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AdTechGod Pod
Ep.138: Why Digital Out-of-Home Is Advertising's Most Undervalued Channel with Craig Benner Accretive
00:27:57
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- [00:01]
A
This is adtechgod and this is a commercial message in Programmatic, most bid requests don't tell the full story of the user behind them. Around 60% have no identity signal. Another 30% are mislabeled or too generic. Buyers end up bidding in the dark. Rise changes that by introducing an agentic layer built directly inside the bid stream. Analyzing every bid request in real time. Rise reasons across context, environment and behavior to generate clear intent signals even in anonymous and cookieless environments. The result? Better targeting, less waste and up to three times higher CPMs on enriched inventory. Not just more data. Better decisions in milliseconds at scale. Find out more about rise@rise codes.com Again you can find out more about Rise by going to rise codes.com. This episode is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in our industry. That's exactly what the show is all about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved those hardest challenges, and grew their business in the process. Listen to the Build with Mike o' Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Ad Tech godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God. Welcome to the AdTech Pod where I speak to the founders in the advertising industry. Today's guest is Craig Benner. He's the founder and CEO of Accretive and he has been for the past eight years. Craig formerly worked as the VP of Sales at Specific Media. He was there for also around eight years, which then eventually became Vyant in 2015. He's got a great background, great personality, although he's a Dodger fan. For any of you Mets fans, Angels fans, or anyone else out there, great guy and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So Craig, thank you again for joining me on the pod.
- [02:12]
B
Thanks for. Thank you for having me, your holiness. Yeah, you didn't mention Yankees, you just mentioned Mets and Angel. So.
- [02:20]
A
Okay, the Mets. Yeah, well, we're narrowing it down to two different cities I may potentially live in, but for now I am definitely. I'm actually not a baseball person, but I give all Dodger fans a hard time because just what I do, Just what I do.
- [02:35]
B
We. We deserve it.
- [02:36]
A
Craig, I'd love for you to go like through your background, your history, I know you were at Specific for a long time. Which eventually turned to Vayantha. Love to hear about your time there, your growth there and especially what led you up to founding this company and what you're bringing in market. So if you want to take it back, you know, go for it.
- [02:52]
B
Yeah. So first of all, thanks for having me and thanks for allowing me to, to, to represent good old out of home. I think it's, it's, it's a huge player in, in the adtech space. I'm happy to be there. And you're right. I, I'm a programmatic digital guy. By, by trade. I spent you know, the last dozen or so pre accretive years at, at Specific and Vient. So I mean I got into out of Home kind of by a mistake. You know, I, I'm firmly part of the Vanderhoe coaching tree. It's always about outcomes, it's always about kind of proving out efficacy of channels. And after we were acquired by, by Time Inc. In 2016, my, my plan was to, to have about a year long sabbatical and about three, three weeks into that sabbatical when I left, I got a phone call from a buddy in, on the east coast who said hey, I'm a, I'm, I'm looking at this digital out of home company and they make money through advertising. He was a real estate guy, he had nothing to do with advertising. And he said can I, can I send you the investment docs and can you evaluate? Because they literally said that programmatic digital out of home is going to make money fall from the sky and that I should invest immediately. So at the time again, I was, I was an omnichannel guy. I, I, I didn't have, I didn't have purview into, in the out of home either. But I was like I'll, I'll humor you. I'll, I'll take a look. And he showed me the docs and that's what it said. And I was like, wow, this is, this is interesting. So it's physical world placement. You know, we spend 70% of our time outside the home and yet it represents a very small percentage of, of brand spend. This is, this is interesting. So I called him back and I said good news, bad news. Bad news is don't invest in this company. They don't have the scale. Good news is I'm interested in this. This is, this is highly compelling. Assuming you could get it right from an ad tech standpoint, from a, from a scale standpoint, from a measurement standpoint. And that was, that was where it all began and that's, that was kind of the formation. So a year long sabbatical turned into three weeks and the formation of accretive back in late late 17, early 18.
- [05:05]
A
So it's, it's funny you mentioned all those stats because I did at one point interview Anna Bagger who's the CEO of the oaa and we talked quite a bit about digital out of home, the growth of digital out of home and truly the potential of spend there. That if you look at the percentage of overall advertising spend across digital and what percentage is going out of home, that it's actually quite off. Like there should be significantly more spend in digital out of home than there is today. Just based on the, on the reach, the locations, the number of billboards, but that it's a fast growing market and one that's continuing to grow year over year. That's some very impressive percentages. So I remember that combo clearly. What sets you guys apart at Creative, outside of digital out of home? Is there like a specific focus in terms of how you go to market and how you deal with your clients? What sets you apart there?
- [05:56]
B
When, when I founded the company, it was, it was a very simple thesis, right? It was, I was coming from digital, I had the playbook. So in the mid-2000s we were, we were basically stealing share from print and we were doing it based on attribution, measurement, efficacy, proving that out. And then in the mid 2000s it was mobile. And I remember, I'm sure all of us remember that it was the year of mobile, about 10 straight years because you know, the, the, the consumption pattern of mobile was exploding and yet budgets weren't following it until about the mid 2010s when they got creative right and they got measurement right. It was Google, it was Facebook, it was all of those folks said we're going to take mobile measurement more seriously. And lo and behold, it becomes a $100 billion market because the delta between budget and consumption shrunk dramatically because brands could now quantify their investment. So I looked at that and I said, okay, well out of home has always worked, right? It's 50 years, 100 years of faith based buying. But to your point, it represents less than 3% of measured media. Why is that? Well, there's a dearth in measurement, so it's, it's, it's always worked. The industry has just sucked at proving it. So our whole thesis was if we prove it, then buyers will have more confidence in the, in the, in the format, it'll be more interoperable. With other, with other formats because we'll be able to speak the same language and ultimately we could grow, we could grow, share and that was, that was it so accretive. We have bespoke audience data segments that are built specifically for out of home and kind of the physical world and movement patterns there. We have a programmatic digital out of home offering where we basically will, will, will target and measure effectiveness of the channel. And then most importantly we have a standalone, it's called a creative audience or creative outcomes. It's a standalone measurement attribution solution that, that literally just shows any format, any screen. What did you get for this? What was the roas? What was the web lift? What was the offline sales? What was the online sales? What was the brand? It allows you to quantify the impact and illuminate the power that the channel has across frankly all of the metrics that, that advertisers are used to seeing and have been used to seeing for the last 20 years.
- [08:18]
A
Yeah, and I feel like the measurement aspect is super important. Do you, do you find that there's a particular type of advertiser that prefers out of home? Is it like automotive, is it retail? Who do you find really loves out of home the most? Or where do you see most of the types of advertisers that you work with come from?
- [08:37]
B
Honestly, and this is one of the ironies of it. You look at, you know, on a, on a, and we were just in Dallas last week at the, at the OAA annual conference and we talked about it and we said okay, well we're, we're sitting there at about 3% of measured media. But then Facebook is at double digits. Apple is in double digits, Netflix is in double digits. Google, you know, all, all of these huge digital brands are seeing the, the, the power of offline. So it's, it's, it's almost like and, and dare I say it, the, the high IQ brands that are, that are highly cognizant of how important it is to, to build intelligent frequency across cohorts that they actually care about. They're leaning in, they're leaning in the, the folks that say, oh well I, I don't understand how it works. It's hard to buy. It's, it's, we're going to continue to feed, you know, lower funnel. Those are the ones who, who they, especially in the zero click kind of AI, zero click search AI type environment, they're now being brought along and they're now starting to lean in.
- [09:51]
A
How, how do you create and, and Sorry, I'm just asking because I just, I simply don't know. So I sometimes use these podcasts to learn. How are you creating these audiences? What's the data that you utilize? Because I know, like a billboard outside of, you know, my house. How do you look at those audiences? How do you carve out those audiences? How does that work in the out of home world?
- [10:11]
B
Got it. Yeah. So, so, you know, it starts with, it starts with high fidelity mobility data, right? You need to understand the relationship between consumers and screens in the physical world is nuanced. Right? So you know, you start with the outcomes that you care about and the behaviors that you care about and then you, then you talk about the exposure data. And effectively a billboard on the street near your house is, is about 700 square feet. It's a 14 by 48. So you need to be able to capture consumers who are in front of that ad at the time of ad exposure. And then from there we built something called the out of home graph, which allows you to connect that mobility data to households, to digital identities, to digital outcomes basically. And that's, and that's methodologically, that's how it works from both a targeting and measurement standpoint is capture consumers who are exposed or have a propensity to be exposed to different screens in the physical world, whether it's gas stations, transit billboards, et cetera, and then be able to connect it to their digital identity. And the translation layer in between allows you to build high indexing audiences, it allows you to measure post exposure behavior and ultimately allows you to quantify the effectiveness of the, of the ads.
- [11:24]
A
And I was looking at your site prior to the recording and I can see stuff like, you know, foot traffic reporting and the true impact that you're bringing to your advertisers in market when you're speaking to them. And since you are very outcomes focused, are you finding that they're starting to lean more into digital out of home rather than other channels, or are you carving out new budgets? Where are you finding, I guess the ad spend coming from today, where maybe historically you didn't get it, you know, 10 years ago or eight years ago.
- [11:55]
B
So, so a lot of it is, a lot of it's linear tv. Like the biggest beneficiaries, the CTV obviously is the primary beneficiary of the linear migration, but then so are we, because we're, we're, to your eloquent point in the intro, we're really one of the last high reach vehicles that exists. I think every week 95 plus percent of Americans are exposed to out of home. So it's one of those things where in this, in this fragmented ecosystem it's still a, it's still a high reach medium. So people are starting to search and social is taking a little bit of a, of a hit because again search several hundred billion dollar market. Fantastic. Google has done a great job but no one's ever built a brand or informed actual or built intent with search. Right. Search is the world's most sophisticated phone book and it's gotten 50% of the budgets and that just doesn't make sense in this new world to where you want to be able to generate intent to ultimately be transacted by AI and search and commerce. But how are you getting that intent? Well you're not getting it on linear anymore. No one's really appointment viewing outside of news and sports and you're either going to CTV or you're going to, or you can go to out of home now that we're able to measure it properly.
- [13:23]
A
This is adtech God. And this is a commercial message. Meet Freewheel Buyer Cloud. Not just another dsp but a fully integrated TV and video buying platform built with intelligence at its core. It's designed to help you plan, activate and optimize smarter so you can build your own innovation on top of it. Learn more and connect with the Freewheel Buyer cloud team@freewheel.com ATG again connect with the team@freewheel.COM ATG unfortunately like the advertising industry is focused so heavily on kind of like the buy bottom of the funnel and I think it's been a little bit of a negative direction. Like leads are important obviously sales are really important. I think that's a big piece of it and that should always be a part of your media mix anyway. That should be part of your targeting, part of your KPIs for any campaign. But that branding aspect for digital out of home, I don't think that there's anything better than it. When you're driving down the freeway, if you're sitting in a mall and you see a billboard and it's a brand you've never seen and it's a male model, a female model, jewelry, watches, vehicles, like it does capture you quite a bit for you to take a look and say oh, I've never seen the new whatever Cadillac Escalade, like that's pretty cool, I'm gonna go search for it now. I think historically the problem was was search was taking all that credit. And everybody said well everything ends at search and starts with search. Like, no, that billboard created intent and interest. And I think the digital art of home just was not getting any of the credit there, unfortunately.
- [14:58]
B
Yeah. And that's been our primary focus is to say, hey listen, you're either bucketing in into kind of this vanity buy out of home is this vanity buy. But it's not just brand awareness and it's not direct response, it's brand response. It's solely in that mid funnel to where it's 3% of your budget. Now if you look at I used to go, and I'm a little bit of a contrarian as you can, as you can tell, or I like to make certain comments and I remember walking into brands being from digital and saying, how does it make you feel knowing that you are spending more on digital fraud than you are on legitimate out of home? Because the numbers, the numbers bear that out. And then I say, let's just, you know, I took a philosophy class in college and one of the few things that I remember is this concept of Occam's razor, which is basically the simplest answer is generally the, the right one. And I, and I would go to these brands and agencies and I would say, I would say, okay, so you believe that a one inch by half inch little mobile ad that's 2,000 pixels below the fold, that 40% of which are, are served to Ukrainian bots. You believe that that will perform better for your brand than a 700 square foot building, big beautiful screen on the 405 or on the 75 or, or that, that, that gets traveled by millions of people every week. You think that's, you think that tracks well?
- [16:33]
A
Craig, I'm, I'm smiling from ear to ear because I, I, I'm shocked by that as well. I think the physical aspect of digital out of home and out of home to me is proof that it's being delivered. And I think if you're in a high foot traffic area or vehicle traffic area, like there's no doubt that people are seeing it. I think my issue historically with out of home was people just were not linking it, they weren't able to measure it and say, I know this car drove by this, this billboard and saw the ad and I know that they eventually somehow converted into buying this vehicle. And maybe the interest sparked from this billboard ad prior, it was just like, oh, it's billboard ad. It's kind of like the old penny savers where like you couldn't track it, but you could track it in search. And so search was just taking all this credit of everything happens from search. It's like, no, but you actually happen to see the billboard ad which drove you to search and if it wasn't for that you would have never had the conversion because nobody would have known it was there. And it's an unfortunate channel that there's not more spend on out of home because I genuinely like some of the billboards. Not all, maybe the lawyer ones annoy me but like for the most part the billboard ads I see in malls, in retail, like I think they're totally relevant and you're in the mindset and you're looking to purchase and that could sway you to purchase right then and there.
- [17:48]
B
Yeah. And that's to your, to your point. That was, that was our entire thesis was this dearth and measurement is holding us back. If we can, if we can show it then slowly and surely we'll be able to increase confidence and measurement drives behavior behavior, drive, spend. I think I wrote that in a byline in 2014 back in the day. And it's, it's, it's one of those things where once we started showing it, no, no one's ever run. Very few brands have run our, our analytics seen the effectiveness of the, of the campaign and says, you know what a good idea is to shift out of home budgets, you know, shift out of home budgets to more search. It's like no. And, and I even challenge again, I, I'm biased but also have, I also have a digital background and I used to say turn off retargeting for three days. And again using common sense you would, you would assume that retargeting and search your or organic paid search are your most profitable channels. You turn it off, you should see 90 decrease in sales. Well, you don't, right?
- [18:56]
A
You don't. No, you don't. There's been tests like that done before where, where people shut it off and they see limited to no impact. Where they're like why am I spending so much consumer.
- [19:05]
B
Yeah, they're giving a consumer a coupon before they're going to walk into the store anyway.
- [19:09]
A
It happens all the time. I'm sure you search for something and the first thing you click is the paid because it just happens to be the first 72 links on Google. But the reality is is that you would have clicked it if it was free. It's just everybody's fighting for that top position and so if you remove it and they're looking for that particular product, they're going to find the right link anyway. They can scroll.
- [19:27]
B
Exactly. And that's and that and that was a big, that was a big epiphany that we had early days is is again when we were measuring like web lift of big screens. Ticketmaster was one of our, our first, our first accounts and I remember we said all right, we're going to capture a bunch of, a bunch of folks in Dallas and we have no idea what the web visitation rate will be. And we were just like wow, this is. We, we were able to validate and confirm the, the, our assumption that the natural post exposure behavior of a consumer who sees a out of home ad is search. It's. It's web visitation over time. It's the lift against both randomized control trial against against similarity control groups and not and control markets were massive. And we're just like this all makes sense. We just need to shout it from the mountaintops because people, you know, because it is more challenging and people don't like friction and we're one, one client at a time, we're, we're beating that drum and, and, and luckily it's, it's all working the way it's supposed to if we just need to do it a million more times.
- [20:40]
A
So Craig, we, we shifted from like ooh to digital have home measurement capabilities have obviously significantly improved. Where do you think things are heading in the next 12 to 18 months? Like what are you excited about in the digital home space? You had mentioned you were at the OAA conference recently. What's the market talking about? What's everybody excited about moving into June, July of the year?
- [21:03]
B
Yeah, heading into the back half of the year. The fact that it's almost June is, is, is wild to me. This year has just flown and so there was a lot of conversations about AI agentic buying. One of the, one of the huge deficiencies in out of home is, is because of the interoperability, because of the lack of standardized metrics. We were not as included in mmms. And MMMS is where TV made its bones. Right. Those models are finally what rewards intent generation, demand generation. So because of the way that the channel had been measured traditionally or historically, our inclusion in kind of a lot of these mmms is limited. So a big part of it is interoperability, standardization, removing that friction from the broader. You know, we don't, we don't our budgets sit in out of home groups where our budget should sit in, in, in just strategy and research groups because, because of the power and the reach and ultimately the, the effectiveness we can deliver. So it's a lot of it is Some of it's self inflicted, some of it's a tooling issue. The technology is not really the limiter right now. It's adoption, education and advocacy.
- [22:29]
A
So you talk about education, advocacy and kind of like the direction of where things are going, but how do you educate the media buyers? Is it still on? The digital out of home world weirdly lives in its own world, right? It's kind of like how connected television has sort of bled into digital advertising. And I don't know why that's so different that connected television advertisers, suppliers, ad tech companies have seemed to be able to infiltrate every possible conference that no matter what you do, CTV is there. Whether it's a performance channel, whether it's a branding channel, whether it's streaming, whether it's linear, you find that presence. But Digital out of Home weirdly has not. I don't find a lot of digital out of home companies speaking at the conferences in the space. How do you educate the media buyers in the agencies and the brands to get them, I guess to shift spent.
- [23:22]
B
Yeah, I, I think a lot of that is just, is just, you know, stuff like this to, to, to be honest, it doesn't, people don't think about it. People think, oh well, programmatic. Digital out of home is a bolt on that we can add to our, our omnichannel DSPs buy and then what ends up happening is they end up buying, you know, ATM tops at the lowest cpm and then say. And then not. And then not measuring it. And then saying, we tested digital out of home, it didn't work. Whereas the education needs to be, hey, we did it. We did a study with Keen and, and we saw that out of home had had a $7.48 marginal ROI, which was highest than any, any channel. Why are you not measuring it that way? Why are you not measuring other things? We, we've also had a little bit of market confusion to where. Because CTV was so white hot, the, some of the folks in digital out of home who had, who had video were just like, hey, we're just, we're give us some of that CTV budget. And it's like, well, it's out of home is a very different viewing behavior. It's a diff if it's, it's a different media consumption behavior than, than ctv. One is, is kind of lean back, one is lean forward, one is physic, one is in the bar, one is in the living room. So we've constantly been educating the value of our channel. In particular increasing the number of just value add measurement studies and attribution that we're doing just to get advocacy up and then ultimately, you know, ultimately latching on to some of the broader, the broader trends like, like retail media. We talked about retail media and that's another $40 billion market and no one ever talks about last inch or end cap or it's, it's, it's a very small part of it. Whereas where do you think retail takes place?
- [25:10]
A
Okay, so what is last inch? What is that? Sorry, I don't even.
- [25:13]
B
It's. It's just being able, being able to capture you know being able to capture last mile last you know, if, if, if they think that Amazon data on a mobile ad or or Walmart data or or Gold or Dollar General data on a, on a mobile ad is effective, wait till you get, wait till you start investing your brand right next to where, where the ads are or where the the items are are are sold.
- [25:43]
A
So it's like on like in store
- [25:45]
B
in store right outside of store on the consumer journey.
- [25:50]
A
It's yeah I would find that way more powerful than yeah a mobile app
- [25:54]
B
and it's, and it's or. Or desktop or even ctv. It's. It's when your wallet is already out, you're in that buying mode and you're able to, to capture the attention of, of consumers who are, who are on their way.
- [26:07]
A
This has been great. Craig. I learned a ton. I don't know much about digital of home, so sorry for all the questions but I truly appreciate you being here and I think me not knowing as the, the Lord of RTB tells you that there's probably a lot of people that don't know much about it either. But I would, I would love to learn more about it. Is there. Should they just go to your website and can they find more information and case studies or what do you recommend people do that want to learn more?
- [26:29]
B
You know our, our helping brands win is is one of our. One of our mottos and we have an entire case study section which just shows which tries to educate It's a creative ads.com they can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm really accessible. I, I love to share the go my own My own gospel the out of home gospel in in. In how we're you know one one one brand, one one vertical one agency at a time. We're just. We're shifting the narrative and as this counter revolution of people are saying like me who have two teenagers get off your phone and get out of out outside it's not. It's not going away. It's the power of the channel is just going to get more and more and more.
- [27:14]
A
Craig, thank you again for joining me and good luck. Thank you for being my guest today.
- [27:17]
B
Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.
- [27:19]
A
Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates, so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of ad tech innovation.