A (3:23)

Yeah, I mean that, that, that, that speaks so much to what we've been also doing internally. Like, so we, we've known, right, that, you know, seven, 11 touch points. Like, I think 11. Yeah, that's, that's about the right number. I think it's maybe even a little bit higher. The seven hours we've been talking about that. I put that in my book like years ago. Build your brand mania. How do you reach that? What's the most effective way to reach that number? Even in. No, like trust. I talk about that. The four different channels, that's something we've seen. We've seen AdWords not work very effectively. I think it's oversaturated. Especially since COVID We've pushed people out to be DuckDuckGo, which is pretty easy. You got AI and AI chat happening. But we've really pushed out our clients to run branded campaigns, visibility campaigns on multiple channels and kind of spraying that out, kind of blue ocean strategy. We're seeing that too. When people are hearing you on multiple channels, that comes together. So this study, I'm going to put that link in the show notes for everybody too, because we follow the eat metric as well that Google put out there, the expertise, authority, trust. They add the experience component to that. And so I just love, I love that. Tell me a little bit about your background. I know we were talking about some veteran stuff before this as well. Just kind of. How did you come to this evolution with Blip?

B (4:52)

Great question, man. I am like, I am absolutely a business transplant. I never thought that I'd be starting companies or running companies or working in companies at all. I spent the first part of my professional life in the government and I thought that that's my, that that might be where I spend the, my whole life. Right. So I, I went to undergrad and studied aeronautical science concurrently, got a pilot's license and then joined out of school. I joined a, an intelligence program that was affiliated with the army, the U.S. army and went straight into three years of training. And so for three years, like, I was absent. And I emerge 26, 27 years old, still never having even worked a real job, you know what I mean? Just so far from the wisdom of the world, so to speak, and went operational and had a lot of fun. I got to see some of the world that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. And even over the past couple of years, it's been cool to see some of those same places but through a different lens, like as a tourist or, you know, for. For this type of work. And it's been a lot of fun. But I started having kids and decided that that is not where I wanted to be long term. In fact, when my first son was three, I was home. I was gone a lot, but I was home. And we were playing, like, cars on the floor. He's like, dad, this is fun. And I'm like, yeah, buddy, I think so too, man, this is great. And he's like, next time I want to do it at your house. I'm like, oh, man, my son doesn't even think I live here. You know what I mean? And so that. That truly was the impetus for me to start looking beyond government work. And I just went straight to, like, the Google search bar. And I was like, what's next? What can I do? What do people who leave this line of work end up pursuing? And I settled on business school and so went to business school. And during business school, well, actually in the government, I applied to a program called, like, McKinsey and companies emerging Scholars. And I became a semifinalist there and so got onto campus and continued into those activities and thought like, yeah, this is going to be great. Once I get there, I'm like, this is not going to be great. This is absolutely not what I want to do. Like, no way. This is just another place to. Well, I mean, I won't disparage that publicly because it's a fantastic route. You know, consulting is a fantastic route. But I really got. I became enamored with the idea of starting and working on new ventures through classes I was taking. And so after that, I went after school, I went to Amazon in Seattle and worked on an emerging markets team. And that fed the beast a little bit more. And after a year or so, many of us were looking around thinking, like, why are we. Why are we doing this for someone else? Like, let's go do this ourselves. And so I left Amazon for a younger company. I think I arrived at their Series B. So it was another Educational couple of years for me to see a company grow from 20 million to 100 million plus. And I left that for Blip, which was even smaller, way smaller. And so that's been the evolution of things and it's been a fun ride, that is for sure.

A (8:05)

So, so to just educate everybody, which I, it was new to me as well. So. So Blip is digital billboards where you can basically buy at certain times like just fractionally, right? It's kind of like a fractional like Uber of billboards, right? Like tell me a little bit about it.

B (8:23)

Yeah, and when I hear digital billboards, when you guys hear digital billboards, you're probably thinking the same thing. I thought when this job opportunity like came up, I'm like billboards, like where's the time machine to take me back to the 50s? Like I do not want to spend my career around this medium. But you're right, it's an Uber style marketplace, right? And so it's, it's best understood using Uber as a proxy. You got Uber is a scheduling algorithm. It's a piece of technology in a two sided marketplace. It sits between car owners and car riders. But Uber does not ride, they do not own cars. We're the same, we're a scheduling algorithm that sits between board owners, billboards, car toppers, lawscapes, whatever, and people who advertise. And we don't own billboards and we don't advertise, we just connect the two through an open exchange. So the value proposition is, you know, with Uber you can get a 15 ride from the airport instead of a $50,000 car that you're now stuck with with us, you can pay whatever you want to pay for a week advertising in Times Square instead of figuring out who owns that board and then going on to a multi year contract and spending millions of dollars to get into Times Square. So, so it's a lot more control with the spend that you have. And the big value is it allows us SMBs to play in out of home. Because before we don't have the Runway, the purse, the budget to accept these big contracts as part of our marketing expense.

A (9:43)

Well yeah, we were talking about conferences, right? Like all the different billboards when someone gets off a plane off of certain routes, right. Like to be so nimble, to be able to be at the right time to reach the right people when you have the density that you're looking for or different kind of events. I mean is it, tell me a little bit about like use cases as well as like is it a A bid auction. Like how, how does it work?

B (10:08)

Yeah, so it's the second place bid auction. Use cases are really interesting. Interesting for us in particular because it's not something that we went out and championed. We just kind of put our heads down, built, went to work, and then came up for air and started to look at the customer data to tell us what people were doing with it. And it's like, oh my gosh, that's kind of cool. So you have everything from a proud parent who wants to tell the small town they live in that their son or daughter just graduated high school and they'll leave that up for a week. We've got an interesting use case is like musicians, mainly rappers, you know, they'll plot their tour locations, their tour map, and then they'll buy up billboards in those cities a month prior and they'll just pepper their tour path for ticket sales. Right. And like you mentioned, it gives them that control, that geo control over locations, which is something people find a lot of value in. And we see used pretty widely. You got use cases like that all the way up to, you know, Berkshire Hathaway and you know, Keller Williams, these big real estate groups who have multiple locations all over and need to shift focus from one place to the other for whatever reason. And Amazon prime, that spends a ton of money. So.

A (11:22)

Well, I mean, I just like the democratization, okay, of, of now you have these media channels that you can reach people that before you might have to have a huge budget to be able to do it and huge relationships, huge contracts to, to reach these people. I mean they're, they're opening up Disney plus and Amazon and Netflix, all these bid auction places, right? So you can build a strategy where you're hitting those multiple touch points and staying in front of people. I think that digital billboards, a lot of times when I think about it, I think about like, well, that's what display ads are, right? Like our digital billboards chasing around on your phone. You're talking about digital billboards, like on billboards, like out there, like anything that's digital, that you see it changing. Yeah. How do you connect that whole network? Right? So that's what you're doing. You're bringing that together and collecting that inventory. I think it's just a phenomenal way to get more reach. I mean the world today with even social media and how TikTok changed the algorithm. I mean, one post, you can reach millions of people, right? You can, a post. And Reddit is bigger than a traditional press release right now. You're be able to incorporate that traditional, like if they're not on their phone, they're walking around looking at something. And the more digital billboards there are, the more you can kind of build out what that experience is. Right. And so I, I think that there's a lot, there's going to be a lot of evolution of this of you know, even like VR and like the, like, like everything connecting I guess and, and, and how augmented reality, that's where I was going. Sorry. I was like VR is like really augmented reality and Google glasses and like how everything's going to be an experience. And even like what I'm seeing in the art is digital billboards, big digital billboards are part of it all. And if, and if you have access to reach people in that way and you need to touch them on multiple touch points multiple times, like this should be a tool in everyone's arsenal. Is, is really the way I thought about it. And when I saw what you were doing and military background and everything, I was like, let's talk like tell, tell me more about it. I mean what can you share any interesting insights into some of the data? Maybe expound upon the, the 7114 rule with Google? Like how are you seeing it pulled through and, and how are you seeing people use maybe multimedia like or different channels? What's their marketing mix and how they're incorporating this into it? I just really want to hear kind of use cases because I just think it's super fascinating. Like smart marketing, right? Like let's talk about smart marketing.

B (13:57)

You know, absolutely. I think, I think the, the message, you know, the, the, the answer to all that is a few fold and then I'll break these down. But it's like people need to be conditioned before they're ready to choose you. They need to know something and they need to feel something. And those somethings are pretty, like pretty defined by the interested parties, right? So people need to know something, they need to feel something. And you know, the question for a marketer whose job is to drive demand is like, how do I most effectively move a person from unaware along that path to knowing something and feeling something such that they're ready to purchase. And I think the key is to point appropriate advertising mediums at them depending on where they are along that 7114 pathway or journey to you. Right. And so that's, that's, that's what I think it is. And that's what we call smart marketing. Right. The, the what's the most efficient and effective way to condition your audience or to develop your audience to get what's called qualified impressions. And we, we push that. Smart marketing centers on this concept of qualified impressions. Qi, this is something. It's a. It's a proprietary term. It's something that we've been using internally because one thing we struggled with early on was convincing people to choose billboards as part of their mix. The first objection is like, no, I don't want to use billboards. I'm already using this. And we're always like, we're not asking you to stop using that and start using billboards. Right? We're. We're asking you to make more effective or more efficient at the top of your funnel. My favorite study ever, and I have to say, I cannot find it anywhere on the Internet anymore. Back in 2020, I took some absent time. I'm still affiliated with the government and like a I own you reserve capacity type thing. So in 2020, I spent like nine months in Syria, and when I came back, like, this thing was gone. I could not find it anywhere. But before I left, I was just championing this thing. And I remember the details well. So McDonald's launched a menu item in five cities. These were DMAs, like Dallas, Oklahoma City, that type of thing. They launched a menu item in five cities. In all five cities, they did six weeks of Facebook advertising. In four of the five cities, they layered billboards on top of the Facebook for the same period, same six weeks. And those four cities combined to outperform in sales, the control City by 729%. And that's the message we have, right? Like, utilize the full funnel marketing approach so that you can create those meaningful touch points for your target audience. Because, like you mentioned, degradation, like digital market. Nothing I say is absolute right. Digital marketing in some ways is becoming degradated. It really is, because you show an ad to someone five times, it doesn't know who you are yet. And you're trying to develop them along that path of seven hours and 11 touch points and four different platforms. Well, if they don't know who you are yet and they swipe your ad away, or they spend no time with it, they don't engage with it, the algorithm is not likely to show it to that person again. So you are just wasting money. And a lot of times at a very high CPM, 14 to $18 on Facebook, for example, to. To no avail, right? And so like, the whole message is, use the full funnel. I'm super interested in. And we have a couple of professors at a few local universities Brigham Young University being. Being the main one in Utah researching this for us, because it's like, why. Why did those four cities outperform the control city by 729%? And I am super interested in that because it brings into question the psychology of survival, which, you know, deals a lot with my, my background. And essentially what we're saying there is when you are served an ad on your phone and you're like, on the toilet, or you're playing chess or you're scrolling Instagram or whatever you do on your phone, you're not in shot mode, and you swipe that away. And very rarely do you tune in and, like, give it an honest look. But when you're confronted by a billboard for eight seconds, like, it's forever. And that was only two seconds, right? You're forced to psychologically ingest colors, logos, maybe a couple words, even if you're driving in a daze, right? You're forced to psychologically ingest those things. So the next time it surfaces on your phone at the subconscious level, your fight or flight kicks in and says, like, hey, Matt, where you recognize these colors, this logo, this word? They're in the database. Do we need to dwell an extra second to see if it's a benefit or a threat? And the answer is physiologically, yes, right? And so that's, that's the, the differentiator right there. And that's the importance of matching this medium out of home to everything else you're doing. Down funnel.

A (18:56)

Dude. Rj, this is just super interesting. Like, I love the psychology talk of, of the marketing component of it. I, I'm, I'm really fascinated. I, I would love to, when you find that study, send that through or even the research that you find, because I'm, I'm, you know, here's what I can tell you. I've run a lot of campaigns. The pushback I get is attribution, right? Like, you know, like, how do I convert? I'm spending money on this. I got, you know, CMOs, I got, you know, business owners. Hey, like, like, I'm spending money on this. Like, I want to know where that conversion is, right? And, and we're a big search marketing company, and, and Google is kind of like, today is where people are, are going through some validation. But it, it gets the attribution a lot because it's the last click, okay? It's not the first click that starts on social media, that starts on billboards, that starts somewhere else that the demand gets created, right? And what I've seen On a lot of campaigns is like radio. I've done a lot of radio stuff, right. Whether it be streaming radio, whether it be terrestrial radio. And, and we see brand lift, like heavy. Right. People are searching for the name. Google likes that. Right. They want to work with brands. They want to. There's a trust factor associated with that. I like this fight or flight instinct. I have not gone down that rabbit hole enough and I'd love to expand upon that in, in our conversation. If you have more to add to that. I, I can just tell you, I, when I look at, I look at the marketing channels we put together, what is the end goal that, I mean, the attribution, it just should be like, okay, like an average weight across them all, whatever. But what is the result of what it's pushing? Whether it be like, you know, influence, whether it be like the bottom line sales, whatever have you, like all these things combined give you a multiplier effect. And, and I like that, that you have to be confronted with something before you make a decision. I, I think that there's a, a trust component too, that when you see something on a billboard, like, there's established like a feeling of like permanence. Right. That's a legit company that's up on that billboard. You know what I mean?

B (21:02)

Yeah.

A (21:03)

With ads, you can just see ads. And I, and I think to your point too, you can run that ad and hit that same person over and over again and they're just going to keep swiping away that this is not interesting to me. So you have to hit them at a different vertical, a different angle with a different message to, to, to try to get it into their subconscious to actually like, you know, that's why the taglines are so important, to get them to actually open and open the ad or read beyond that because they're hit with so much. And, and, and that's kind of what I gutly think some of it is, is like, man, there's some permanence associated with this. You know, the, like, that message might be a little bit different, but it approaches and hits them, like you said, at a different time of what they're doing. That that puts it in their subconscious in a different way. Like, I love that.

B (21:51)

Yeah.

A (21:51)

Phenomenal.

B (21:52)

I mean, to anyone listening today, you don't say it out loud in your car or whatever, but like what, what do you read on a Chick Fil. A billboard, you know. Right. Eat more chicken. It's, it's like the quintessential billboard campaign that does exactly what you're talking about hits them from a different angle, stays in their mind. It's very authoritative, it's very consistent, and it's very trustworthy. But you know, billboards are just that. And not to mention relatively cheap. Right? And you know, if you, if you broke down what the, what smart marketing looks like, it's like you think about this pathway with seven steps that or 11 steps that people need to stand on at one point in time to start building trust with you. It's like, how do you deliver those 11 meaningful touch points across this journey from when they don't know you to them being ready to buy. And billboards have their place, right? It's not just do billboards until they see you 11 times. It's like use out of home for awareness, maybe those first two, three, four impressions because it's accessible, it's efficient, and it's authoritative. Right. One thing we worry about with digital advertising, Facebook meta, for example, is like, are our ads being served to people or to bot accounts? Because that's an expensive thing to just deal with, right? But with billboards, you can be sure that it's an actual set of eyes that's seeing that ad, right? So first couple of impressions, billboards, next couple impressions, maybe 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, keep the billboards going and then start to, in, you know, mix in some of your own, you know, your own content, the, the stuff that you're doing, online podcasts, things like that. So that when people listen to a podcast or they're fed an online ad, they can start to make the connections with the things that they're seeing out on the freeway and out in the city, things like that. And then once you're sure that a large percentage, large enough percentage of some area has seen your ad six, seven times. Yeah. Be okay layering in that expensive, you know, one to one digital call to action with a meta ad or the like. And so that's where we've tried to play in the last year. And that's what we're rolling out. What we've rolled out about six months ago is, you know, there are multiple brains at the decision table in any company, right. And one half of the table is like performance marketing attribution. I need to know how many dollars we're putting in and how many dollars we're getting out. And, and that's a hard thing to prove with brand marketing, with brand advertising, right. And you'll see a lot of companies plateau. They'll stall because that mentality will prevail. It'll win a day and they'll pump more money into paid ads and they'll do things they can, they can track because they want to show each other and their board like, this is our growth. You know what I mean? But you got brands that have figured it out. Liquid death, locally, Kizzix, you know, some of these brands that everyone knows about because they're such good brand marketers. And so we've tried to determine how can we speak to both heads so that they can believe they can agree on something at that decision table. And that's where we came up with what we call qi qualified impressions. It's going to be a disservice to force your marketers to try and bring, you know, one to one attribution to a billboard. Right? But what we can do with government data, with geopath and all the stuff we know about our demographics in our cities in the United States, we can run a statistical model that will say with a relative degree of certainty, this is how many people have seen your ad X number of times based on the length of time your ad has been up, how many times you show it, like how much, how many boards of the same area, stuff like that. And so you can buy, say, a million impressions from a billboard company and they'll say, hey, yep, this has been seen a million times. Here's the proof that it's up on that board and then you're done. But with us, we go two steps further to try and speak to both of those brains at the strategy table. Come buy the million impressions and, you know, say it's in Salt Lake City. That's, that's where we're headquartered. So I use that as an example. Say it's in Salt Lake City. We'll be able to say, hey, this is not a million people. This is 272,000 people, 9,000 of whom have seen it one time, 11,000 of whom have seen it twice, 43,000 saw it three times, and so on and so forth. And so we can produce this statistical, like bell curve that shows, all right, a critical mass of people in this area have seen your ad more than four times. It's time to feel, okay, layering on that expensive digital marketing because they're primed, they know you, they're ready to go. And then the third thing we can do in that same scenario for the same customers to say, like, when we do have a critical mass of people who have seen you four or five times, we can help you by retargeting. So we'll put A geofence through a partner. Put a geofence around either your store or our board and then anytime they drive through, we can shoot a mobile ad right to their device. And so this is our answer. This idea of qualified impressions is our answer to that. Why can't I give proper attribution to billboards? Well, let's give us something we can track and measure and that's a qualified impression. And so I'll end that little rant with a quick definition of what a qualified impression is. And a qualified impression is an impression delivered to someone who has seen you at least six times. If you deliver an impression to someone who's seen you once, twice, three times, four, five or six times, or four or five times, that's a general impression. But the impression becomes qualified once they've seen you six times. Because now you can feel really good about the trust that you've started to build and really good about spending a little bit more on the digital front to convert these customers.

A (27:32)

No, I love that. I, I mean the data I've seen is like when, anytime even you're running digital ads, you gotta wait about two weeks to see any kind of real like data. Like you gotta hit them a few times to, to, to let it soak into the psyche, you know. And one of the things that we, we mentioned previously that I think is worth bringing up and I think this is a great time for this call, at least in, in my journey. You know, everything's, it's interesting because certain people are brought to you at different times, right? Like you think it might be serendipitous, but there's probably like something to that. But at the conference, the Brighton conference that I was at, the keynote speakers all talked about how click volume is going down and how you need to build a brand, right? And it's, and build it on other people's platforms. Build it everywhere you can, but build it in the, in the mind, right, of, of your target customer. It doesn't need to be on your now, email does great. Okay. Email still crushes it. Okay. And I think everybody said it was going to die for a long time, but a lot of people talk about, hey, you got to build it on your own property. You never know how these social media platforms are going to change things. I mean, they're starting to become more like public utilities to a certain degree. And I think that they're going to be around and like any of the rules, like, are probably good for the whole. And you should navigate around those, but you should be Everywhere, right? You should be everywhere and you should be building your brand in the mind of the client. And it shouldn't matter on the click, right? It shouldn't matter on the attribution if you know that they're seeing it, because that is an issue. I mean the, there, there's even companies out there that their whole job is they get a percentage of ad spend to, to get out all the bots, right? And this one company I was talking to, you had to spend a million dollars and they charged 1% of the ad spend to basically get it rid of all the bots. Well, if you have to spend at least a million dollars, how many of those clicks are bots and versus real humans, right? Like so, so, so there's all these different components in this complex world on how to reach people and the right answer is like all of them, I believe. Right. And this should be a tool in the tool belt and it really should be looking at, well, do you have enough budget one to figure out how many channels you need to be on? Like maybe talk to me a little bit about, for, let's talk about a smaller company and a bigger company maybe like, or give me like a couple scenarios how they might incorporate this. Is that add on strategy, right? Like not the sole strategy, but an add on strategy to what they're doing digitally to expand their reach, to expand, you know, the customer base. I, I, I've even seen data for some different kind of platforms and different kind of things. Some of these people, like you might not, you might be able to reach people in a billboard that aren't on social media, right? Like there, there's probably a data set of, of people that are not on some of these social media channels that, well, you're, you're reaching them in the physical world. Right. And so just kind of curious how you, how you would structure something like that for big and small companies.

B (30:34)

Yeah, good question. A lot of caveats here. So I'll start out by saying like everything I would recommend doing starts with who you're targeting. Right? So really, really in depth understanding of where your ICP lives, you know, where they work, what they do, their hopes and dreams, all that because your company, your brand needs to become part of that world for them. Right? And so if in that research you find that your ICP spends time on the road, spends time downtown or stuff like that, then billboards are an appropriate medium for you to add into the mix at the right, at the right time. Right.

A (31:13)

Their target Persona, you gotta know your target Persona and A lot of people just start marketing without even thinking through all that stuff. Like, I think that's super critical.

B (31:20)

Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of spend for like a small company, we tell this to people all the time, like very, very bluntly, upfront. Because the last thing we want is for someone to try us for a month and be like, nothing happened. Well, I can tell you right now, nothing is going to happen in a month. Right. You need to think about 90 days because you're saturating an area so that people see you multiple times. Right. You're trying to have that eat more chicken effect in one particular area so that people can just recall the taste of your product or the feeling they get when they use it or eat it or whatever it is that that's what you're trying to affect, the type of change you're trying to affect. Right. And so 90 days, typically pretty safe, pretty safe window. And depending on the size of the city, take Salt Lake, for example, it needs to be between 3 and $5,000. That will get you 60% of the population in these DNAs, roughly 60% of the population to see you six times. And, and so that, that's just general rule of thumb, but we have tools. You give us your icp, you tell us where you live and where you want to target, and we'll run it through the tool. But Generally it's like 3 to 5k a month for 90 days and you'll start seeing results.

A (32:32)

Awesome. So I, I think this should be a tool in everyone's tool belt. I, I really thought what you're doing is fascinating. So I'm so glad I had you on and, and could share you with the audience before we go. Like, what is one unknown secret of Internet marketing that you might not have shared? Or if you want to repackage it in a different way, Just if someone is like, you know, wanting to take something away, what's the one biggest takeaway?

B (32:55)

I guess, and, and I did share a little bit of this, so let me try and repackage it. But I think it's, I think it's widely overlooked that even when we say we want to be the most creative company, we want to be in people's minds. Like, just listen to the language there. We, we, we. It's all about me. It's all about me. This is what I want to do. This is what I think. And I think the change that has not happened in companies who are struggling or plateauing is that, that we needs to be changed to they. Right. The takeaway is people need to be conditioned. They need to know something and feel something about you before they're ever ready to choose you. So let me say that a different way. That's not correct. I need to be as creative as possible and be everywhere they are so that they choose me. Like that's what we do. That is not right. People need to know something and feel something before they're ready to choose you. And so the question for all of us as marketers is like, how do I most effectively move these people along that development path of trust toward them being ready to choose me? And the key is to point appropriate advertising mediums at that, you know, at different stages of that path. And I think that's what we all miss. We start with us. We don't start with them nearly enough. Even if we say we do like our actions truly do not start with them nearly enough.

A (34:19)

Man, I love the psychology. Thank you so much RJ for, for coming on show. How do people find out more or, or reach out to you? I know that we got blitbillboards.com is probably like one of the main ways. How else might people find out more about what your all this psychology that you're talking about as well as like your services? Because I'm, I'm eating it up myself.

B (34:41)

So yeah, website is the main place. We have a blog there with some of these psychological rants. We also we'll put in in the stuff that we send out here in conjunction with you, we'll put like a landing page connected to this podcast for anyone who wants to try this as part of their marketing mix. Right. We'll you know@offers.blitbillboards.com podcast come and create a campaign and we'll match your spend 25% to get you started.

A (35:13)

Well everyone, I'll put those links in the show notes. If you want to create your own scop in the space, definitely reach out to to rj. Thank you so much for coming on. If anybody really enjoyed this, please share it. Please follow Please Subscribe Leave a Review all that interaction helps even leave a little emoji or something like that. Thank you so much for for listening. And if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet, reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business. And until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.