Bonus Stocking Stuffer: Why PR and Geofence Advertising Are a Match Made in Heaven

When a client recently shared with me that he had used geofencing as part of a political advertising campaign, my interest was piqued. In an effort to learn more, I asked who he was working with on the campaign and this led me to today's guest. Jeff Schwartz is the CEO and founder of the Epic Advertising agency. Great name. I decided to make this holiday stocking stuffer because it was so much more than your run of the mill conversation. Jeff gets into the details about hyper targeted digital advertising and he shared so much information, it felt more like a consultation call. So I want to share that call with you. We discuss not only geofencing, but other areas of online and digital advertising like display ads, over the top media, social awareness, and targeted ad campaigns for issues. If your company is interested in branching out into the digital display ads area, particularly if you want to use it for public relations and you have no idea where to start, here is my gift to you. Ho ho ho. Take a listen. Hey Jeff, thanks for joining me on the podcast to speak about a very particular issue facing communicators. You were working with a client of mine and he had mentioned that he had worked with you to use this concept of geofencing to get an issue across. And I just wanted to tap into some of your knowledge as an owner of an agency about how to do that. So welcome to the podcast.

No, thanks for having me, Molly. Yeah, it's a very useful form of technology for multiple different kind of components. My agency is Epic Advertising Agency. We, you know, do a lot of different things for our clients. Our main focus is hyper targeted digital advertising and creative services. So geofencing is part of that tech that we use to really start serving ads and messaging to a group of individuals that have been at a very specific location. And when I say specific, I mean like we can get down to about 16ft, like about 4 or 4.9 meters somewhere in there using GPS and wi fi technology.

I like this idea of hyper targeting and many public relations professionals when they work in the space of pr, it's really free information that they're trying to. It's free influence if you will. But more and more, and I know, I find this in my work that if you put a few dollars behind some initiatives that you can get your. Your point across your agenda moving forward, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. And there's actually, you know, the whole concept of, you know, PR being free. There's actually a concept that I have that I teach in keynotes and everything where there's two forms of currency. There's money currency which everybody thinks about and budgets for. And that's what we're talking about with like geofencing. Then there's time, investment of time. It's, it's a true currency when you look at it that way. It's, it's a, it's a real game changer of how you invest each of those elements. But the investment of money, this is a great way to get issues across because it is very narrowed in on particular audiences. We have other forms of targeting that we utilize as well too. But as it pertains to geofencing, we can do things like targeting events. So something that is very specific where it's a congregation of individuals and then serving them ads and, and the ads that we can serve them actually vary. A lot of people think of it as banner ads that show up on mobile phones, apps, websites, those kind of things. But we can also do video pre roll which is like a little video, like a five minute how to video online or issue video online that has that ad that shows at the beginning, at the middle or at the end. There's also OTT which stands for over the top. And that's just basically commercials that pop up on or show during know streaming, your favorite TV show, live sports, one of those things. So great examples of that is Sling tv, Pluto tv, Apple tv, any of those kind of things, whether you're watching on tv, tablet, phone, whatever it might be.

Jeff, let's say someone knocks on your door, picks up a phone, sends an email, they have an issue in front of them and they want to hyper target, let's say decision makers in at the Capitol. Okay, so it's maybe it's a state issue and they want to get their message in front of decision makers and they knock on your door, what are you going to tell them to do? What would be a type of hyper focus campaign with all the elements that you might advise them to do.

Yeah, and we've done this actually. And you know the question really becomes with the Capitol building, well, the whole capital compound or specific buildings within it, because we can target specific areas as well too. So if they know that the people that they're trying to reach, the real decision makers, the lawmakers are in just a couple of sections and they never really enter in some locations. That's a component that we can narrow it down. But the ideology behind this is to really pinpoint where this desired audience is. And then using satellites to really target mainly, mainly we pick up people's cell phones and that's through Them having gps turned on. 90% of all Americans have it turned on in background. If you ever like have an app and says, hey, we'd like to use their location so we can actually tell you where, you know, the nearest Buffalo Wild Wings is or something like that, that turns the GPS on and we're able to target with that. If they connect to WI fi, that just means our targeting gets even more precise. But essentially what we're doing is identifying these mainly phones and then serving ads to them. But we also have this layer of what we call cross device matching, which if that phone is connected to someone's smart tv, someone's tablet, someone's computer, other devices, which a lot of phones are, then we can also start serving ads on those devices too. So maybe somebody that was at the Capitol building that had their smartphone in their pocket, we were able to identify that, but we wanted to serve them OTT ads. When they're watching, you know, streaming their favorite HGTV show on their big screen, we're able to kind of make those connections. So we're not only just hitting them on their phone, we're hitting them on other devices as well too. So understanding those components of those complexities of how it works. And also when it comes to geofencing, there's other people that are entering the Capitol building as well too. There are, you know, everything from the plumber that's coming and do the leaky pipes to you know, a group of like the teachers that have phones when they're doing like a field trip and everything. So it's those things that are factored in as well that we have optimizations to really figure out how to hone in on people that are like consistently there versus people that just kind of show up periodically and vice versa, because sometimes that's important.

Now you mentioned the tech, so I, I'm following you on the tech. But when you mention OTT and something is over the top, what are you creating? What does it look like? If so if there's a communicator on the other end that knows they have to put together for, for, you know, the most basic term, we're going to call it an ad. It's paid advertising. What does it look like? If you have an issue that you're trying to get across, what are they creating content wise?

Yeah, so OTT and Video Peril are video based ads. So they're going to be like, a lot of people will think of them as your traditional TV commercial. And OTT is really. And some people throw around ctv that term too, that CTV and ott. The difference is OTT on any device. CTV is just on the tv. OTT is just more encompassing. So that's why I always refer to ott, because we are on multiple devices. But essentially it's going to be a video ad that appears, you know, as those commercial breaks happen while you're watching either live sports, live news, your favorite movie, your favorite TV show, those kind of things. We also can do banner ads, which is more of a static ad as well too, which is going to appear on like apps and websites. We can do animation, GIF and HTML5 with that as well, and, and have video play in banner ads too. And then we also have solutions for digital audio, but those are actually external right now. Within the next month or two, those are going to be coming internal. But we can also use geofencing to do some digital audio, which is going to also include things like Spotify, iHeart, Intercom, BlogTalk, radio, those kind of streaming audio services as well.

Okay, so the content that a communicator needs to create, it could be. It could be a video, it could be. It could be just a print ad, it could be content, it could be a gif. Do you help people create the content?

We do, yeah. So, I mean, for us, we can do graph. Our specialties in creative are graphic design work, video work, animation, audio and website development. So a lot of times we'll be able to do all that for our clients. However, the particular client that you're talking about, you know, he's a phenomenal video producer and everything. He's never going to need video from us because he's got that taken care of. He needs graphic design help, so we fill in those things. So there are a lot of situations where some people will come to us and we work with actually ad agencies across the country that are creative shops and they come to us just for the tech and vice versa. We also do just creative for some people as well too, but we can do both. And it really brings it full circle because me and the culture of my company and everybody at my company really believes and that you have to say the right thing to the right people. It can't be one or the other. And I associate it to dating. You know, if you're on a date with somebody that you really like, you're talking about somebody you really like and you mess up and you say the wrong thing, it's going to be a bad date. Same thing if you say the best thing to the person that is not Right. For you. If they're a little cuckoo, a little crazy, and they're just, they're just wrong, that's going to be a bad date as well. You have to have both those things. So I always use the thing, I'll always use the saying date your clients when it. In regards to creative and targeting. Okay.

It's a great metaphor. People could certainly understand that. So I understand this concept of, you know, helping people create the right message at the right time and delivering it in the right place. I mean, that's really the, that's the slogan of the, of this podcast. How do you know someone's hired you? They have an issue. They have an agenda. They want their issue to be heard. How do they know that it was successful?

Yeah, there are multiple data points that we look at because everybody's key performance index or KPI can be a little bit different. One of the really neat things with geofencing in particular that is the most effective form of conversion tracking is the fact that we can track physical conversions. So let's say you're. We're doing a get out and vote campaign and we are doing these geofences and we're targeting young adults, so maybe college students. We're targeting college campuses and dormitories for, for colleges to get them to go out and vote. Well, we can then set up conversion zones around those voting areas on the day of voting and be able to tell you, hey, this person saw one of our geofencing ads, experience one of those ads, and then they actually showed up at the location that we wanted them to show up to. We can also tell them these people didn't do that. We can tell them these people didn't see an ad and they showed up and they were happened being both, because we don't serve ads to everybody that's entered a geo fence. A lot of that has to do with budgetary kind of restraints because if you don't have enough money to get everybody that there's that component. Also, like I mentioned, we're really only reaching like 90% of them. So there's instantly 10% that maybe don't have GPS turned on those kind of things. So that is one of the best forms of conversion tracking. We have other forms in the data that we look at, obviously we're looking at, you know, the vanity metrics of click clicks and click through rate and impressions and those kind of things. But like OTT is a great example because it's not clickable. 99% of inventory is not clickable. You can't poke your TV screen and expect to go anywhere. So we also encourage search traffic and direct traffic through Google Analytics or other kind of back end data aggregators that we can look at to see, well, was there a spike in traffic and did those people have reactions and was there overall reaction that we wanted as well too? With us with advertising, lot of times it's sales for PR and awareness kind of things. It could be, you know, votes, it could be signing petitions, it could be contact forms, those kind of things. So those are all data points that we try to tap into. It's a very difficult thing. There's no singular source that says yes, this is what it is. It's looking at multiple data points to tell the story and show the show the process of somebody experiencing these ads and then taking an action after that.

So it all comes down to the data. In other words, to find out if a campaign was successful. Let's pull it back a bit. When someone utilizes a firm like yours for this type of technology, what they're aiming for is influence. They're trying to buy influence. And it's. And that influence, it sounds like you're saying it could be social awareness, it could be for political purposes, it could be for recruitment, it could really be for anything. Correct?

Yeah. And we've used it for recruitment. We use it for political, we use this for social awareness. In New Jersey we did a really great campaign for southern New Jersey that was focused on anti vaping for young kids, anti underage drinking, those kind of things. We geofenced the homecoming games and homecoming dances and some high schools as well. Now one thing that's important is with this technology a lot of people are like, ooh, this is like spy stuff kind of things. We do adhere to strict privacy laws. So like we're talking about young individuals that we're targeting. We would never be able to do this and we never would try to do this for like elementary school because there's COPPA laws where you can't target individuals online that are 13 years or younger. And there's a lot of other things that protected, I think are important to say is when we target somebody through geofencing, we have no idea who they are. Versus targeting somebody using third party data, first party data, keywords, things like IP addresses, those are a little bit more tied to the person. But there is a very specific break in our information of targeting somebody geographically because we don't want to know who they are and where they are, we just know that where they are and we're going to serve them to it. So it's kind of like a blind. We know that we're serving certain number of devices. We just don't know who they are as individuals. So there is a lot of privacy restrictions that are in place that are great. There's even more that we adhere to just because we're, you know, honestly, pun, you know, kind of play on my. Our name an ethical company.

Yes. Oh, of course, yes, that you are an ethical company. Nice, nice, nice touch there. Because I think you're, you're pointing out that there is a hesitancy when people are concerned about privacy and just, you know, information and tracking, you know, on phones. And I know there's a lot of people out there that did not grow up with phones in their hands. So they, there is just a risk element as well. So, Jeff, at the end of every episode, I always ask guests or I always provide an indestructible tip, and that is taking your area of focus and where you work and what you do and what could people tap into? What is the one tip if you could leave someone with about your business and what you do that could help them make their brand or their name and reputation indestructible? Is there something that you could provide to help them?

Yeah, actually there is something I could provide and I didn't even talk about this, but I wrote a short ebook on nine reasons why advertising doesn't work. So I'm happy to provide that link. So that's a great resource as well. That has nine tips when it comes to advertising that's relatable to some PR things as well too. On why advertising might not work. One of my favorite, one of the first ones that's on there, that's a good one because there's a lot of tips that are out there is as it relates to the creative. I know we talked about geofencing and targeting, but think of creative like a loaf of bread. If you create really bad bread, no one's going to want to eat it. Create really bad creative, no one's going to want to take the action that you want them to take. But just like bread, it gets stale, gets moldy, you know, and, and this goes for organic content. It goes for. In the PR world. I think this is really relevant because you do one great article that's out there. Well, that's great. But it's going to start to deteriorate on the value of that. You have to get more out there. You have to keep on being in front of people. With new and original content. So it's like a loaf of bread to where you want to keep it fresh. You want to keep it really good and tasty and put it out there. So treat your creative like a loaf of bread. Whether that's ad, creative, PR content, organic social media content, blog posting, whatever it is, you know, that's, that's one of my favorite tips. It's part of that e book that I'm happy to share a link and then everybody can download it.

Oh, I'll definitely add that link to the show notes for everyone to check out. But Jeff, that's a good one. You are nourishing everyone with this idea of keeping, keeping content fresh no matter what it is. You can't just be one and done. You know, you need to multiply.

Yeah. And there's no silver. There's. I've never met a single person that said, I did this one thing and it was great. It changed my business. This is all that we had to do. It's anybody that's an entrepreneur, anybody that's in the realm that you and I are in understands that there's that reputation, that reputation that needs to happen and it's vital and important. And the thing is, when I talk about a loaf of bread, it kind of puts in perspective for clients to understand what it, what it is. You know, because a lot of times people will create these beautiful pieces and then they get stale and we say, hey, we have to have a strategy, we have to keep up and every so often do this. But understanding that there is a shelf life of certain creative as well too. There's certain things that you can build up your creative arsenal to redeploy and reutilize and those kind of things. So you know, thinking of it as Brad has really been a great tip. That's one of my favorite from the e book that we created.

Jeff, thank you so much for sharing this, you know, this deep information. But it's a new way of looking at how to get your information out there and how to influence in non traditional ways. How can someone find you, Jeff, to find out more information about your business?

Yeah, I mean I've always had open door policy. So regardless of if, you know, I don't have to just talk to people that are prospective clients. I'll talk to anybody about this stuff because it's helps my personal brand, it helps my business brand which is more important and brands us as experts. So, you know, if someone wants to get in touch with me. The website is ethic-adsads.com the phone number is 412-224-2100. My direct email is my last name Swartz S W A R t z@ethic-ads.com and then if you look for Ethic advertising on any social media site you can find us there. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram kind of things as well. You know, appreciate a, a follow up from anybody but feel free to reach out to us directly. And and we also try to produce a lot of education and content. So there are blogs that we have. We do I call advice videos as well too that we've kind of produced. So we do have like a YouTube presence as well. But yeah, if anybody wants to just have a conversation with me, I it doesn't matter what your questions are, what they're going on. It's related to what, what we're doing professionally. I'm happy to have that. Sit down.

That's awesome. Thanks so much Jeff for taking the time to share your wisdom in this field of technology.

Yeah, thanks Molly.

My thanks to Jeff Swartz for sharing all of this information. And you can find even more information in his eBook 9 Reasons why Advertising Does Not Work. I included a link in the show notes. For more information about Jeff and his firm, Ethic Advertising Agency, you can find him at ethic-ads.com thanks for listening. Happy holidays. Bye for now.