do more creative and more flexible stuff on the billboard. Right? Yeah. It's the natural flow of things, so it's normal for things to be that way. So I imagine within three or four years, you'll be able to do way more flexible things on the sphere. It won't be as impactful as it is now because obviously the novelty of it is extremely high. It's still going to be very impactful. Just it's going to be probably at 70, 80% of what it is now.

Yeah. And have you, I'm just curious, have you guys facilitated ad deals with the Sphere specifically, or is that not really in your scope?

It is in our scope. We have one in talks right now, actually, but it hasn't been. It hasn't happened yet because it has a very long lead time.

Yeah, for sure, I'm sure. I mean, even I remember when it first, you know, came out, you see all these unique creative concepts with the NBA and Shopify showcasing all the revenue per second on the Shopify Black Friday. So many unique concepts that have really not only gone viral, but it has that just novelty that, in my opinion, won't go away for hopefully quite some time. It's such a surreal thing. Even like flying into Vegas or being on the Strip, you're just like, whoa, this thing is craziness.

The physical power of billboards is very real. Like, obviously when you have a huge billboard like that one, it's even more compelling. But even with smaller screens, the moment you see yourself out in the wild, because you know there's this saying, I love that nobody again, my background is digital marketing, so I see the value of digital ads as well. We do digital ads and we do billboards as well. It's always a mix of things. So not to trash the competition, but nobody gets excited when they see their Facebook ad for the first time. You know what I mean? But you get very excited when you see your billboard for the first time. Like the reaction is out of this world. When you see yourself or your company or your brand or your product on a billboard, any type of billboard, like when it's real, it feels like it is now actually happening rather than just being, you know, an idea on the Internet. In the back of my mind, this is out there in the wild. People can see it. It's actually happening in real life.

Yeah, I think moments like that when you think about billboards, when you think about in person, community events, run clubs, as much as we live on our cell phones and we're all probably spending too much screen time.

I am for sure.

When things get real or physical, even a physical product, I know CPG brands where you know, they're formulating the drink and the beverage, but the moment you have that can in your hand and it's real and physical, or you see again in this context yourself on a billboard, something about that just lights up humans and different than you know, seeing even like a massive social media page promote your content. Like it might feel great, but at least for me, having been on a board a billboard or have friends that's been on billboards, that factor of like, whoa, like it's, it's so tangible, so real and you just think about it differently. Which is again goes back to this idea of novelty and really leaning into how brands can tell stories in the real world with, with things like Billboard. So it's super cool to, to really be a company that's able to unlock that feeling for people and brands and startups that again might just be this idea in their head or you know, this small start up on a screen that now they can activate in the real world and feel that level of power and prestige, at least at first individually, but then hopefully it translates to, you know, how people view your brand, how people assimilate to like what you're offering and contextualize it from a professional context. So it's super powerful what you guys are doing, man.

100% appreciate that. And I just want to add it. I think it's interesting because it translates over time even to bigger brands and bigger, you know, Stars and stuff like that. Because, you know, the common sense would be. Yeah, of course you're excited because you're a small startup, you see yourself on a big billboard. Of course you're going to get excited. So one of our first major clients after we started in the US was Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg obviously has seen himself everywhere. On super bowl, on T, on any billboard in the world. So he already has that for him. It's not. It's not, oh, my God, I'm on a billboard anymore. Right. Of course, when we pitched him, he was still thrilled about the idea of being on a billboard. And it's again, it's Snoop, right?

Yeah.

So that's how we started working with him. Because we told him, hey, we can get you really fast and way more flexible on a billboard. It doesn't have to be a headache. And you can be on any billboard that you want within hours, essentially. And his team loved it. And that was it. And he, he post. I think he post like over a dozen of the billboards that we did for him just because he's so excited of it. Yeah. Like, it's funny how we first got him. Like, it's a funny story. Just a quick detour because we're pretty good. Another thing that we're good at, I forgot to mention this. We're very good at cold email.

Okay.

We also have a good product that allows that type of stuff. And by that I mean our pitch to Snoop. We didn't know anybody on his team, so what we did is we found the emails of his managers on IMDb Pro. By the way, Lifehack, if you pay $20 to have access to IMDb Pro, you can actually find the manager contact info for a lot of celebrities. Yeah, some will respond, some won't. It also depends what you actually pitch them. But we found those contacts, and when. I think this was 2021 or 2022, when marijuana was legalized in New York, we had this idea, why don't we pitch Snoop and put him on a billboard with the. With his face and the message, it's about time, New York. And that's it. And we pitched him the idea. And he was like, you know what? The first one is on us. We'll pay for it. Don't worry about it. And we pitched him. They loved it. They just replied in like 40 minutes, yes, let's go. And then we said, okay, we'll do it, but just take a call with us. That's all we want. Right. So let us pitch you on the call. This is our product. If you like it, fine. If you don't, no problem. No, no, no hard feelings. And they said, yeah, okay, fine. And then we put them on a billboard. We had the call and we told them, you know how much it cost us to do that? Like 500 bucks. They're like, no, that's impossible. It was. It was one of the biggest screens in Times Square. Wow, that's impossible. Like, no, let me explain. Here's how. And then. So that's how we started working with them in the long run. So that's a. That's been a really good strategy for us. We had them. We had Kanye west before he went all over the place. Yeah, we had Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Ricky Gervais, that. I think those are the main ones. And we've all pitched kind of in the same way. And that's worked really well.

That's powerful. I mean, talk about a great value prop. When talking to celebrities saying, hey, I'll put you on a billboard. Or even founders, people listen and people, you know, they want to know what's in it for them. They're busy. They get hundreds of cold emails. How do you stand out? And even too, like, this is something where. I don't know if maybe you have stories like this, but I can even picture where, like, agencies, when they're pitching clients and. Or they're pitching a brand, it's like you run a billboard ad for a potential client that says something and you're like, hey, the. Just want to let you know we did this for you. Or, hey, like it says a, you know, a piece of copy that you can take a picture of and say something or just send them a picture. Have people done things like that in terms of.

So they've tried at some point. They've. We've done a couple of those things. I think it's in the brand agency relationship, it's a bit more formal and a bit more uptight. And the, the client is always very scared of running creative. That's not a improved, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

So they're a bit afraid that they're going to create. It's impactful. I totally agree. The idea is very powerful, but there's kind of. Kind of a small. If you know the industry really well, you realize that while that sounds great on paper and people get excited about it initially, then a lot of clients might be like, you know, what if my marketing director, my CMO finds out that a random ad for Coke ran and he didn't approve it? Or it has a Weird copy, I might get into trouble.

Yeah.

Or the agency. So that's why for sure.

That totally makes sense. When it comes to ads getting approved, does your team have to approve everything or when you say self serve, obviously there's things you don't want to be shown on billboards and people can probably take advantage of it. So what does that process look like in terms of the monitoring of content on these billboards?

So part of it is automated. We have some filters that, you know, eliminate the obvious stuff from pornography to super elite legal stuff. But there's always a human that's looking on the ad because in, in comparison to digital, like online out of home is regulated. Right. So you need to make sure that you're running ads that are legal. First of all. Yeah, there's some even more specific stuff like if you're running, we have filters for this. But if you're learning running like alcohol ads, you're not allowed to run in proximity of schools or places of worship or stuff like that. So you need to make sure we have filters for that and clients can make sure they don't pick those billboards. But somebody double checks to make sure. Thankfully it's pretty automated. So we run, we run thousands of campaigns per year. So it's basically considering that a large agency group probably runs and we're talking like the publicist WPP of the world, they probably run the ones that are specialized in out of home. So they maybe run 400 or 500 campaigns per year and they're multi billion dollar companies. We run 2000. Right. So it's way faster, way more flexible and we have a way smaller team, obviously. But to answer your question, yes, somebody looks at the ad creative and says, yes, this is good to go and the landlord has to approve it as well.

Yeah.

So nothing goes live without the land. That's why usually the go live time, we say it takes two business days. We've had cases where we ran within hours, but the average lead time is like two business days just to make sure that the landlord has time to approve.

Yeah, no, that makes, See that's good in terms of you got to have those things in place until you know, you can, you know, either create a way or if there becomes a way where it can just be automated where you could go live within 12 seconds. But yeah, having the approval process I think is very important when it comes to, as you said, like all the regulations and things you got to look out for.

Yeah, I think it makes sense for, for it not to be that streamlined. It should be streamlined in terms of submitting your campaign. We're, we're aiming for same day approval, but I do think it's because, you know, we talked about the impact that outdoor has. You want to make sure that you're not running something that can, you know, something that you don't want the kid to see, something that you don't want, I don't know, some, some sort of, of person that can be really affected by that type of stuff. You know, maybe you run an insult towards a minority group that can be extremely negative in the long run. And you don't realize, you know, because it's kind of, it's not like saying something really aggressive, but it's very subtle. So somebody needs to look at the creative in order to avoid that again, because outdoor, something seen in real life has a real impact on people. So we need to be careful with the messages that we put out there.

Yeah, absolutely. Makes total sense. A couple more questions before we wrap up here. One is just when you think about the future of Blindspot, what excites you and the team the most about the opportunity here, the use case, the tech and everything that you guys are building?

So I think there's a couple of things here. One that I'm personally very excited about is that we're trying to automate the entire process in the sense that hopefully you don't need any human interaction to do an out of home campaign anymore. By that I mean, we're introducing this conversational UI interface that's obviously AI driven in order for it to be conversational. So imagine instead of having to hop on a platform and clicking around and picking billboards and picking hours, you just type. And it's like talking to your media planner. Say you would have, you know, you're working with Publicis. You have a guy that's your out of home media planner who's been doing this for 40 years and he knows everything. And you tell him, look, Mike, I just need the best billboards in New York in order to target bankers, because that's my audience. I'm targeting bankers. Right? So he'll say, okay, let me look into Fidai. Let me look at the, you know, subway lines that go from Williamsburg to Wall street and from Upper east and Upper West. And you know, he'll make this plan because he has that experience. It'll take him a few days to do it. And obviously he'll be subjective because he's human and we're all subjective. So we want to replace all that with an interface that has all this data, has all the data from the previous campaigns that we ran, has public data available like demographics, ethnicity, everything, real time traffic data, and just pulls out a campaign for uss. This is the perfect campaign to target bankers in New York or whatever other market you want. And also based on all the historical data that Blind Spot has and other sources, here are the best creatives and the best ways to frame the messaging based on what you want. Because maybe you tell them I want to target bankers because I'm a fintech company that saves them two hours a day by solving X problem. Okay, here's how you should frame that on a billboard based on all the data that we have, based on the campaigns that we know have been successful. And it's essentially, it immediately just pushes out within seconds or minutes. It gives you that media plan with budget and everything. You just need to adjust it if you want to or you just hit enter and you just submit it and it starts playing once it's approved. And that means that literally everybody can be as competitive as a large brand that has access to real expertise in the field, which is a game changer.

That's powerful. Yeah, that's incredibly powerful. Bravo.

Yeah, that's. So that's what we're working on. We're pretty advanced with it. We're probably going to launch our first kind of public version of it in, in autumn, so in a few months. But we've already seen really exciting stuff with it. Yeah, so that's, that's one thing. And the other thing that also gets me kind of, I, I love it when people do creative stuff with billboards. Like when they put fun stuff and they put memes on billboards when they just do stuff to troll their competition. We've had, we had companies that were targeting their competitors headquarters with recruitment campaigns saying they had an office in a better place and they were saying hate going to work here, come work in Upper east side or whatever. Right. It wasn't Upper east side, but you get the idea.

Yeah.

And come work in this better place. And that was it.

Funny.

Yeah, that's funny. You know, just that type of funny creatives where it's more about the message than the planning itself. I mean, the message is the context as well. But those two things are things that I get excited about when I talk about it.

Yeah, no, that's so cool to hear and I'm pumped for you guys, man. And just to wrap up here as well for people that have made it this far, founders that are listening, where's the best place for people to go. Learn more about blind spot. Test out a campaign and just to get familiar with everything that you guys have going on.

Yeah. So just Google blind spot billboards. It might work if you Google blind spot as well. It's blind spot. The TV show comes up first. Because it's the TV show. But we do, we do have, funny enough, we do have these PPC ads, the search ads that say not looking for the TV show that sent to our. So apart, speaking of creative ways of doing marketing. Right. Yeah. Or just go to seeblindspot.com see, like seeing a billboard, right? And then you can sign up for free. It takes a few seconds to sign up. Then you can just browse billboards the same way you browse hotels on booking and figure out what works for you and then go from there.

I love it. Well, I want to say thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm looking forward to trying out some campaigns for my podcast company and even just recommending this to a lot of founders in my network as well. So really appreciate your time today, Mati.

Thank you for having me, Casey. This was a pleasure. I love chatting with people who get excited about ideas in general. It's my type of vibe.

Absolutely.