← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
From Billboards to Bottom-Funnel Results
00:39:42
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- [00:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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From advertising to software as a service
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Alex Weinberger
to data across all of our programs
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Benjamin Shapiro
and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.
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Alex Weinberger
Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Typical lifespan of an article is about
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Alex Weinberger
24 to 36 hours.
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Benjamin Shapiro
We're reaching out to the right person
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Alex Weinberger
with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that used technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro
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34% 34% is the amount of out of Home ad spend that came from digital screens in Q1 2025, according to the out of Home Advertising association of America. Most of us think that out of Home is static billboards, but one third of out of Home is digital and that spend grew 9% last year. So while US marketers keep fighting over cookies, attribution, AI generated everything, one of the oldest ad formats on earth is getting a second life. Not because billboards suddenly became cool again, because Digital out of Home is now programmatic, targetable and measurable, and maybe most importantly, unskippable. So how do you use Digital out of Home as a full funnel media channel instead of an unattributable brand play? Ben I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Alex Weinberger, the General Manager of Digital out of home at AdRoll, the growth marketing platform helping brands unify channels and drive performance across the entire funnel. They're also a sponsor of the Martech Podcast and today Alex is going to explain why Digital out of Home is having its moment right now, how programmatic buying has changed the game and why the physical world may be one of the smartest ways to spend your money in an AI saturated market. Alex, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
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Alex Weinberger
Hey Ben, great to be here.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you here. Excited to talk about a channel I feel like that is totally underrepresented in the media right now. Digital out of Home and out of home in general. Let's start off at the top. AdRoll recently launched digital out of Home. Why is now the right time to Enter the channel that's digital existed forever.
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Alex Weinberger
Well, because the market is asking for it, right? Like the investment is flowing into digital out of home at a really significant rate. As you quoted in your intro, 34% of all out of home spending was programmatic and digital in Q1 of last year. And we're expecting that to just continuously grow. So Adroll has been a leader in retargeting and display and account based marketing, or ABM for about 18 years now. So it just makes sense that as the industry continues to evolve, ad roll continues to evolve with it. And they made a decision that digital out of home was the right next step in the evolution of the company. And that's where I come in to kind of help take that and bring it to market.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, so the entire world is going digital. We get all of these signals, We've got AI, AI, we've got personalization, and we take one of the biggest programmatic ad buying companies that has existed with basically as much data as anybody not named Google, and they decide to start buying digital billboards. Why now though, what is it about digital out of home that is having its moment?
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Alex Weinberger
You know, it's the, it's the proliferation of the programmatic space and all of the advancements that have happened technologically attribution wise and really screen selection wise. Right. So going back to 10, 15 years ago, the out of home space was really the real estate space. It wasn't media, it was real estate. And it was a board up on a stick, on a corner or on the side of a road. And brands wanted to put their, their logo and their branding and their messaging up there because of the people that went by. But how do you really quantify that? Right. In 2026, media without the ability to measure doesn't really matter. So being able to draft off of everything that we've seen in the programmatic digital space, whether that's display, ctv, social video, all of we've been able to kind of sit on the sidelines and watch all of these things happen and then grab and pull all of those things forward and apply them to the digital out of home space, such as specific screen selection, real time bidding, really driving that efficiency within the space so that brands can be everywhere all at once without needing to do a hundred different individual contracts with a hundred different media owners.
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Benjamin Shapiro
There's this fundamental change in marketing right now, and it's generated by generative AI, which is the top of funnel measurement is essentially evaporating. Right. And whether it's all SEO going Towards aeo like the click has essentially started to disappear. So we understand less about what is influencing the top of funnel more than ever. And I think that's changing how we evaluate brand versus demand, how we think about the purpose of reputation and all these other things. And then you enter things like brand channels that are having a renaissance. And that's to me where out of home specifically comes in. But digital out of home is a little bit of a different beast because you get the sort of benefit of the digital portion, but you also get the sort of brand component of the out of home. Let's spend a minute just defining what digital out of home is. You know, I think of out of home as the billboards, maybe even the signs on the bus. You started to talk about this a little bit. What is digital out of home? How do we think about screen selection and those options?
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Alex Weinberger
Yeah. So digital out of home is every digital screen outside the four walls of your home, not your personal devices. Right. So it's not your laptop, your smart tv, your tablet, it's not your smartphone. So every digital screen that you've seen out in the wild, it absolutely does include those large format roadside billboards that you mention, the digital bus shelters. But there's also the play space screens like gyms, bars and restaurants, malls, salons, sports entertainment places like ice skating rinks and topgolf and bowling alleys. So when you think about the ability to be everywhere that your consumer is, right. For so long, we knew how to target people in their homes with TV and with print and with direct mailers. We knew how to target people when they were at a specific location by putting a traditional billboard up. But what about everything that's in between? What about everything between the home and where it is that you're going? So digital out of home covers all of that ground and it's a really great opportunity to get your messaging out there in front of the people as they're moving around the real world. And you, you said a couple of things in kind of the build up to this question that I want to touch on, which was the unskippable factor of it.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Right.
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Alex Weinberger
People in a lot of ways and a lot of different tactics have almost become like numb to ad delivery. Right. Whether that's display, whether that's different tactics. But with digital out of home, you can't miss it. It's right there in front of your face. It's almost like what TV was 20 or 30 year ago. It can be that subconscious level of marketing. And the other thing that you said was the credibility of being on a digital out of home ad. There was a survey that was done by oaa, I think it was last year, it might have been the year before, where something like 70 respondents in this survey said that they view the brand that was being advertised in digital out of home more favorably. And it lends a lot of credibility to them because your brand, your ad, whether that's a B2B company, whether it's a SaaS platform or whether it's a local body shop, it's going to go Coca Cola, Ford Motors, Delta Airlines, your ad, Procter and Gamble, right? So when a consumer sees your ad shoulder to shoulder with these big massive brands and everyone's used to seeing advertising out in the wild, it gives a lot of credibility in the mind of the consumer. So that's the message that we're bringing forward, that you don't need tens of millions of dollars to do digital out of home. You can do really focus, specific localized campaigns and give and be given that same level of consideration as some of these other massive brands.
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Benjamin Shapiro
There's a credibility component to being seen in a public forum. I want to get into the segmentation a little bit more. You mentioned like buses and bars and gyms and the places that there are other screens within digital out of home. Do you segment by like this is a billboard, this is a restaurant, like what's the segmentation in terms of the types of screen and what's the usage of those segments?
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Alex Weinberger
Yeah, it's a great question. So within digital out of home, we call it the taxonomy, right? The taxonomy is the way that we define different screens. So you'll have your roadside inventory which will be your billboards, your digital bus shelters, your urban panels in major urban centers like New York and Chicago, Los Angeles, places like that. And then you've got your play space screens which are going to be your gyms, your bars, your restaurants, your in store and retail screens. So the taxonomy is constantly evolving and it's getting more and more specific as to, okay, you want to be in an airport, but do you want to be at the baggage claim? Do you want to be at the arrival of the departure gate, do you want to be in the lounge? So there is a very specific and ever growing taxonomy where we can offer that to our clients into the marketplace and say, you know, you can be in just airports, you can be in just gyms, or you can be across 50 different formats with your campaign depending on what kind of brand you are, who you're trying to reach, what your KPIs are for the campaign. That's the thing that I really love and that's what's kept me in the digital out of home space for as long as I've been in it is because you have 10 different conversations and you've got 10 different outputs and so you really get to put on your consultative sales cap and really bring super customized plans to every different account. Because no two campaigns are going to be the same. Because no two goals are going to be the same.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I want to talk about the customization and specifically the programmatic element of digital out of home. Adroll has been a leader in the programmatic space for nearly two decades. Why does the programmatic, the real time bidding nature of digital out of home solve problems before? And I'll preface this with I think of out of home being a very like local targeting medium. I want to target people in San Francisco, so I put a billboard up in San Francisco. Programmatic and the ability to like pick individual inventory and figure out what to bid and whether it's worth it. Why does that make sense for digital out of home?
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Alex Weinberger
Because to, in the example that you use, right, you want to get a billboard in San Francisco because you want to reach people in San Francisco. But what if they're not driving? What if they're taking the bus or what if they're taking public transportation? What if they don't see your billboard? Right, You've picked one billboard in one location because you think that's how you want to reach people. But what about all the other touch points that we talked about during the day? What about everything in between the home and where it is that they're trying to get to? So the programmatic nature allows you to be a lot more flexible, allows you to be in a lot more locations during, during the flight of a campaign. And again, it's that, that kind of, that subconscious or that priming the pump that we like to talk about with digital out of home media is being in all of these different place. So you see an ad on a billboard or you see an ad on a bus shelter, on the back of an Uber or a taxi, or you see it while you're at the gym and then you get hit with a CTV ad when you're home watching whatever it is that you're watching, and then you pull out your phone and you're playing Angry Birds, if that's even still a thing anymore.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Is that a thing?
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Alex Weinberger
I don't know. I was, I was really into Angry Birds when it came out.
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Benjamin Shapiro
That was Royal Crush or Casino and
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Alex Weinberger
Candy Crush or whatever game it is that you're playing on your phone. And then you get hit with an ad, a display ad. So think about all of those different ways that we were able to reach the consumer with this synergistic messaging of, hey, you saw it out in the wild and then you saw it on your TV while you're on the couch, and then you saw it on your phone while you're playing games. So thinking about building up that consideration set for this consumer ultimately to execute a purchase. Digital out of home allows you to cover all of that space in as many different environments as you want as far as building that consideration and ultimately execution of a purchase. Which is, which is the name of the game. Right. At the end of the day, media and advertising serves to sell more units, to do more business, drive more revenue. And this is a great kind of piece in the entire funnel, especially when you layer that in with other tactics.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Just for the record, no shade to Angry Birds. I actually played Angry Birds on my Apple TV this week and I don't remember whether I would serve digital out of home ads or not. I guess those would be in home,
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Alex Weinberger
but those would be CTB ads.
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Benjamin Shapiro
One of the actual important things I wanted to talk to you about other than Angry Birds was this notion of targeting. Right. I want to reach mid market B2B buyers, you know, director of brand CMO. And when I'm doing my out of home, I think I'm reaching an entire industry, I'm reaching an entire geography. How do you think about targeting and how can you use Programmatic to make sure you're reaching your buyers?
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Alex Weinberger
Yeah, so there's a couple different ways that we can approach that, specifically through the B2B lens, building off of our really fantastic ABM platform that we've got at that role. So the first is event support, right. So we know that the buyers of a specific industry or specific category or vertical, they're all going to be in Dallas, Texas for this conference, Right. You're sponsoring a booth or you've got presence there. Well, why not surround the entire conference area with digital out of home ads in Ubers and taxis, in hotels and restaurants and bars where people are going to be spending their time while at the conference to get the messaging out. The other piece is, well, where are their headquarters? Right. Where are these decision makers physically located in the world? And let's go put a pin in their actual headquarters and put a tight radius around it so that we can catch them when they're coming and going from work. We can even do things like day parting to say, hey, let's put these ads up from 7:30 to 10:00am to catch them coming in maybe 11 to 1 for their lunch break and then maybe 4 to 6 for the at home rush break to get out of there. So understanding the geographies of where your target accounts are and the people that you want to reach with these messaging are, it gives us a bunch of different ways to kind of put these ads in front of them so that when they're coming and going from these locations, it's top of mind. So that when they get hit with a prospecting email, they can say, oh wait, I just saw your ad on that bus shelter. I just saw this ad when I was grabbing lunch. Right. So there's a lot of different ways to use it so that when we do other tactics in combination with it, it, it works.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Tell me about the role of creative. What makes a good digital out of home creative when people only have a couple of seconds to consume the ad.
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Alex Weinberger
So I love this question because we spent the first, whatever, 10 minutes talking about the nuances of programmatic and the structuring of targeting and the way that we can build these plans. But you could have the most strategic campaign with the most precise targeting and the best screen selection with the biggest budget. But if your creative stinks, your campaign is going to flop at the end of the day. I think we've got four and a half seconds is like the current attention span. I would say mine's closer to two seconds. I think a goldfish is like seven seconds. Right. But you've got that like three or four seconds of attention span of a consumer as they're moving past this ad to grab their attention. So if you're going to put an ad in Chicago or New York and you're doing light blues and grays and blacks, well, you're putting your ads in a city of concrete and steel. It's going to get completely washed out by the backdrop of the city. So we want oranges and yellows and reds and big bold colors to kind of contrast with the environment that you're going to be in. You want at least 40 to 50% of your creative to be the logo or the packshot of the product that you're putting out there. And you want minimal words, three to maybe seven words max. Right. Because again, you've got that very quick opportunity to catch their attention, deliver your message and have your image resonate with them. And I tell every single person that I'm talking to and copywriters and creatives love when I say this is take your biggest swing, let it rip anything you got in that bottom drawer of like maybe one day, if I'm allowed to really take a big swing, that's what you want to put on your billboards and on your digital bus shelters and you're creative of your digital out of home. I had one creative tell me the other day that they did a successful digital out of home campaign by building this beautiful multicolor creative and then flipping it upside down, right? So as consumers were walking past it, they were like, wait, what was that? And they had to do a double take and go back and look at it. That's the kind of thing that we, I'm always encouraging is forget your brand guidelines if you're allowed, forget your kind of, hey, this is our consistent messaging. Do your biggest, most explosive, fun, eye catching thing that you can possibly think of and put that in your out of home creative. Because that's what's going to get attention and that's what's going to drive performance and results.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It's the thing that I like the best about the digital component of out of home is that you can be creative, you could be bold, you can be aggressive, you can be daring. It's not on a billboard that you can't remove. You can test, you can iterate. But that gets into my next question, which is about attribution. I want to test this crazy wild off the top message about I hear everything and the production business that I run and, you know, I hear everything is going to be production infrastructure for the wealthy or whatever I want to say, you know, and I'm going to make the copy backwards and I'm going to put it in pink and I'm going to rotate it and then put like, you know, dancing boys and girls behind it. Whatever. How do I know if it's working right? How do you figure out if the message actually resonates? It's in public, it's in the ether, it's out there somewhere. Talk to me about attribution. Once I have that bold creative, how do I get a signal?
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Alex Weinberger
Great question. I also love the plug that you made for your own production company. I hope they keep that in the actual podcast.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Shush. That's not supposed to. It's supposed to be a soft sell. Come on.
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Alex Weinberger
Hey, we're all salespeople at our core, so I always appreciate the effort. Yeah, so that's the really exciting thing, right? So one of the biggest myths about Digital out of Home is that it's just upper funnel and it's just awareness. But as I mentioned earlier, the kind of drafting off of all of the other programmatic channels has allowed us to pull forward a full suite of measurement and attribution for digital out of home. So kind of running through them, the first would be foot traffic attribution, right? Understanding the observed devices that were in and around the screen at the time that your ad was being served and then being able to measure and see did that observed anonymized mobile device make it into the location that you were driving them to. This could be for conferences, this could be for events. Typically it's used for brick and mortar locations very heavily in the retail space as well as. So that would be your foot traffic. Similar methodology would be for a sales lift study. So that's understanding the devices that have been exposed to this out of home. Did they go into the location of the retailer that they've been driven to and then matching that up again, all anonymized with back end point of sale data to say, did this person receive an ad and did they make a purchase? And then there's also the brandlift study. This is probably the most common, especially for non brick and mortar and non CPG type accounts. And for your production company, right. This might be one that would be really interesting. Would be, I think was I hear everything you said. Another little for you would be a brand lift study. Right. So there's a bunch of different brand lift survey companies out there and they've got these massive panels of people who have opted in to participate in these surveys. So a consumer will get a push notification to say do you want to participate in the survey? And they're going to have control and expose buckets. We can do customized survey questions to say, hey, did you, you see the ad in and around the city? Did you see an ad for I hear everything production company? If yes, how likely are you to visit their website? How likely are you to contract with them for your production services? So there's customization within the survey as well that we can do for brand Lift and then we can even do things like app downloads. Did this device that was exposed to this ad ultimately go and download the app? And even web conversion, did they make it to the website? So that's the exciting thing about digital out of home in 2026 is we have a full suite of measurement. And as I said earlier, you measurement media without measurement doesn't really matter. Today you need to be able to show that attribution because there are a ton of other channels that can give you that attribution. So we have to be at the table with all the other digital channels.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Two things. One, thank you for doing a wonderful pitch for iHer everything. Two, baked into the attribution is when someone goes by a digital out of home ad, you're essentially saying, okay, well, we can understand if that device was exposed. Walk me through, because I think that that's something that most marketers don't quite grasp is that I can not just have a billboard on the side of the city, but like anybody that comes into a gym, I can understand if they were exposed to the ad. How does that work? I know it's anonymized, but how are you able to figure out which devices are actually exposed to ads?
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Alex Weinberger
Yeah, so at the individual screen level, each individual format. Right. So you'll have your billboards, your digital bus shelters, your gym screens, or your bar screens. There will be a preset radius for how far someone reasonably needs to be to have been exposed or to have viewed this ad. So a digital 40 foot by 80 foot roadside billboard might be 300ft, a digital bus shelter might be 30ft, and a gym screen might be 15ft feet. And so what they're doing is based on that sliding scale on a format by format basis, they are observing. I don't like to use the word capturing. In today's privacy age, that's maybe not the right word. So they're able to understand all of the observed screens within that radius that will get matched up against the timestamp that 15 or 30 seconds that the ad was actually being displayed on that screen. And they'll get a snapshot of, hey, we saw saw a hundred mobile devices within 300ft of the billboard during this 30 seconds, or we saw 15 next to this bus shelter when that ad was being served. And then they get bucketed and collected as the exposed, as the exposed panel in ad roll.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Are you able to retarget the people that were exposed to an ad? So somebody walked by my billboard, they're within the hundred feet of the billboard being shown, or 15ft of the gym screen. Can I then start sending them display ads or serving them CTV ads, kids, when they get home?
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Alex Weinberger
So ultimately the answer will be yes, depending on when this podcast ultimately gets published. It might be a different answer, but absolutely. So the privacy laws that came on late last year and early this year have for good reason. Right. Made it a little bit more difficult to just get that device ID Passback file. That used to be the process. Right. All of these exposed mobile devices, they get put into a made file. We can pass that device ID file back, you plug it into your dsp, you do a match rate and then you start serving. What's happened with the privacy laws that have just come into effect here in the United States is now they need to be even further cleaned and anonymized. So they're getting built as an audience segment that then gets pushed through a clean room, that then gets pushed through another third party vendor like a live ramp or an ad quicker or whatever it may be and then you're able to pull down that audience, push it into your DSP and start serving. So and, and we, we're a fully global company so we can do that today in say AAPAC in Australia. G PR in Europe is similarly causing challenges in that space. But it's something that we're absolutely laser focused on because again when you Google Ad roll or when you go into ChatGPT and search AdRoll, we're known for our retargeting. So that is something that we're working incredibly hard to get up and running and will be available soon.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I think that connecting the piece of who was exposed and then being able to follow up with more direct response related channels. Right. We think of digital or out of home in general as being brand exposure, but it doesn't mean that it is unconnected to the digital component. When you have digital out of home. I want to talk lastly about the, the full funnel strategy. If you're able to to connect the dots between who is exposed to your other marketing campaigns, how do you think that B2B marketers should consider digital out of home as an ROI generating channel?
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Alex Weinberger
Yeah, so I think the days of single channel activation are dead. Right. I think that's behind us and I think there's so much data and there's so much information and research out there that shows that multi channel, or to use another fun buzzword, omnichannel activation. Right. Is really where you're seeing significantly higher performance. And performance can be transactions, it can be foot traffic, but it can also be buyer intent. Right. And there's a huge amount of data that shows that when you pair digital out of home with mobile or with display or digital out of home plus CTV plus social, the more channels you add in to this activation, the higher and higher and higher the buyer intent goes and it makes sense. Right. If you think about it from a non savvy media lens, the more times that I can reach my mom, who to this day still doesn't know what I do. I don't think she's known what I've done for the last 10 years, even though I've explained it to her quite a few times. But the more times we can put an ad in front of her, right, when she's on her way to work or going to the grocery store, and then when she's watching whatever show it is, that probably QVC at home, right, we can hit her with another ad through the QVC streaming and then we can hit her with another ad on her desktop when she's watching the YouTube video and we can hit her on her phone again, right? That is just going to continue to have these building blocks of consideration so that when she does want to pull the trigger on, on the hoojmabob or whatever it is that we want her to buy, right, she's been, she's seen it so many times, right, that her eye is going to automatically go towards whatever that brand or product is. So there's data and there's stats and there's a million studies that we can cite and we can quote here. But it also is just kind of. It makes sense, right? The more time that we can reach a consumer with messaging in different areas, the more likely they are to purchase that thing. So when you think about through the lens of B2B, so many of that is like these are long buying cycles, right? Typically people aren't making decisions about SaaS platforms or about technological partners just on a whim because they saw an ad one time, right? There's gotta be a consistent drumbeat of effort and the partnering and the collaboration of all these channels at different touch points reaching those buying decision makers. And throughout that, what can be an 18 month buying process just goes to further your positioning when they are trying to execute and make that decision that you are the company that they should go with because of the validation that they've seen through the media channels.
- [28:16]
Benjamin Shapiro
I understand the concept of omnipresence, right? When you're stacking the media channels in different formats in different places, you show up everywhere and people feel like your brand has credibility and presence and just general awareness and man, they must be doing well if I keep seeing them everywhere. That's not an insane concept. When you're thinking about using out of home, beyond just top of funnel, but actually trying to drive it for nurture or for direct response. Are there different strategies to really hit different parts of the funnel? Yeah, absolutely.
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Alex Weinberger
So a lot of my Background is in the CPG and retail space. And we used to talk about owning the last mile, right, or winning the last mile. So where you're doing a conference, you might have a wider net or you want to reach someone that's at a headquarters in San Francisco. Right. You might want to hit all the highways for 15 miles coming in and out of that location. But if you're thinking about a retailer, right, and you want them to buy Red Bull, I want them to buy Red Bull at a Walmart. I don't want them to buy it at an Exxon gas station. I don't want them to buy it anywhere else but at a Walmart. So you think about putting your ads in, in a position to be dangerous, right? So hey, it's 2 o' clock in the afternoon. I'm exhausted. I need a little pick me up, I need a Red Bull. Hey, I just saw an ad that Red Bulls or buy one, get one free at Walmart. And it happens to be just over there, three lights down in that shopping center over there. Right. I can very easily see that ad, make a determination that I want to buy that Red Bull and I'm going to go buy it at Walmart because it's on sale and it happens to be really close. So there are a lot of those strategies that you can bring to bear depending on, you know, is it a retailer focused campaign, is it a brand focused campaign? Are we trying to drive them into certain locations? So in a lot of the digital space we talk about contextual or about that audience targeting, but contextual and digital out of home really means environment. Where can we put the ads out? In the environment where a consumer can very easily see an ad and go execute a purchase. So that's one of the main strategies that we've employed in that CPG retail space that really makes a ton of sense. And when you pitch that to a retailer, they're like, oh yeah, that does make sense. I don't want them to buy it at the gas station, I want them to buy it here.
- [30:30]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's fascinating to think about how far we've come from. Well, I got some bourbon and I'm going to put up a billboard. I have to figure out the slogan to Essentially, ads can not necessarily follow our consumers around because that sounds bad for privacy, but engage with them in multiple different formats that are contextually relevant to what they're doing and where they are. And I think that, you know, it's a lion in the weeds, right? It's, it's, it's hiding in plain sight in the sense of we've got this ability to be targeted, to retarget, to understand engagement in the real world with digital out of home. And it's a very powerful channel that not only has programmatic media buying, creative testing, but also you can use it. Not just the top of the funnel, the bottom as well.
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Alex Weinberger
Exactly. Well said.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right Alex, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of questions related to your experience and digital out of home full funnel media as well. Are you ready?
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Alex Weinberger
Ready to go.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Give me your one big prediction for the future of the digital out of home industry industry.
- [31:35]
Alex Weinberger
Love this one. So as I just previously mentioned, a lot of my background comes from the retail and CPG space with a heavy focus on retail media which we know is just absolutely exploding right now. That is where all of the investment's going. That's where not all, but a lot of it's coming to digital out of phone as well. But the, the advancement and the rapid growth of retail media but also the in store signage kind of arms race that's happening at the major retailers. Right. So we couple years ago Walmart bought Vizio for a couple billion dollars and they've got the TVs hanging all over the walls and they're able to put messaging out there in their four walls of their store. We know that Kroger I think just announced they're going with Barrows, Albertsons are going with Strata Cash. Aho Delhi has just announced their edge platform which they brought over from Europe and are now implementing here with signs physically in the store, at the shelf in the end cap paths. So what that's going to do is the expansion of the in store signage today being considered digital out of home. The prediction or the hot take is that the place based screens in the gyms, in the malls, in the bars and restaurants are not going to replace but they're going to carry outsized value in the future compared to today where everyone wants billboards and digital bus shelters and these big high visibility roadside signage screens. Those aren't going away. But I think the equilibrium and the value proposition is going to start evening out to where these place based screens are going to take on an outsized importance because of the pull through into the in store signage that we're seeing in the digital media space.
- [33:20]
Benjamin Shapiro
What I'm hearing from you is there's going to be a proliferation of smaller screens in more places with arrows pointing towards where you can buy specific products. Exactly all right, let's move on to the next question. What's the most overrated screen in advertising right now?
- [33:37]
Alex Weinberger
Oh, I don't think I like that question very much. I don't, you know, because it depends, right, to, to one of your earlier points. It depends on who we're talking to. You know, I had, I had an example, a situation early on where I was working with an ice cream company and I had put a recommendation to put gym screens on there. And the client was like, hold up, like this is a full fat ice cream. Why do we want to be in gym screens? And I said, well, listen, I go to the gym so that I can eat the ice cream. I don't want to go to the gym and be served an ad for a celery stick. That's not why I'm there. So I don't really think there are. I don't think there are screens that like, don't matter because it's all contextual. It matters what the client is, what the environment is and what they're trying to achieve. So I'm going to very delicately tap dance my way out of that question.
- [34:24]
Benjamin Shapiro
I'm going to hold your feet to the fire. Nothing personal, it depends is a bullshit answ. I will give you what I think. I think the laptop is the screen that's actually going to be deprioritized over time. I think that with the rise of generative AI and agents, people are going to be freed and even, I'll say the mobile phone. And I'm being a little contrarian here, but I think that we will have more out in the real world, like computation and work being done for us. So we will be eyes up and out. So I think that digital out of home, home becomes more valuable because, you know, perceived advertising in the real world might be more important than the digital advertising. Mostly when we have the digital footprint and tracking that we're, you know, kind of getting used to now.
- [35:11]
Alex Weinberger
Well, I'll say this, we're ready for it, right? If those budgets from display and from mobile need a home, digital out of home is here to catch it.
- [35:21]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, if a B2B marketer is going to test digital out of home, where should they place their first dollar?
- [35:27]
Alex Weinberger
I would say conference event and trade show support is a great way to kind of do short bursts, get a feel for the effectiveness of the media and also kind of be in a location where they've already invested time, effort and resources to be at this event and this conference. So why not put a Little bit more oomph around it, if you will, and kind of surround that conference. The hotels, the restaurants and bars where events are happening. That would be a great first place to kind of. I don't love the term stick your toe in the water with digital out of home. I'm more of a cannonball into the deep end kind of guy. But in general, I think that's a Great place for B2B type type accounts to start.
- [36:10]
Benjamin Shapiro
With digital, you start at the bottom of the funnel. People that you know are in your target market, if there's a trade show, an event, have a digital presence. There's there in theory, you'll be able to retarget them down the road. Get that brand impression, get the impression, understand who is the target market and who's been exposed to the ad. What's one thing digital marketers believe about billboards that's just flat out wrong?
- [36:32]
Alex Weinberger
Well, we touched on it right off from the jump, right, that billboards are the only digital out of home format that when you say digital out of home, they're just talking about billboards. As we've talked about. There are, I want to say, 97 different kinds of venue types and formats that we've got available here in the United States. So billboards are just one of them. So it's not the end all, be all. A great example is I was working on a campaign for a client that had a conference, a B2B type brand, and they were doing a conference in Seattle and they were like, we want every billboard between the conference center and the airport and the hotels. And they drew it on a map. Well, we came to learn that Seattle actually has an ordinance against placing digital out of home screens within the city limits. You can get them in Tacoma, right, But you can't get them in Seattle. So some marketers say they kind of beat their chest and say, we want to be on a billboard. It's like, well, there's a lot of other really fantastic formats that we've got available for you. And if you really have to be in Seattle, you're not getting a billboard, right? So that understanding of market by market, it's going to have some variance and nuance to it.
- [37:35]
Benjamin Shapiro
Seattle, they win their second super bowl and all of a sudden everything is their way.
- [37:40]
Alex Weinberger
They're getting too big for their britches over here.
- [37:42]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, here we go. This is a fun one. Fact or fiction. In five years from now, digital out of home will have more media spend than static billboards.
- [37:52]
Alex Weinberger
Fact, I think the data backs that up. A great stat that I like to talk about or a reference is, you know, the big, the big four digital out of home media companies. You've got Lamar, JC Deco out front and Clear Channel, who just got acquired by a private equity firm. $6.2 billion. They are spending between 500 and $750,000 to convert each individual billboard and they cannot do it fast enough. Right. The, the demand is there, the investment is there from the media owner side and from the brand from the marketplace. I think you said in the, in the intro to this, we're at 34%. In five years, I definitely expect that to be over 50%.
- [38:35]
Benjamin Shapiro
Alex, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and telling us a little bit about how digital out of home is having its moment. And more than anything, my takeaway from here is the world is changing as we think about marketing and the top of Funnel is changing. And our ability to influence people not only in digital formats, but also use our digital technologies and reach them in a targeted fashion outside of the home is becoming more and more important. Thank you so much for coming on, being a sponsor of the podcast, and being my guest.
- [39:02]
Alex Weinberger
Thanks, Ben. Great talking to you.
- [39:04]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Alex Weinberger, the general manager of digital out of Home at Adroll. If you'd like to get in touch with Alex, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit his company's website, which is adroll.com and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or Visit us on YouTube. YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.
- [40:04]
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand, then visit iheareverything.com.