The One Ad Channel That Doesn't Annoy People (And How to Buy It)

Speaker A: For years, marketers have been obsessed with the digital channels. Web development, social media, email marketing, paid ads. But one of the oldest advertising mediums has quietly fallen to the wayside. But it's also perhaps one of the smartest channels you can tap into. So today's billboards, yes, the ones that you drive past on the interstate or see in Times Square are no longer just static signs on the highway. They are digital and they're data driven. And they're capable of changing in real time based on everything from here's the weather to live sporting events and who. Here's who just won. Pick your football game. Hello, and welcome to the Humans of Growth podcast, where we talk about the stories and strategies behind business growth and development. I'm your host, Ali Hathcock, and today's episode is sponsored by Inkbound. Now, the average mailbox only receives two, maybe three pieces of mail per day, and most people receive less than 20 handwritten cards per year. Inkbound sends real personalized cards written by real humans with real ink to the prospects and clients worth reaching. So if you're looking for a new way to prospect or reach your current clients on a new channel and increase that client retention, check out tryinkbound. Com. That's T r Y I n K B O U. Today's guest on the show is Sarah Carney, the VP of, uh, Programmatic Media over at Big Outdoor. In this episode, we are breaking down how modern outdoor advertising actually works. And to be really honest with you, it is so different than what I expected because I'm used to the old Chick Fil A billboards from the 90s and early 2000s. And that's my m preconception of outdoor advertising. And we talk about why it is so much more measurable than most people think possible and how brands of all shapes and sizes, yes, even the smaller ones, can be using it to reach the right audiences at the right moment. Let's dive into the episode. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Hi, Ali. It's nice to be here.

Speaker A: So, Sarah, I introduced a little bit of the professional side of you, but in a sentence or a story, who are you? As a human, what is bringing you joy right now?

Speaker B: Uh, me, as a human working, um, professional in New York City, not, um, allowed to talk about my partner or kids. So we'll not do that. Uh, but what's bringing me joy right now, honestly, from a recency bias perspective, is just how much the city has come alive in the past month or so with all the activity and, like, events that have been going on throughout the city with the Knicks winning and the city just all rallying behind them and it coming to life in every way and bringing every New Yorker together. And now the World cup happening and there's block parties happening all over the city in M Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in Jersey City and Hoboken. And it's just bringing everyone together to watch the World cup as well as also heading over to the Meadowlands in New Jersey to watch it in person. And I just love that it's bringing everyone out in person together to experience things in the real world. Um, and it's just making the city come alive. It's just absolutely wonderful to see and right when summer's starting. So it's just, it's such good vibes. Mhm.

Speaker A: I love it. I feel like from all the news that I've seen out of New York over the past couple months, New York is the state that everyone wants to be in right now. You guys have, out of all the good news, the bad news, you guys have the most good news coming out of New York compared to every other state right now.

Speaker B: Like, great. Yeah, I mean, we're trying. I mean, there's definitely, you know, challenges still. We all have challenges. Every state has their challenges. But you know, I feel like overall the city is having a big resurgence and it's a growth period and everyone should come visit. It's amazing here.

Speaker A: So yeah, it's such a fun city. I miss being in New York. So today we're talking about something that we don't normally talk about and that is outdoor advertising. Um, we've talked a lot on the podcast about social media and paid ads and SEO and everything that happens like on your phone or your normal computer screen and even like your TV screen. But today we're talking a little bit about like all things outdoor advertising. So for someone who has never bought outdoor advertising before, how do you explain programmatic digital out of home advertising in like normal everyday human language?

Speaker B: Oh boy. Okay, normal everyday human language. Let's like act like I'm talking to my mom, I guess.

Speaker A: Yep, 100%.

Speaker B: Um, so anyway, I mean, outdoor advertising overall, if we want to like take a step back, is it can be a variety of different screens. It's not going to be just a mobile screen. It's not just going to be a TV screen. It can be a large format screen in Times Square. That's a digital billboard. It can be a digital billboard alongside a highway. It can be a small screen on the top of an ATM in a convenience store. It can be the screen on top of a taxi, uh, that's playing, or a screen that's in the subway station on the wall that you're watching while you're waiting for the subway to come. There are so many different types of outdoor advertising and outdoor screens. So basically what programmatic does and what's so great about programmatic advertising for outdoor specifically is that instead of having to contract out individually with every single one of those publishers who's owning individual screens, um, which is a big investment on their side, which is also very different from a mobile or, you know, CTV publisher. Um, basically they have a lot of capex investment from having to invest in all the hardware. Right. That goes into the screens and such.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And um, so basically programmatic what it does is it allows all of that to be combined and sourced together so that if you are wanting to buy, you know, a single dma, you want to really penetrate New York City and you just want to penetrate Manhattan. You can find all of the screens, all the different types of screens in one place on one platform and purchase them all together. So you can really take over an entire city. Or if you want, you can be very selective in how you do it and you could just target. I only want to be targeting transit type ads. I'm um, a transit type inventory. So I only want to be targeting, you know, taxis or subways or subway stations. And that's in particular because my product that I'm advertising relates specifically to people on the go and such. So it's very nuanced in that way and there's a lot of opportunity for targeting. And I would say from a programmatic perspective, it's just, what's great is that it's bringing everything together and streamlining all of that supply so that it's a much easier transaction and a much easier buy. Um, one of the great things about digital out of home and out of home in general is that it's become digital. For the longest time, out of home was not digital, it was static. It was actual paper printed or painted signs, um, or vinyls. And now that so many boards and screens are digital, we're able to hook things up programmatically to the pipes and, and it just makes the transaction process so much quicker and so much more streamlined across the board. Yeah.

Speaker A: Cause I think like when I think of billboards, like my mind goes back to like the 1990s billboard, where people would have to like go climb up the really tall ladder with like a thousand pieces of paper and like, uh, stick it up and it's like, okay, these are the campaigns that are generally run by bigger entities like Chick fil A and McDonald's. And you see them on the side of the highway. And it's by all of, like, the legacy brands for brand awareness compared to, like, now everything's. So there's still the, like, the paper billboards on the side of the highway. Yes, but it's, uh, so much more. It's so much more digital now. So what is, like, the shift from like, the paper stuff, I guess, to digital allow you to do in terms of, like, campaigns that you couldn't have done, like, in the 1990s, early 2000s?

Speaker B: I mean, one of the things that's amazing is that you're able to run so many more campaigns at once. So when you're running a static campaign or like, and you're having to do a vinyl, like, literally, you. You'd have to run the same advertiser for four weeks or for three weeks, because you literally can't be changing the creative every day. There's not enough manpower. It doesn't make sense to be going and changing the creative every 24 hours and repainting it. It just literally, it's not possible now with, like, with digital, you can be circulating and having a loop where every 10 seconds a new ad is coming up or every 15 seconds, depending on just how you're structuring your loop. Basically what we would say in the advertising world and digital out of home. Um, and basically you can then run 10 advertisers back to back and keep cycling through. Uh, that also opens it up so that we are able to do day parting as well. Never something we could do before in the old static, digital, um, out of home world and digital out of home.

Speaker A: What does that mean? Day party? Yeah.

Speaker B: So day partying means that basically, let's say you're Starbucks.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: You only want to run from 7:00am to 9:30am um, during the morning commute, you can set your programmatic campaign to only run from 7 to 9:30am targeting people along the way of their commute, whether that's as they're driving on the highway, whether that's they're picking up gas, whether that's in their sub, in the subway station, walking along the streets. And that way they know they're targeting you at the right time of day for what they want and for what action they want you to take as a consumer. Um, and so that kind of stuff is very cool that you could never do before. And in static out of Home. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: So it sounds like you can run like a lot more of like the time sensitive marketing. Kind of similar almost to the way you can with meta ads where it's like, my ad's going to run either like late at night or early in the morning. You have the ability to choose like the specific time slots you want it to run. And then I'm also assuming you can, you can do different ads for like different days of the week or hey, the weather changed all of a sudden. Now we need all new creative. We just push it live.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: And we're able to make these like minute changes. So like if you were, if you had billboards or signage, uh, outside of like a conference and you're advertising and it's storming the vendor who's paying for those slots could be like, hey, stop by our booth for free umbrellas.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: Switch things out. Like, how long does it take to push. We have new creative to push it out. I'm assuming it's relatively ish instantaneously now.

Speaker B: Pretty much real time pushing the creative. Um, it depends on what the refresh rate of the screen is overall, but it pretty much can happen within a minute or two. Uh, we do this all the time with dynamic creative. That's what we call it typically. And that's where you will be doing things like changing the creative based on certain triggers, whether that's weather triggers or based on scores. Uh, so. Or based on, okay, yeah, who's winning the game. Right. And then you change the color of the creative based on who's winning the XYZ World cup game or.

Speaker A: Yeah, okay, okay, keep going, keep going. I love this. I'm here for it.

Speaker B: Or we have, you know, uh, creatives where we have things where it can pull in data about even like the stock market. So it could advertise like, okay, we want you to buy this XYZ index fund. Like if you're advertising in office buildings, let's say, or to a different, totally different crowd. Um, when the stock market does this, we want to show this, but when it does this, we want to be showing our bond product. So there's all kinds of different ways that you can leverage the data from an API perspective to get that real time data and then switch out the creatives real time based on triggers, including the weather, like what you said, um, which is very common too, where it's like, okay, we show a hoodie when we know it's 60 degrees out and we show a tank top when we know it's 90 degrees out. And they can also do it where it's like, this gets really fancy. But, like, where they know that they should be showing a hoodie in 75 degrees in Miami, because people in Miami think 75 degrees is cold, but in 75 degrees in Maine, they should be showing a tank top because that's very warm in Maine. So, like, they're. They're even able to get that advanced where they know different behavior of people in different areas.

Speaker A: I love that. So when it comes to, like, time sensitive, like, programmatic media, like, what's some of your favorite campaigns that you've seen?

Speaker B: Well, I have to say that one we did very recently, which was so fun, was actually for the Knicks. Um, it was before game four in New York. Uh, which was on Saturday, I believe. Yes. Saturday night. I got a call on Friday afternoon from one of my reps at, uh, Bistar, which is an out of home, programmatic, uh, ssp, DSP company. And she was like, I have this campaign I. They really want to run with the Knicks. Like, they might want to sub out creative, depending on what happens tomorrow night. Can you get this live and in New York City, like in Times Square now? And we were like, sure, let's do it.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: That night we set up the deal IDs. We literally had the creative. We, like, sent them the specs. We were developing creative. And these are for like two spectacular billboards in Times Square. So these are not like just standard run of the mill ctv.

Speaker A: This is the big stuff. Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. Yeah. This is like stuff that can be 3D. This wasn't 3D, but like, it can be that kind of stuff. Like screens.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a whole nother thing.

Speaker A: Okay, we'll get there in a second.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so we were like, okay. And so we get them. They develop the creative within, like a few hours. 10 o' clock at night, we're finally, like, pumping the creative onto the screens. Then the next day, the Knicks win. And an hour late, like 20 minutes later, they're like, okay, we have new creative. Can you go into the platform? It's 11pm at night. Approve it. And 11pm, like after the game in Times Square, we were showing like, Nick's creative creative, like, Go Nicks, like, all over Times Square. That was brand new and branded for Epic games. This was Epic Games. And it was.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Fortnite specifically.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: For Epic games. And it was like, it was huge. And then they ran, like, for eight days. Yeah. After that, congratulating them. So it just, it was like that was amazing. It was all done within, yeah, I don't know, eight hours pretty much. And then we were subbing out the creative in real time so that they were adjusting it based on, like, who was winning the game and stuff. So it was really, really cool.

Speaker A: So you had some late nights with that as well?

Speaker B: Yes, we did have some late nights, but honestly, Programmatica is so. I mean, maybe I'm also kind of like a dork, but it's, like, so easy that, like, you know, you can, like, quickly log onto your computer and just hit, like, a few buttons, uh, if you know what you're doing, and hit, like, approve, approve, approve. And then, like, you're good. You know what I mean? If you've got things set up right. I guess that's the key, though. You've got to make sure that you've got all that, like, ops and everything. The tech has to be set up properly beforehand to know that everything's going to run properly.

Speaker A: Right. And it's not like when we say creative, it's the design. But you're not creating designs from scratch, necessarily.

Speaker B: Yes, we're not creating designs from scratch, but it's also. It's ensuring that the creative fits the proper format for the screen, how it's developed. Um, and just based on the. So one of the screens that they were actually buying was actually two screens in Times Square, and they're stacked on top of each other and they sync. Um, so it's making sure that they have two creatives that work to run together at the same time, that look good together and that they sync and, like, run at the same time together so that they look, you know, professional and, like, they're supposed to be together. Um, yeah, cool.

Speaker A: I. I love. I don't do programmatic. It's one of the few things I don't do. So this is fascinating. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So, okay, so you mentioned 3D, and I can't not, not go there. So tell me about. It's been a while since I've been in Times Square. I'm used to the 2D stuff that we have, like, in Nashville, because we ain't bougie. Tell me about the 3D stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, 3D has become, like, a thing in the past few years. Um, this is on, like, Direct Digital out of home and Programmatic Digital out of home. So. Okay, there's like, some units that are more, like, rounded or have corners or are curved, and those depending on how you develop the creative, you can make it look like they are 3D. So right now we have outside of 42nd and. On 42nd and 8th Avenue, right outside of Port Authority, we have multiple 3D creatives running. Um, and it's two screens across the street from each other, and they basically play off of each other. So one of. Right now we have a Game of Thrones creative running. And, like, the dragon is, like, popping out of the screen, like, onto 8th Avenue for. From the screen. Yeah, from. Okay. It's really cool. I can send it to you after.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Okay. We'll link it. We'll link it in the show. We'll link this in the show. Notes. This is fascinating. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then we have another one for, uh. I think it's a fee. I think it's Anheuser Busch. No. Or FIFA. I can't remember who it is exactly, but it's a soccer. It's like they're kicking the ball and it's. The ball is, like, going across the screen and. Okay. To the other screen. It's really cool. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's so cool. Okay. Technology has evolved since I've been in, like, downtown New York.

Speaker B: Manhattan was, like, really over. It's, like, very overwhelming, but very fun now. And it's like, if you ever need something to do with kids under the age of 10m to just, like, have their senses completely stimulated, like, just walk them around Times Square.

Speaker A: You give them, like, a scavenger hunt, like, checklist from the.

Speaker B: Find all the things. Yeah, find.

Speaker A: Find all the colors and find all the shapes and then find all the animals. Just work your way through.

Speaker B: We do, like, times where walks. We'll do, like, for, like, clients. Like, we'll walk. Do walks around to, like, of all the different billboards or, like, we'll do tours.

Speaker A: That's super cool. Because that's the thing is it's like, it's hard to, like, I'm thinking on a client side, if you're newer to programmatic, it's like, it's hard to visualize what is this actually going to look like, where is it? And understand, like, the context of everything else that's going on around it.

Speaker B: Yes. That is a difficult thing from a programmatic perspective, which is where, like, we work really hard where we can, depending on, like, how much campaigns are spending, to provide actual photography and pictures of the campaign in real life, like, once it's run, because it's so impactful to see it on the street. Like, when you see all the people walking by and, like, you see the screen there in a photo rather than just like, okay, it's a.

Speaker A: You just, you know, it ran and

Speaker B: just on a screen. Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. And this reminds me of like when you see like, authors will have their like, book cover go up on Times Square and they'll all like, take pictures with their book for like the two seconds that it shows up on screen.

Speaker B: That's the other thing that we get a lot of is like, there's a lot of kind of like social amplification from digital out of home. Um, and like, they'll be. There's a lot of influencers that will kind of gravitate towards their digital out of home creative. And a lot of times like post in front of it, like you were saying, and then like amplify it on their social. So we've seen that so many times with. Which is just amazing for, um, the channel in general. And it's also just really good for their brand.

Speaker A: Yeah. So speaking with that, a lot of business owners come with the idea that outdoor advertising is only for like the big brands with the big budgets. And then you see influencers. It's like, yeah, this. Obviously they have money, but, like, what do you see in terms of like, spending? Is it still mostly legacy brands at, uh, what size of company should you start thinking about? Per. Out of house, programmatic, like this?

Speaker B: Honestly, I see a lot of small brands and a lot of small budgets. I see a lot of local, um, I see a lot of education, universities. We see a lot of travel, like visit Austin, you know, visit Tampa, those kind of things. Um, I see a lot of CPG too. So like all kinds of drinks, Pepsi, that kind of thing. Um, which I guess are, yeah, definitely like the bigger brands for sure. But I also like a lot of smaller, like, brands that kind of want to make an impact. Like, good. Are the sunglasses. Have you heard of those?

Speaker A: I don't think so.

Speaker B: Uh, you'd probably recognize it. A few. Okay. Like, like, kind of like some of those like niche like influencer type brands. A lot of times run with us. Uh, yeah, that you would see like on an Instagram or something. Uh, so yeah, I mean, we honestly, it's like it can be run of the mill from anything because a lot of it has to do with where you're targeting and who you're targeting. So.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: Now if, if you are a local business, you know, a lot of times you only want to be running in three zip codes. And so it's easiest just to buy programmatically those three zip codes and find all the inventory in that area. Um, so, yeah, it just, it really depends. We, we have both. Meanwhile, we also have big clients like Fidelity running with us. Um, okay. And you know, clients from China even running with us. So it runs the gamut. Okay.

Speaker A: I love it. So a business is thinking about outdoor programmatic. When do they start shifting budget from traditional Google meta LinkedIn ads to hey now it's a little. I'm assuming it's harder to track the outdoor programmatic than your traditional. So how do you find like the balance of somebody who's kind of just starting to dive into these channels?

Speaker B: So it's so much has developed in digital out of home when it comes to attribution and measurement and how you can track like just return on adspend and just store sales lift, store traffic lift, all of those kind of things. Um, so first I would say the one thing is needing to understand what DSP you can use to access the digital out of home inventory because you're not going to be able to access it through Meta or gam. Right.

Speaker A: Okay, Break, break it, break down. That DSP stands for demand side platform. Great.

Speaker B: That's going to be like if you've heard of like the Trade desk, um, or Yahoo DSP or uh, or let's see a domni, uh, or like how I was saying Vistar has one. And those are the platforms that you would need as a marketer or your agency needs access to as a marketer to go in and access all of the inventory in digital out of home inventory. And that's how you go in and actually create your plans. You put in your floor, pricing the price you want to purchase, purchase the inventory for where you want to purchase the inventory, how long you want to run for what flights, all of that kind of stuff. Uh, so it's figuring out that I think first because okay, like you said on LinkedIn, they're not going to have access to the digital out of home inventory. So you have to make sure you're working with like an omnichannel demand side platform first. Um, and then I think it's a matter of understanding what your KPIs are overall. But really there are amazing ways to measure attribution for out of home. So you can look at sales conversions if you want. You could literally track website. You know, we can pixel something. People can track what they do is they'll track depending on where the screen is. Okay. They can track when the campaign ran and exactly what time the campaign ran and what day it ran.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And who was around based on their device. And then from their device, they can use that to track. Then did they go to the website, did they purchase something? Or did their device which is connected to their laptop or another device in their household go to the website, right, and purchase something. So this is where things like ID graphs come in place where you're matching all of the people and the devices so that you can track, you know, okay, these are the people that were in the vicinity when that ad was shown on that subway stop or in the spectacular screen. And then those are the. And then those people took this action on their device. Um, and so that's where you can start to really see actual measurement and change things. Now the thing is that that takes a little bit of time, right? So you need to have a 30 day back. You need to have a little bit of time to gather that data. You're not going to have that click through data that you would have on mobile like in 24 hours, right, because it takes a little time. So you have to have a little more patience in out of Home. But really the, the success that if you look at any studies out there, out of Home, like by far outweighs like even CTV when it comes to performance from a campaign perspective, um, especially if you consistently run out of home, there's like a very good long tail on it where it doesn't drop off and people continue to remember. And also one of the great things about out of Home is that I heard this recently in a talk was that um, out of Home is like one of the only advertising channels that doesn't annoy people.

Speaker A: I like. Yeah, because you're not being bombed. It's the one channel, like when I sit thing and I'm like I'm on the road. It's like I see at one ad and then I see the next. It's not like I'm seeing 17 ads all at New York Times Square is different. But like I'm only seeing one. I mean my eyes are supposed to be on the road, like knock on wood a little bit. But it's the one channel where you're only like there's not competition. You're not competing against 50 other ads.

Speaker B: And it's not like interfering with what you're trying to do. Like I'm m trying to look at a post or like read an article on the New York Times and I'm flooded with ad. It's like trying to do like an out of home. It's completely passive. Like it's not, it's not interfering with me and my like Journey in the day and what I'm trying to accomplish, it's just there. And so it's the one medium that is like, not annoying people. There's not bad perception against it. And the other thing that's great is that there's no, there's very limited like, brand risk with it because you're never going to be put next to like a weird political article or like on a weird website you'll never see.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: That never happens on out of home. Right. You might be next to a weird person, your ad, but, yep, that's it.

Speaker A: And that's the, uh, that's the interesting thing. It's like when you don't know what post somebody just saw before they see your meta ad. And. But if I'm advertising on a billboard on a highway or on like the little thing on top of a taxi, I know what those people are thinking. I know what they're experiencing nine times out of 10. And so I can tailor my messaging to that compared to the hope and pray. Like, I don't know if they just saw a political ad or religious ad or God knows what or some like, who knows what my ad is being served beside. And I think that's. We could do a whole podcast episode of that. It's like, we don't know. Like with most marketing, you just don't know for sure. You could do a whole you just don't know context. Like, you don't know, like, you even if you serve it in the, like what's in the morning, like in the mornings before people leave for work or in the evenings on Netflix, you don't know the context of what's going on in their home. And like, there's some like, nuance of like, yeah, you're choosing based upon like, interest based targeting, et cetera, et cetera, and like this type of house household. But like, if I'm in the car or I'm walking to work, like, yeah, I don't know if there's going to be a wreck two miles in front of me. But generally speaking, I know what people are doing. Yeah, we're doing on that route. Yeah, they're, uh. Right. And I know what they're thinking about. I know they're thinking about what am I doing at work today. I know people are paying attention to like the red light or the traffic stop or the car that's driving slow in front of them. And I don't have to worry about like, any of the other context that's going on on these other channels or in their life for the most part. I think that's fascinating.

Speaker B: Yeah, I. I know. I think it's like, super interesting because it's. We're kind of bombarded with ads all the time, so.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: To not have that is. I don't know. It's kind of a feature to not have that.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And. And it's fascinating. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole too far, but when it comes. Goes back to tracking, I. We tend. I think as business owners, we tend to think of like billboard advertising or out of home advertising is something that's just brand awareness and you just do it because you're supposed to and you can't. You can't track it. But there's. This is creepy on like the consumer privacy side of everything. Like, it gets really. Like, this is the stuff where it's like this. The marketer's like, oh, this is badass. The. The consumer part of me who wants to go live in the middle of nowhere is like, what the is this about?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, but, you know, but in the nicest way possible. It's like, they can do what. And it's like. And we see this in terms of like government and protests and people and the government and the FBI, nci, knowing where you are at all times. But as marketers, like, we're able to see it's like not like the individual person necessarily. Sometimes you can. But there, you know, these people saw this ad and there is a level of attribution that you couldn't get 10 years before. So, you know, here's how many people. Ish. Drove past this billboard on their way to work or this many. The taxi where your belt sign was on the top of it drove past this m. This many people saw it, and this many people scanned the QR code. Or you got a surge of traffic around this time.

Speaker B: Mm.

Speaker A: From the 10 seconds that I was up on the screen at. On Broadway in Nashville.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, totally. Yeah. So I mean, the attribution. I. It's come a long way with out of home. And like you said, it's typically like, I can't. The measurement partners that I work, like the third party work with the third party measurement partners. Yep. I never see the actual individuals data. And so like anonymized. Right. And right at the household level and stuff. I mean, they probably can dig down to it if they need to. But, um, typically that's why there's like the entire industry of clean rooms and all of those kind of things, which we could probably also Have a whole nother podcast about. Yes, but yeah, that is a whole, whole area of things, for sure. Um, but yeah, it's typically not like you're tracking Ally.

Speaker A: You're right.

Speaker B: You're tracking a look alike of Ally or someone similar to ally. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yep. 100. It's based upon like the demographics then de. Anonymized.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: To some degree. Yeah, I love it. So we're going to pivot a little bit into some rapid fire. So you've been in marketing for a hot minute, you've seen a lot of things. So this is going to be channel agnostic, industry agnostic. Just from your experience, what you've seen. You ready?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. Most overrated marketing channel.

Speaker B: Linear doesn't matter. No, linear.

Speaker A: Linear.

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Put some con. Put some context on that for people who don't know that jargon.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, like cable, like old cable or like NBC. Like.

Speaker A: Oh, the good. The old. The old stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean CTV is fine. Ish. But I still think CTV is a little overrated. But, um, yeah, definitely linear.

Speaker A: Okay. Most underrated marketing channel.

Speaker B: I mean, I have to say digital out of home. I, I can't, I can't not say that. It's also like the smallest piece of the pie. Well, okay, I would say digital out of home and probably audio. I would say like podcasting. Although I think podcasting is getting a, a good wind against it. But like, those are the two. Okay.

Speaker A: If you had to start a non marketing business tomorrow, what would it be?

Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, you know, if I was like really smart, uh, I'd probably start some AI company because that's what everybody's doing. But if I really just wanted to live out my passion, I'd probably start like an interior design company. Okay. Enough money in the world. I would just go design houses. Sounds fabulous.

Speaker A: I will be your. I will be your first client. There's nothing on my walls. Great. Come. Great. Uh, okay, you have $20,000 to grow your interior design business. How are you spending it?

Speaker B: I'm definitely spending it on a. Some sort of website. Um, definitely spending it on, um, probably some social type advertising. Um, and definitely spending it on like contracts with vendors to get like bulk discounts on items and stuff.

Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I think that's the biggest stuff right away.

Speaker A: Okay. And what is the best marketing campaign you have seen in the past two years?

Speaker B: Okay, well, I mean, there's a ton, but I'm gonna say one of ours because that's what I'm gonna do. Good. I love, um, was weird. Got a ton of press. Again, I'm going to talk about the Knicks because that's, you know, all we've been talking about, um, on those huge screens, um, outside of Port Authority. And it was a screen, screens that said legacy past. And it was of the knicks Winning in 1973, I think. Don't quote me if I'm wrong. Okay. And then passing the ball to Jalen Brunson. Uh, yeah. On the other side from this year. And they were literally, the ball was passing from one side to the other and it was legacy past. And I got featured on Fallon when he interviewed Brunson and, like, it was so emotional. He was like, how does it feel to be featured on a billboard? Like, what does that mean to you to be featured in Times Square? And it's just like, moments like that are just so, you know, you just can't buy moments like that. You just can't. So, yeah, I love that campaign. It's still running. If anyone wants to walk through Times

Speaker A: Square, if you're in New York, stop by and it'll. Let's be honest, we're probably going to be bragging about that for at least a couple more months.

Speaker B: Yeah. Give her.

Speaker A: Most likely. Awesome. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show today. If people would like to connect with you further, what's the best way for them to find you?

Speaker B: Um, they can definitely reach out to me at my email, which is Sarah S A R A H@bigoutdoor.com or you can find me on LinkedIn or feel free to go to our website, which is bigoutdoor.com awesome.

Speaker A: For everyone tuning in today, thank you so much for joining. And remember, while everyone else is flooding social media and inboxes, the smartest move you can make is to show up where nobody else is in the mailbox. We will catch you on the next episode of Humans of Growth.

Speaker B: Thank you.