How to Catch Customers IRL for Less

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me in the UK, Jim James. Today we're going all the way to Toronto, Canada, and we're going to talk about out-of-home advertising. And you'll be surprised to hear just how affordable outdoor advertising is. I'd always thought it's a preserve only of big brands, but Amanda Doerenburg is going to tell us otherwise. She is the president and CEO of a group in Canada in charge of the out-of-home market. Amanda, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here.

Well, I'm excited to hear your story. One, you've been an amazing entrepreneur in advertising and tech, and now you're leading up an organization that is helping those people in the outdoor advertising market to share the message and to get the message to consumers who, especially since privacy laws, are not necessarily getting the ads on their phones, but are going to get them when they go out on the street. So tell us, Amanda, about COME and about outdoor advertising and the opportunity that it represents for entrepreneurs.

Absolutely. So COME is an acronym, uh, it's a bit of a mouthful. It stands for the Canadian Out-of-Home Marketing and Measurement Bureau, and we are a not-for-profit association that is a member-based association comprised of the largest and smallest independent media owners all across Canada. So we represent about 98% of all publishers, which would be the media owners, as well as a second category would be advertisers and brand direct. So the largest out-of-home or media planning and buying agencies in general, such as WPP, IPG Media Brands, and their subsidiaries are members of COM. And then a third group would be the tech stack. So those working in the innovation and automation of advertising delivery, such as Broadstein, HiveStack, Vistar on a global scale. And out-of-home advertising is basically anything outside of your home. So it could be the roadside billboards that you see. It could be Times Square, Yonge-Dundas Square, here in Canada. The transit shelters, the bus wraps, the taxi tops, interior of a restaurant having advertisements above, you know, behind the bar, on the wall, or in the restrooms. Cinema pre-roll advertisements before you go to watch the show, the main screen events. So, it is relatively broad scale from a definition perspective and we tend to classify Um, 2 different larger categories of outdoor and then place-based, which would represent indoor.

Um, so really, it's, as you say, everything outside the home. And now you catalog the, if you like, the inventory. It's massive, isn't it? Um, let's talk about the opportunity that represents, you know, and then later on we talk about how you're building Kome, which is an established organization, but you're transforming it. And we're going to learn about how you can use your entrepreneurial skills to build a membership organization where Later on, I'm going to talk about maybe one mistake that you might have made on the way before you share your top tip. Well, we're all allowed a couple, but I'll only ask you for one. I'll only ask for one. But Amanda, there are so many, if you like, placement opportunities for the business owner. But first of all, let's just address what for me is the elephant in the room, which is that outdoor signage is the preserve of Big brands. Can you just take us through it? Is it really only for large companies with large budgets, or can somebody who maybe has a restaurant or a sports store in a location compete by using local and local outdoor?

I love this question because people associate billboards and out-of-home specifically with, as you just did, with large brands. And, you know, coming from the creative side, if you're an artist or a modeler, You know, anybody in that space, which was a former life of mine, you aspire to be on a billboard because you think you've made it when you're on a billboard as a creative. But it is not the case. For example, in the US, 80% of the revenues driving the out-of-home advertising spends come from local regional businesses, and only 20% are from the large national or multinational brands. In Canada, just from a geographical disbursement perspective, there are 3 major core advertising cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. And then we have, you know, some tertiary Calgary, Edmonton, et cetera. But we're 80% national and about 20% local regional. One of the interesting facts on a global scale is that out-of-home is actually the most inexpensive media format to purchase from a cost, a CPM, cost per 1,000 impressions. So if you're looking to reach sort of broad spectrum or if you're looking to, from a, you know, a mom-and-pop, like a deli or a bakery that's, you know, around the corner, my favorite bakery, they leverage, you know, very proximity-based strategies where they're looking at out-of-home assets that are within a specific, you know, 100 meters from their physical store. So you can take different strategies, but it is on, if you compare it to all other media formats, it's one of the most inexpensive on a CPM basis.

That is really, really surprising. So how, you know, does it work? Because if you buy, for example, Facebook ads, You can target, you know, a bit of, you know, piece of creative to a demographic and a location. How can, let's say, the small business owner do that with outdoor where you might need to do a big 48-sheet, you know, like big, big signage? There's production, there's the putting the signs on the— how does it work from a practical point of view?

So with the whole production context, that's more for what we would classify as classic or traditional inventory. So it's a static billboard that's outside or it's a static transit shelter. But there's a huge influx in digital out-of-home on a global scale. It's one of the largest growing and most heavily invested from a VC perspective and an entrepreneur perspective in growth. A lot of the media owners are putting a lot of money into it. Are transitioning significant dollars into repurposing some of the traditional inventory into digital. So digital takes in more of the technology application. So we can actually imitate the same type of targeting aspects that you have with a Meta or other native online advertising capacities in the offline space. So for example, in in Canada, we ingest over 8 million road segments of data, which includes speed, direction, vehicular volume on an hourly basis. And then we understand the pattern of movements within an out-of-home asset or a place-based venue, which would be the actual physical location. And we can observe mobile data and information to a home origin, run that through companies like Statistics Canada, and understand the demographic lifestyle psychographics. So we have the capacity to do the exact same sort of targeting components in the offline space as we do in the online space. It's just executed in a different way.

Wow, that's fascinating. And just to be clear, when you say digital signage, you mean screens that have content delivered to them, you know, I guess via the internet or via 4G or 5G. Is that right?

That's correct. Yes.

Okay, right.

Basically a large computer, whether it be on the side of the road or in, in a restaurant or bar or something.

Okay, wonderful. Yeah, in China there used to be a business that was putting, uh, adverts into elevators and, uh, putting CDs into the elevators every day to replace the advertising. So, so it really has become real-time and, as you say, data-driven. Um, And why would someone, an entrepreneur, use outdoor when everybody's really making their purchasing decisions at home and on their mobile phone? Just, just take us through the customer journey, if you like, that would validate or invalidate outdoor.

I love this question as well. The customer journey depends on the demographic of the customer because Each demographic is different. So if we look at Gen Zs, for example, which is a $390 billion US disposable income, one of the biggest statistics around Gen Zs is that whilst they live their lives in the digital world, they're in the metaverse, they're working in blockchain, they're, you know, on social media constantly, they live in the TikTok world, they actually don't trust online advertising. And statistically, and there's a great deal of research out there I'm happy to share after this podcast, but a great deal of research that shows that they prefer traditional media as a trusted source for advertising. There's a lot of fraud. There's a lot of clickbait. And they live their lives in this space. So, they're aware of it. They're hyper-aware of it. So, they've actually gravitated to more traditional media formats as a form of trust. When we look at millennials, they're sort of a blend of the Gen X and Gen Z where, you know, half of them will live their lives in the digital space and certainly trust to a certain degree online advertisements. But again, statistically, a great deal of them would trust more traditional advertisements. One of the other things with, you know, the privacy legislation and cookieless world that we're embarking upon is The inherited trust factor of a medium that's been around for so long, you can't turn it off. You can't, you know, you can't clickbait it. It's there. And the perception, as we've just discovered, is that if you're on a billboard, you must have budget to be on a billboard.

Yes, there's an inherent credibility, isn't there, to the scale?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

That is fascinating, Amanda. And as you say, in the era of sort of cookieless, uh, on phones and on, on Meta, that getting people where they're about to buy or en route to buying or taking part in some activity is really, really very, very handy indeed.

Um, one of the interesting things with that from a customer journey perspective, given the onset of new technology and innovation and data that's, that's being leveraged in, in the out-of-home space, is you can be delivered an advertisement that is contextually relevant to you in a digital out-of-home space. And then the attribution of that which follows, you could then— you walk into, let's say you were delivered a Starbucks advertisement, you go into a small mom-and-pop coffee shop, and Starbucks can then competitively conquest and serve you up advertisements on social. So there's an omnichannel component that comes to this as well, because technology has allowed us to do that with the inherent ingestion of various different datasets.

Well, and when you say ingestion, that's a technical term for just taking all the data and putting it into the system, isn't it? If I can use my layman's terms there. Um, well, so should people be worried about data privacy then, if what you're saying is you've got all this data, or is it sort of generic data and not individual-specific? How do you reassure people that they're not being tracked?

It's not a one-to-one media format to begin with. It's a one-to-many media format, and the data that's being ingested is fully privacy compliant. So we've got a great deal of legislation globally, you know, with GDPR and California with CCPA, California Consumer Privacy Act. And the Canadian space, we've got various different federal and provincial legislations, Bill C-11. And I could go on for hours about the privacy compliance that we have to jump through.

Okay.

But it's all anonymized aggregate information. So I don't know, Jim, the board, I just know that device 123 passed this screen and maybe went to a Starbucks.

I see. And, and that is very reassuring because, you know, you'd be worried, wouldn't you, if you keep getting, uh, things that are tracking you?

Yes.

Amanda Doerenburg, as the, you know, president and CEO of Coom, you've actually had an amazing career as an entrepreneur. Um, and unfortunately, the, you know, we don't have enough time to cover your entire background of starting businesses, but let's just talk about Coom and how you're building a nonprofit trade organization using your entrepreneurial approach? Because that's really, really interesting as well.

It is. As you mentioned before, this is an association that's been around for probably 50-plus years. And when I joined, the board of directors was looking for a different approach. And anecdotally, I think I turned down the job for about 6 months before they convinced me that they're really looking for an entrepreneur to come and And revamp this. So we, you know, when I joined, there were six employees, including myself, and we're now up to approximately 24 full-time employees. Plus, I couldn't even count the contractors that we have and partners. So we are very much a full sort of agency type of environment where we we move in a very agile way. Every everyone that I've brought on to the team is very curious, which I think is something that inherently comes with. entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs are quite curious. And for example, during the pandemic in 2020, between 2020 and 2021, we grew our revenues by 41%, which is unheard of during a down market, if you will. So, very much taking an entrepreneurial approach in the sense of how we work together, the community that we build within the team environments, As well as how we're approaching the, you know, we have limited resources from a budget perspective. We're not-for-profit. So we have to be creative with how we're allocating those funds and how we use that. And frankly, you really need to be an entrepreneur to get a lot done on a shoestring budget sometimes.

Yeah. So, Amanda, tell us some of the things you're doing. I can see from the website, and those who look at the video on YouTube will be able to see that. For those people that are, you know, interested, we will of course post the URL and so on afterwards. But commb.ca is the website. Amanda Doornberg, you know, what are you doing in terms of membership outreach? Because I can see you've got a lot of activities. Take us through some of the activities that you're bringing into the market that are moving things forward.

We take a very creative approach when it comes to marketing and growth marketing specifically. So, in my experience, I've found that thought leadership and content are king. So, the more content we have, the more eyes we get on that content. Public relations and strong PR connections is a big thing. So, when we came— when I came in, first, one of the first hires I did was a VP of marketing and communications. To really amp up and face— focus more on the outwardly facing PR, not the internal member relations. And then we expanded into the internal member relations with the existing members and additionally hired a resource to focus on garnering new members. So basically a sales role. From a growth marketing perspective, the content pieces that we put out are predominantly public, but we do focus on some member-specific content just to ensure that, you know, there's a rationale for why you're paying a membership fee. But the public content that we do is on a global scale. We don't just focus solely in our market because at the end of the day, the ones who are controlling the budgets are the CMOs, the VPs of these big brands, right? So, I can't just focus on the out-of-home community whilst it's a key focus. We actually have to go broader than that and look on a larger spectrum. So, we focus on media and advertising as a whole and we've formed partnerships strategic partnerships with multinational publications that we write for. But then we curate our own events, our own content. We launched an awards gala last year, which was really great. And we got a lot of international exposure. And I think, you know, content has been really key and being very strategic about the content placements, how we're approaching that.

When you say content placement, what do you mean, Amanda?

I mean the partners that we're working with from content. So, we have multiple levels, right? We've got the industry dailies, which would be, you know, a Media in Canada or a Daily Do that focus very specifically on what's happening in this sort of geographical region. And then, we've got strategic content partnerships with other associations, Canadian Marketing Association, whose members are all of the big brands, or PATAO, who are all of the, you know, Fortune 500 CEOs and CMOs. And then we have multinational content partnerships with respect to, um, you know, the Forbes and Fast Company and Entrepreneur, etc.

Yeah, well, and now I can see why the board was so keen to get you on, Amanda. Amanda, textbook case, but is there one, uh, little skeleton in the closet you could share about something that maybe from a marketing point of view obviously has not gone quite as planned? A, a, a strategy or a that you wouldn't recommend trying again?

Timing of product launches, I would say, is key. So, we are a measurement body, so we provide the currency in the sense of impressions and the analytics. So, timing of launching a product, as well as socializing that with those that you're about to launch and affect potentially their business. Maybe probably one of the things I didn't do as much as I should have.

Okay, you're being quite— being a little bit circumspect with that one. But timing, we'll put that under the category of timing. Timing's everything. Um, but what about something that does work? As we, as we move to the end of the interview, Amanda Doerenberg, you know, as the, you know, CEO and president of the— of Coombe, The Canadian Outdoor Marketing Board, a measurement board. What would you say would be a tip, a piece of advice that you'd give my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs when it comes to moving the needle?

Find a way to create a personal brand and be consistent with it. And it doesn't take money to do that. It's just formulate who you are as an entrepreneur and what makes you different and unique. And leverage that story in and that history that you have. The reason why you are an entrepreneur is because you're curious and you're excited about building something. So share that excitement whenever you can in all areas, whether it be on social, whether it be at a networking event, just create your personal brand and don't be afraid to get out there and share it with the world.

Amanda, that's a great piece of advice. I am going to ask you though, how do you manage a little bit of an additional question? How do you manage having a personal brand alongside the brand of the business that you're running? Because some would argue that you work for a company, that is the brand you should promote. How do you reconcile having 2 brands running side by side?

It's a great question. So for context, I'm also the CEO of Billboard Canada, which is the music magazine. And I think that if you build your personal brand to a point where you're getting enough attention, the the company brands will come seeking you because they actually are looking for that personal brand to help amplify the company brand. Um, and the innovation will continue to drive if you, if you, if you take that path, in my opinion.

Yeah, very interesting. So, you can have separate but equal, and actually your personality and your lifestyle as an entrepreneur continues whilst you're still enabling Coombe to thrive. Amanda, Plainly, you're extremely knowledgeable, but we all look for knowledge in books and podcasts as well. Is there one that you'd like to share with us that you'd recommend?

One of my favorite books recently was by Jason Pfeiffer, who is the CEO of Entrepreneur Magazine, and he wrote a book called Build for Tomorrow. I liked it so much that I actually put this in gift bags to 400 guests at one of my events at home. It's a great, great read. I would highly recommend it.

Okay, that's Jason Feifer. That's F-E-I-F-E-R, by the way. And so I've put a link to that in the show notes. Amanda Dornberg, thank you so much. If people want to find out more about you and connect to you, how do they do that?

Any social platform, @AmandaDornberg. I was lucky enough to get my first and last name on all of these platforms. So feel free to just search me or Google me and you can find a way to reach out.

That's wonderful. Or you can also go to COMMB, which is c-o-m-m-b.ca, and that will also get you to the organization and to Amanda. Amanda, thank you so much for sharing and really educating me on an area that we haven't covered before on the show. So I was really delighted to be able to lure you onto the show to explain all about Outdoor and about building an organization. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Well, inspirational and also just, um, reassuring that as we move from an era of sort of being tracked and having lots of cookies on our mobile and our desktops, that if we're doing marketing, we can have location-specific marketing through still privately held data, anonymous data I should say, but they can still serve the ads that people need to see because ultimately these are ads delivering goods and services that people will need because that's why they're in that location. So brilliant, out-of-home is an opportunity that we should all explore. So get hold of your local agency, and I think as Amanda said, it's cheaper than buying met ads, so that's got to be good news too. So thanks very much for joining me, Jim James, for this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, do please review it on your player because it all helps and follow the show because I don't want you to miss another great episode of another great interview with an expert like Amanda Doornbeck. Thank you so much. Until we meet again, encourage you just keep on communicating.