Unlocking the Power of Out of Home Marketing | Charlie Riley

to save a marketer time to have to go talk to 10 different vendors, we built a platform that we still use to build out our plans. And so there is some AI and machine learning built into that to help make recommendations based on what someone's trying to accomplish, what their budgets are, locations, time of year. So there is some AI built into that. And on the creative side, we have a tool that we use that has AI built into that to make creative recommendations as well.

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Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in New Britain, Connecticut. Can you imagine trying to learn the English language. I mean, it makes zero sense. Anyway, my guest today is Charlie Riley, OneScreen AI. Welcome, Charlie.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

You bet. Uh, see, right on cue, because I was going to ask you, what kind of dogs do you have?

They, they, uh, they have ESPN. We have a Pyrenees mix, a Great Pyrenees mix, and they, uh, a very fluffy Husky, who—

nice—

everyone might be hearing, uh, chiming in, uh, right now.

Yes, that's what they do. Well, Charlie, tell us a little bit about Charlie and OneScreen. Give us the, the download on that.

Sure. So yeah, my name is Charlie Riley. I live in Buffalo, New York, uh, head of marketing at OneScreen. We are a performance out-of-home marketing solution, so we work with Brands, B2B, B2C, that are looking to add out-of-home marketing, advertising to their marketing mix. They're looking for real-world exposure to add to their digital channels, and we help them plan that, execute it, and then measure it.

Okay, you used a word I'm not familiar with, uh, out, out of home.

Yeah, so, uh, I know most people are familiar with billboards, but That's one medium as part of the whole, the whole channel. But out-of-home advertising is sort of the umbrella term for anything that really is probably not digital, even though there's digital out-of-home. So you see some screens, you can see them in bars, restaurants, maybe in transit ads that are digital or even billboards. So traditionally billboards were someone would have to climb a ladder and put up a 48 by 24 vinyl that they needed to have printed. There's a big cost to that. There's a time— it's time-consuming. Now you might see billboards that can rotate and have multiple ads there. And we help brands get those up in a matter of hours sometimes. So yeah, out-of-home is, it's pretty broad. It includes, you know, it looks— if you think of things like street teams from a PR execution, you think of like planes flying a banner that you might see, that would count as out-of-home. So we do that for a wide range of brands all across across the US and overseas. And yeah, I joined as the first head of marketing. I've been the first head of marketing for a number of companies across a wide range of industries. And I've just, I've been a marketing lifer. I've worked in advertising, worked on some sales side, but just always loved the idea of like trying to figure out the psychology around how people buy things and help them tell us, you know, help tell a story to help them understand what we— how we can help them do whatever they're trying to do.

So does, does OneScreen handle just one platform, say digital billboards, or do they do all the channels?

Yeah, we're pretty agnostic. So there are thousands of vendors. We have over— I think now it's 1.2 million pieces of inventory across the United States. So when you think of billboards on the side of major throughways, when you think of transit ads, you might see ads on the side of buses. Now you see it more often when you kind of talk about it. But we work with, like I said, street teams where we can wrap cars. And so one way that someone might have thought of out-of-home advertising in the past is they might go direct to like the major providers that have— that own those billboards. Like I said, we're agnostic, so we work with all of them. We really help build plans that are really geared towards the overall marketing goal, not just what the inventory of the vendor has themselves. So yeah, we're pretty agnostic around that and it really depends on what someone's trying to accomplish. We might recommend something that they may not have thought of before. We might integrate both digital and static out-of-home ads that are really trying to The whole point is to get eyeballs, uh, real-life eyeballs in front of something that they can't turn off, they can't opt out of, and it complements whatever digital marketing they're using.

So we can call this non-consensual marketing. You, you don't consent to it.

You just— that's one way to say it, I guess. Yeah, I mean, that's— yeah, now nowadays digital marketing— and I think privacy is important. I think you should have the ability to turn things off that you don't like to see. Out-of-home can be non-intrusive in the sense of it's sometimes just like subjectively you're seeing, you're just, you're seeing something in the background. So you may not even like be aware of what brand you're seeing there, but those impressions add up to when you're thinking about whatever that might be, you're buying the next set of pans or you're buying You know, you might see a lot of lawyers at the regional level that, that advertise in out-of-home. But yeah, that's sort of like surround sound marketing. You can opt out of it, which is good for us and good for the advertisers that use it. But, you know, hopefully if someone's opposed to it, they're driving by pretty quickly. So, you know, they don't— they only have to see it for a few seconds.

So who, who is it that you primarily help?

Who are you?

Who are your ideal clients?

Yeah, it's a mix. So we work with B2C and B2B brands, like I said. We work with direct-to-consumer brands. HexClad, which you may have seen Gordon Ramsay's, he's involved with the organization. They sell really high-tech, innovative cookware. They've been doing campaigns with us and they saw the opportunity. They're a direct-to-consumer brand. They've done they have digital advertising like locked in. They are just really good at that. But they also saw the exposure of adding to that, adding to the digital marketing that they're doing by adding in certain strategic locations that they know that their audience is at. And we subscribe to hundreds of data sources to be able to help them understand retail data, location data. Pattern, like traffic patterns. So we were able to kind of help build them a plan in certain markets to, to add exposure to what they're trying to do, uh, and what they're trying to sell. Pants. We work with Ramp. Ramp is a large, uh, financial services, uh, organization on the B2B side. They sell to B2B customers, but they see an opportunity to— because they, they sell to a pretty wide audience of companies, small to mid-market. We were able to strategically pick locations and cities that they could add exposure to. And there's a, there's a science and an art to it. The science part is where we can help them using data, figure out where the best locations are and purchase those and execute those. But then there's the creative side, which is what does the message say and how you only have a short amount of time to get across a certain message, but it's, it's to build repetition there. So they do a really great job at having both the mix of science and art of being able to be in the right places at the right time. But also tell a really compelling message with their creative work.

So do you work with the creative side of it, the messaging, the imaging, or I mean, like, I'm thinking like getting hired, someone hires you from the agency side that already has that plan in place and they're just looking for additional channels.

Yeah, we work with a lot of agencies, especially those that If they're a regional agency, they might do out-of-home media buying, but they probably don't have the data sources or the level of sophistication around national buying, for example, that we do. So they might be buying regional plays. They might be a creative shop. They might be a brand agency who they see an opportunity to— they do a full rebrand for an organization. Why not tell that story on some really cool canvases? So we work with a wide range of agencies and we're a really great complement to them because we don't— we complement what they're already doing or what they're good at. But we do work with the creative side. So not only do we work, we primarily work on the execution side, but we work with the creative side to help them understand you can't just take a Facebook ad and slap that onto a billboard, right? You know, you can't put a really long URL on a billboard because no one's going to remember that. You can't put a QR code because that's illegal because they don't want you to pull your phone out and crash and scan them. So we do work with the creative side. We actually help. We've been introducing some technology to help give suggestions on what the creative messaging looks like and how impactful that'll be. And we've seen 30% of our clients change the messaging based on those recommendations because we might say, you know, this is on a right-hand read if you're going down the right-hand side of the thruway. So you should put the logo on the right-hand side versus the left, or you're using too many words in your billboard or your transit ads. You should trim that down and get to the point faster because people only have a certain amount of time. And we've seen our clients take on that expertise and those suggestions to improve their creative side. So yes, we do get involved in that, not as much as on the execution, but Like I said, it's as important sometimes, if not more important, as like the message you're telling. We help them find the great places to tell that story. They have to tell a really compelling story in a short amount of time.

What's the average time that someone looks at a billboard?

That depends. If it's on a thruway, it could be up to 6, 7 seconds depending on, again, the location. If it's coming around a bend, if it's a long straightaway, if they're buying a huge, you know, like the larger size formats. If it's a transit ad, it could be a bus shelter ad and someone's standing there for 5, 10, 20 minutes. So they're exposed to, and especially if it's digital and it's rotating, they can change the creative there. We do things at conferences where we'll have trucks that will rotate messaging on trucks. So they'll either drive to a conference, they'll be outside, they'll maybe do a, we can do a street team around there. The exposure for something like that could be even longer. We've done things where we'll wrap an ice cream truck and bring that to like very experiential marketing. We'll bring that to a park and someone's going to spend 20 minutes to half an hour waiting in line. They're exposed to the brand. They have brand ambassadors that are there that have a chance to talk to them. Maybe they're giving out free ice cream or free coffee. So it really depends. I mean, that's the kind of the beauty of out-of-home is there's a wide range of executions that someone might think, again, only billboards. But I gave the example earlier, you might have been at the beach someday and you see a plane flying an ad back and forth. You might be there for hours. And if that plane is contracted to continue back and forth, subconsciously you see it once, but you've actually seen it maybe 5, 6 times. And that exposure there could be extended. So it really depends on the execution. But the one point about what we try to do is We try to help provide the exposure, not just as a one-time thing. So, you know, we're probably not going to recommend a campaign to run in a city with just one billboard. We're going to recommend maybe 3 billboards, a couple transit ads so that there's— we're hitting the right concentration enough times that someone can recall that ad.

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What can someone expect to spend with you? I mean, like, if I'm coming in to— I mean, maybe a range.

Yeah, and I know that— I know the answer. This isn't the easiest answer. It depends. Um, If you're trying to do a campaign in San Francisco or New York City, major market, limited inventory because bigger brands are there, it's going to cost more. If you're in secondary cities and you're using maybe digital versus static, that's going to factor in on it. If you're also giving us 6 months' notice versus 2 weeks' notice, that factors into it. But campaigns, we see campaigns run anywhere from, I mean, you could probably run a really effective campaign with a lot of variables, $20,000. We've seen clients that are spending, you know, several hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they're doing that repetitively. They're doing that in major markets. It really depends on what their goals are trying to accomplish. And we will use that exposure to different ad formats to figure out what the best mix is for them, both on price, both on timing. And then there'll be times where we'll say, hey, we're not gonna be able to get you the right exposure, so we wouldn't recommend this campaign. But maybe if you waited, or, uh, here's what a recommended spend would be to get the right TRP eyeballs, for example.

Okay, so the name of the company has AI in it. What is the AI component?

Yeah, it's a great question. We do use AI in some capacity around some of our planning. So when the company started, it was built as a marketplace, so a supply and demand marketplace where we would see these vendors, the vendors we talked about, because it's, it's a pretty fragmented, fragmented industry. So to save a marketer time to have to go talk to 10 different vendors, we built a platform that we still use to build out our plans. And so there is some AI and machine learning built into that to help make recommendations based on what someone's trying to accomplish, what their budgets are, locations, time of year. So there is some AI built into that. And on the creative side, we have a tool that we use that has AI built into that to make creative recommendations as well. So like I talked about before, where we might give suggestions around this gets an 8.5 out of 10 rating because of these 3 things. Now, if you change that on the creative, well, we would— the AI would bump that up to say a 9.5. So we do use AI in that. But yeah, the first thing when someone thinks about is, hey, how does AI fit into a billboard I see on the side of the road? You know, we're not— it's, it's— there's pieces to it, but, um, there's still a human element that's involved in, uh, our team making recommendations, using that technology, but making recommendations based on what they're— what a marketer is trying to do.

So you said that originally it was designed as a marketplace, that was the business model. Why did it change?

We saw that a lot of companies who have never done out-of-home before, who have never run outdoor ads, who never just run a campaign like that, they need help with kind of managing all the logistics of that. So for someone who may want to dabble, who, you know, a marketer may be used to demand gen, marketer may be used to running paid search campaign, or they may outsource that, which is kind of a little bit acknowledge it or similar to what we do in the sense of like we're, we're an expert in one thing. You might have some experience in doing that, but what we found is that a lot of clients want that handholding and that expertise to be able to say, we're going to build a plan for you, not you having expectation of going into a platform and trying to build something yourself. They could, um, but if you've never done it before, you probably have a lot of questions. Am I buying enough? Am I, you know, am I buying enough inventory? Is this the right place? Is this a good price? We bring all that knowledge into, you know, we're negotiating for added value. We can tell somebody if this billboard is a great location, but there's actually a tree in front of it. So while that vendor wouldn't tell you that, we're going to recommend something else. And that's where, like, our— that's where our industry expertise comes into play with that.

So how long did it take you guys to pivot that?

Uh, I, I— this was before I started, but I think it was roughly a year and a half or so. I want to say that we, we saw the ability for us to just be more consultative than hoping people go into a platform and kind of build the plans themselves.

So why did you join, uh, OneScreen?

A couple things. One, it's, it's an area that I have a lot of experience in. I've sat in the seat of who we're trying to talk to. So I've worked for a few ad agencies in the past where there was media buying, and I was part of that. I was part of the digital media team, but I also dabbled in a little bit of out-of-home buying as well there. I have bought out-of-home. I've wrapped cars for conferences. I've bought billboards in previous roles. So I have an understanding of how this fits into an overall marketing mix. And so it was exciting to see how the company was building out one that had this technology behind, you know, not just, you know, put your finger in the air and saying, let's buy this, let's buy this. We have a really strong strategy around and the data sources to help back up. Here's why someone should add this to their mix. But I've sat in the seat where digital, the ROI on digital is getting diminished. It's still there, you still have to use digital channels, but what out-of-home is, is a nice complement to solving some of those digital problems. It was a really great opportunity, great team that when I met them, I was like, this seems like a fun challenge to work on. So yeah, it's been great to be a part of something that, you know, we're helping marketers that I know and like, I know what they're going through. So it's very relatable to my experiences in the past.

Yeah, it's kind of like marketing is marketing and, you know, people get stuck on the latest and greatest. I also find that there's a lot of, you know, red water marketing where if people have had success with it, they just continue to do it to the point where it's not effective anymore rather than looking at alternatives and looking at something that is essentially non-digital. It's not a traditional digital although there may be digital components to it. To me, it's kind of like looking at, you know, direct mail. I mean, it's like, you know, going full circle on things and saying, where is it that I can be most effective rather than what necessarily has worked in the past?

Spot on. I think we, you know, as marketers, you fall into a trap of, like you said, I've always done this channel or I've always used this channel, or how could I pull away from that? And we're, you know, we're smart enough to know, we know somebody is not going to move their entire budget into out-of-home. But you referenced direct mail and there was, you know, that mail moment that still is there. I think people are so inundated with email that I love going out to my mailbox and getting my mail, even though some of it might be junk and spam. There's some good things there and you wait for that moment. It's very similar. Like, that's a tangible execution and there's a way to do it though. Like, if you just went out and tried to figure out like, how do I do postcard marketing? You're probably going to fail. But there's resources out there that can tell you how to do that the right way. And that should complement— like, that should be driving back to a landing page that you can track it. Similar thing with out-of-home. There's ways to track out-of-home effectiveness. That is similar to direct channels. But I think good marketers should be spending a small percentage of their budget on experimentation. They should try new things. And out-of-home, the nice part about it is it can give— if you have a fun creative brand and you don't have to get eccentric, but it gives a really great canvas to tell a fun story or just even to tell a different story in a place where someone isn't expecting it. And that's— it's just that's the fun part is when we can help a brand say, hey, we've tried these different things, we want to do something a little bit different. We want to do a street team or we want to hand some things out around this event that correlates to our brand, or we just want brand exposure. So we want to, you know, do a takeover in a city for a 3-week flight or 6-week flight. And so we help them figure out where's the best locate— where are the best locations that your core audience fits. It could be the downtown corridor or it could be in certain suburbs because we know there's a higher concentration of people that would buy certain products. So we would place things differently. So that's the fun part about like the science and art around helping marketers try something different because especially if they've never tried out-of-home before, they probably come in with preconceived notions that I can't afford it. I have to buy this massive billboard. It's going to take forever. I can't track it. And all those things really aren't true. I think we can help them understand that there are placements, there's different executions, there's different options that they could think of. They could have some fun with it. Like out-of-home could be a really fun execution that it just, it kind of like works that creative muscle for a marketer.

Well, yeah, if there's ice cream trucks, I mean, that's—

Who doesn't love ice cream?

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Check it out right now.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter.

Check it out right now. Maybe not in Buffalo in January. Would be my guess.

Probably not. Probably not. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I mean, hot chocolate would probably be a nice execution. If you did a street team outside the Bills games, you'd probably have some good pickup. But like, you know, there's a ski resort an hour away from where I live. There's executions around something like that because that's a core audience. You know that if you're a brand that sells maybe athletic gear, or certain, you know, like, compliments to, to outdoor exercise, things like that. There's executions there.

Yeah. And, and I think, you know, that what digital marketing over the last 20 years, uh, 20-plus years, is that I think people got enamored with the data and, you know, all of the ways to slice and dice it and analyze it. And not to say that metric measurement isn't important in marketing, it absolutely is, but it kind of became the, the tail that wagged the dog. And, and it's like, at the end of the day, is it effective? And, you know, I think a lot of that was technology driven. I mean, like You know, Google shifted the way people bought. But to your point and your company's efforts, the way they were influenced before didn't go away, right? You know, I mean, just because they're now doing Google searches, it didn't change the fact that they still go to the mailbox. They still, you know, are looking at things while they're driving or writing or sitting or whatever.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. So we've seen with some customers a 15% or more uptick in organic search when they run an out-of-home campaign alongside maybe an SEO campaign or paid search. And the reason for that is because somebody is exposed to a billboard maybe 10 times, and when they finally get back to their home or to their phone and when they have time, maybe when they're not driving, they remember the name that they saw on that billboard. They type it in directly to Google and they convert at that site. They type in the name of the brand that they saw, they get to their website and they might convert there, especially if they're a direct-to-consumer brand. Will the out-of-home get that billboard or that transit ad or that wrap get credit for that conversion? Possibly not. There are ways to track that, but like that's where the attribute, kind of like you talked about this attribution model of who gets credit for what. Yeah, I think the smart marketers and the smart companies understand it's impossible to give the right credit and somebody does not make a decision unless it's a small conversion. If it's a t-shirt, if it's like a, again, like a smaller price point, maybe you can track that last point, that last touch conversion there. But, you know, it's going to take, especially if it's a B2B brand, which is why when we work with B2B brands, some of them they understand this is a brand play because we have a high concentration of potential clients in this market. So when a brand is thinking about who gets the credit, if you have to always do last touch attribution, there's probably 15 different things and it's out of home, it's email, it's social, it's whatever that are not getting the credit for that. But we've seen really good success with companies that see this as a brand and performance channel that it's, you know, the tide rises all boats, or— I'm terrible at analogies, but it's one of those things where it's all those things work together to help get that person over the line.

Yeah, it's like Rory Sutherland in his book Alchemy wrote— he's a director at Ogilvy— and he basically talks about how we want to think that everything is reasonable and analytical, but we're dealing with humans and they're unpredictable and oftentimes unmeasurable. And the title of his book is Alchemy, and that's how he describes marketing is that a lot of times they don't know exactly why it works. It just does work, but focusing on it working, not really focusing on the ingredients, whereas You know, if you just get stuck on the ingredients, you can kind of miss the boat.

Yeah, I'm looking over here because I have that book here somewhere. I think he's spot on. It's, you know, it's— it has to be all the ingredients, like you said. And a good marketer is not going to just rely on one channel. Now, it's hard to be great at 10 different channels, but you should experiment and you should think about other ways that if you've got a broad ICP, if you're trying to talk to a wide enough of an audience, out-of-home is a really good complement to maybe some of the other channels that are starting to get stagnant. Or, you know, you peel a little bit away from those budgets and see if adding out-of-home to that— and this is what we do with a lot of companies, we'll do a control group. So we'll show them same audience, same market. Here was who was exposed to your ads and here's, here's who were not exposed to your ads. And we could show it's a website lift, we could show a conversion lift. If it's a retail brand, we can show foot traffic that was impacted into your store versus those who were not. So yeah, I think you have to look at out-of-home as one piece to the pie. And a lot of times it's the missing piece where a lot of brands, they either they don't know how to use it or they are executed, so they've just never done it before. Or like I said before, they have misperceptions around how it can work or how it can be effective. And we've, we've proven that with other companies. So it's, it's definitely something that I think fits in the overall mix. It's not for every brand. It's not going to work for every brand, but for a lot of brands, it's a nice complement to what they are already doing.

So, Charlie, how do we find out more about onescreen.ai? I assume just go to the website.

Yes. Yeah, you can go to onescreen.ai. We've got some really good information there to talk about, especially if someone— if you've never done out-of-home before, you have a lot of questions where to start, like you asked, like budget, timing. We'd be happy to kind of share all that information. We build plans for people before they even buy. So like we could help someone do some research to say, here's what a plan might look like for you. Here's what some suggestions might be. So Yeah, our team geeks out over this stuff, so we're really happy to answer some questions, not in a non-salesy way, but just to— we really enjoy educating marketers around this channel and this medium and the opportunities that could be there if they think about adopting it. So OneScreen AI, we, yeah, come, you know, I can be found on LinkedIn too. I'd be happy to answer any questions about it as well if someone just has some thoughts, but Yeah, there's a lot of great resources there to talk about how to get started or how to optimize if they're already using out-of-home.

Perfect.

Charlie, thank you very much for your insight and experience here. I appreciate it. Listeners, if you like what you've heard, share the podcast, rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, drop us a note and we'll get rid of Charlie. Until then, ta-ta for now.

Thanks, Christian.

And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Profitable Creative. Until next time, you money lovers. And don't forget, Profit First for Creatives is live via Amazon.

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