Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth The Art & Science Behind Billboards About this episode Founder and CEO of THE HARKEY GROUP, Scott Harkey, delves into the art and science behind billboards. Discover how this full-service, integrated marketing organization navigates the dynamic needs of its clients with a consumer-centric, performance-focused approach. Gain insights into the creative inspiration and award-winning strategies that drive success across various industry verticals. Show NotesConnect With: Scott Harkey: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 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 iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 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 use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Scott Harkey. Scott is the founder of The Harkey Group, which is a full-service, integrated marketing agency with consumer-centric, performance-focused, and creatively-inspired teams across multiple industries and verticals like Monogram, which focuses on the hospitality industry, or Nomadic for digital creative, and of course, Matter Films, their video production firm. Scott is also the host of the Rebrand Podcast, which is a member of the I Hear Everything Network. He's a wonderful guy, one of my favorite people, and today Scott and I are going to discuss the art and science behind billboards.
1:57 Speaker 04 All right, here's the conversation with Scott Harkey, the founder and CEO of The Harkey Group. Scott, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:06 Speaker 05 Good to be here, Ben. Yay. We met on the Martech Podcast multiple years ago and we're bringing it right back.
2:12 Speaker 04 One of my favorite guests and then you decided you wanted to do your own podcast and we helped you build it.
2:18 Speaker 05 Great.
2:19 Speaker 04 And it's good to have you back here. I feel like it's a home game for me. You're the road team. And we've changed around a lot of how we do the Martech Podcast since you were here before we started. Instead of doing longer form content, we get to do these more quick hitter, fun style contents. We call them segments. Can I throw a couple of segments at you to talk about what you've been learning about out of home?
2:39 Speaker 05 Absolutely. I love it. I heard more like, kind of like a PTI setup, so.
2:42 Speaker 04 There you go. So let's start off with an elevator pitch. You and I are going to New York City. We're going up to the top of the Chrysler Building. I think that's in New York. Did I get it right? Maybe that's the wrong city.
2:52 Speaker 05 It's Detroit, isn't it? I don't know.
2:54 Speaker 04 Detroit? What's the big building, the Empire State?
2:57 Speaker 05 Empire State Building.
2:58 Speaker 04 There's a million big buildings. We're going up to the top floor. Give me your elevator pitch. Who are you and why are you a specialist at billboards?
3:05 Speaker 05 Before I started my group of agencies at the Harkey Group, I started an agency called OH Partners, which is an integrated full-service, you know, more regional challenger brand agency. But I ran a billboard company called Molina Outdoor. And the guy that taught me about billboards, his name was Manny Molina. He was Artie Moreno's college roommate at U of A. Artie Moreno, of course, is the founder of what we know today as Outfront. Before that, it was CBS Viacom. Before that, it was Outdoor Systems. But Artie Moreno is considered one of the pioneers, like Carl Eller and Ted Turner, of billboards. Now, of course, Artie owns the Angels, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
3:41 Speaker 04 Let's not hold that against him.
3:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. So I learned billboards from him. We had about 60 billboards in Phoenix and Las Vegas. I learned a lot about billboards and really grew an affinity and love for billboards. Throughout the last 16 years, I've owned and built and bought billboards. It's almost like a rental house business. And about three to four years ago, I got more seriously involved in billboards. I started other small billboard companies. I've, of course, bought a lot of out of home for a lot of big brands, especially big casino, hotel, sports app betting brands. So I love billboards. It's a media multiplier and everything about it. There's a lot changing in the space and certainly happy to share my, I don't know, 20 year history in a lot of out of home as either a media buyer of out of home or an owner of
4:25 Speaker 05 out of home assets. So I sort of know both sides of the business, which I think really helps figure out how to get clients unlock that value that exists in between this transaction, almost like an airline flight. There's inventory that's expiring every day if you don't sell all that inventory. So how do you find the right locations for the right price? How do you pair that with other mediums? Because it is a media multiplier. It helps make your other media message and brand message go farther at a cheaper CPM.
4:51 Speaker 04 All right. So I'm going to fire off a couple of questions at you. Let's start off with what we call trend or trash. Is it trend or trash that out of home advertising is experiencing a resurgence because of new technology?
5:07 Speaker 05 Absolutely a trend as we see more and more digital advertising networks take their inventory and put it on DSPs like, for example, the Trade Desk or Google or Vistar. There's about eight different programmatic trading companies now helping non sophisticated out of home buyers place digital out of home inventory. And again, it's perishable inventory. So similar to where Expedia and other sort of search engines got involved in the airline business, I see that really as where the next innovation is for the digital billboard business. Lamar, Clear Channel, Outfront, which is about, call it 35, 40% of the share of the out of home business, at least in the US, JC DeCo, of course, more European markets. They have
5:49 Speaker 05 all this perishable digital inventory. Now they're putting on DSPs and exchange networks and digital marketers and advertisers are finding this inventory that we can buy now with the click of a button that has data and demographics on it. So it's sort of the way we buy digital advertising. So it's more comfortable, it's more targeted and it's faster and it can be bought at scale. So yes, absolutely a trend.
6:09 Speaker 04 I understand that technology is helping people buy the right inventory in the right places using things like the Trade Desk for your digital billboards. Is there a big difference or any difference in terms of performance or inventory when you're looking at something that's a digital placement as opposed to your traditional like poster or whatever they use to make the big static billboards?
6:34 Speaker 05 Yeah. So again, I think history has a tendency in the advertising business of repeating itself. If you look at when all the major publishers had inventory, they were trying to sell to advertisers at a certain CPM. And then you had people like Google and the Trade Desk and other DSPs package up all that inventory and sell it in a package using data and analytics and putting the right inventory to the right advertisers at the right time of the consumer journey. Now you would hardly ever buy direct publisher inventory, right? You'd buy it all through exchange networks and DSPs. That's what's happening with billboards. Now that's a double edged sword. Is it easier to buy? Is it more targeted? Is it more data rich? Of course. Is it a little bit more expensive? I believe so. I
7:15 Speaker 05 think if you're buying it direct with the clear channels out fronts or other even independent operators, which there are thousands of independent billboard operators out there, I think you can get a little bit lower CPM. I'm seeing CPMs on a lot of these programmatic networks double or triple, but you could buy direct. So you are buying it at a premium, but it is faster and you can be a little more targeted in terms of demographics.
7:38 Speaker 04 All right. Well, I want to go to our next segment. We call this one Talk Nerdy To Me. We're going to push up our glasses here and I want you to break down the analytics behind measuring a billboard. I get that you can buy media mostly with digital billboards, your day parting, your geographic targeting, trying to hit the right person, the right place, the right time. How do you figure out if it's working? If the people driving by your billboards are actually influenced by the content, if they're actually converting? What the analytics look like? So you did just put your glasses on to do the nerdy.
8:12 Speaker 05 I did. I'm going to go nerdy on this one, right? Look, there's no question that out of home advertising is probably the least measurable media tactic out there. At the end of the day, I say this all the time, it's a giant sign. Can you measure the brand effectiveness of a sign at a QSR restaurant or at your office? You can't. But look, branding helps. The average American consumer has seen at least 5,000 messages a day. And that was a few years ago. I haven't seen the latest Google study, but it's probably even double. I mean, look, we're just coming off a political election. I think the number was what, three, $4 billion in ad spend, maybe even more. I think just the presidential alone was two or three.
8:51 Speaker 04 God, that's bad.
8:52 Speaker 05 I know, me too. But look, we're bombarded with messaging. So you want to be top of mind. And that's why people talking about you, people seeing your message over and over and over again. Google did a study a few years ago where they said the average American consumer needed to see an ad within 30 days. I think it was 18.7 times. So what billboards do, what other signage does for you as a brand, is it keeps that brand out there over and over and over again. A lot of people drive, especially in the American market, drive the same patterns to work over and over and over and over again. So the reason it's effective and the reason billboards are effective is because it just keeps your brand message out there as many times as possible.
9:33 Speaker 05 And if you look at a CPM model where digital advertising and CTV now is so expensive, we're talking $12,000 to $40, $50, $60,000 for every 1,000 people. It's going to cost you between, call it, let's just say $15 and $50 for every 1,000. Billboard's still between 75 cents and $3 per 1,000. So if you just look at pure math for cost per impression, billboards are way up on the list. Now, again, you don't have a video. It's just there. It's not quite as dynamic as a CTV ad. So if you're watching Yellowstone and that ad comes up, that's pretty special. It's an ad unit that is very coveted by brands and which is why it's super expensive. So how do you actually measure the effectiveness of billboards?
10:18 Speaker 05 Here's what. What we've done, we built out a fully integrated analytics system using a company called Alight Analytics, which the MBA uses and others use, and basically plugged in every advertising data source we could. And in some cases, it was thousands of lines of different data. And it was 20, 30 different media tactics and out of home being one of them. And what we would do is through our client, the Arizona Lottery, they're about $1.7 billion in sales. We would measure each campaign that we were running with our 3,000 retailers. And we would figure out if we did a campaign without a home and we would do a campaign without out of home and we would check the sales lift. And in a lot of cases, we saw sales lift between seven and 20% lift when we ran campaigns without a home rather than
11:03 Speaker 05 not running campaigns without home. Now, our digital marketers out there, of course, they want return on ad spend and all this stuff. You're not going to get that without a home. It's got to be within an integrated campaign and it's one element of a campaign or a brand message. But I can tell you, fast food restaurants wouldn't have giant signs and grocery stores like signage matters and multiple impressions for a brand matter. And how you can measure it, I do like how we've done it where you try different campaigns with it and without it and just check overall lift. Cause again, it makes everything you're doing better, but it's not something that carries the campaign.
11:39 Speaker 04 It's interesting. The only thing I've ever heard that is outside of what you said, right? It's a giant sign. How are you going to track whether somebody actually saw it? You can't. The only thing I've heard, and this was in my first year of recording the Martech Podcast 374 years ago, somebody told me that you can get cell phone data and understand who has had multiple times trips past the billboard and infer that they've seen the message and then try to backtrack. And it just sounds like it's very convoluted, trying to figure out who's on the road at what given time and how many impressions they got for a billboard. But I've heard that location data can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your out of home campaigns. Have you tried anything like that?
12:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, I've seen a lot of it. It's been cost prohibitive in the past and I don't like to treat out of home like I treat my digital campaigns. I know its effectiveness. I know the locations we're buying. I use a company called Geopath, which gives me very detailed analysis on eyeballs, basically per day and per week. And they take in consideration how big the sign is, where it's at. There's also other demographic information in terms of household income, traffic patterns. Again, is the sign on the left side of the road or the right side of the road? How close is it to the road? How high up is it? Does it have any trees blocking it? So I use it more impression based and I understand the demographics and area that assign where it's located. I've seen a lot of things with
13:06 Speaker 05 cellphone data. Of course, billboard companies are putting different beacons on the boards, not only for cellular service, which they have some, but also for beacons for tracking and data. So yeah, you can do some of that. I'm not sure how effective it is. I've done a lot of other digital ad serving campaigns where you can track if that mobile phone went into the retail location. We've seen some success with that, but I just love using billboards for media multiplying. The other way billboards can be used successfully is more of a locator, a store locator.
13:38 Speaker 04 Your McDonald's are three stops away.
13:40 Speaker 05 Correct. You see this a lot in the cannabis business. You see it in the QSR business. So two things, like let's run a big campaign and let's add out of home at 10 or 15 or 20% of our budget to multiply our message for cheaper. Geico is genius at this. The insurance category as a whole is very good at using out of home as a media multiplier for an overall campaign and market by market. Then the other thing is you're using it as sort of a store locator, turn left here, next exit. Those are the two ways I really love using out of home. It's not great for sort of like buy now or sales messaging or direct response kind of stuff, which is why you see very little DR or what I would say in
14:23 Speaker 05 like the CPG or the fashion business that has done really well with influencers and more Instagram direct response, low funnel stuff. It's not used for low funnel. It's upper, middle funnel kind of work.
14:36 Speaker 04 All right. Last question I have for you on billboards, we're calling this secret sauce. You're putting together the sauce that you're going to put on your billboard cheeseburgers. What are the ingredients that you're including to make an effective billboard? Talk to me a little bit about the creative portion of this.
14:52 Speaker 05 So my rule of thumb is seven to eight, meaning you get seven to eight things maximum on a billboard. And the less things, the more effective. And the percentage of effectiveness is double digits more every time you have less than seven. So or less than eight. So words count, websites count, logos count, images count. So less is more, certainly with digital billboards and static billboards. If you're doing a static billboard, I really prefer doing something really unique, especially if it's a perm location where you can cut out where things are coming out the top or out the side and think of it really innovative manner. There's a lot of other really unique out of home things coming from a technology standpoint creatively, like projection, where you're projecting on the side of buildings, which is really unique,
15:35 Speaker 05 or wallscapes, or even art collages that are actually built where so past Blue Ribbon, I love their creative. The other thing is you want it consistent around market. You don't want 20 different creatives. You want maybe three different that are all within the same family of brands. I think website addresses on boards are less important now. I think you just want brand recall, let Google get the credit digitally. Any sort of unique URLs or phone numbers are a no go for me. And something that has bold colors and contrast, black and yellow, black and white, white and black, like a strong contrast of colors when you look at fonts and logos and messaging is certainly a rule of thumb on out of home as well.
16:17 Speaker 04 I'm here in the suburbs of San Francisco. So every time me and my wife drive into the city, we read the billboards and we're always looking for trends. And they're all B2B SaaS companies. We're in startupville and they're all centered around artificial intelligence right now. And it's consistent. And to me, the ironic thing is there's no pattern disrupt. It might be a great billboard, but is Clay's billboard any different than Klavio's, which is different than Salesforce's, which is different than whatever is down the block on the way to get to the Salesforce tower to go over the bridge to 101? Look, you mentioned you want to do something that's like a little different in the building and the landscapes. How do you manufacture some sort of pattern disrupt?
17:01 Speaker 04 So your billboard stands out from the other signage that's around it?
17:04 Speaker 05 I do think there is a lot of opportunity in B2B for out of home. There's a few things that psychologically happen with out of home advertising. When you see a brand that's on a lot of billboards or on billboards consistently with, to your point, a traffic pattern and that traffic pattern, let's say, is high income and B2B decision makers. There's something about when somebody's on a billboard or a brand's on a billboard, it gives a sense of legitimacy, right? It says they have enough money to be up there. They must be credible. I'll give you an example. I work with a large real estate office B2B company and they go against some of the biggest other national office players in the globe, really like a JLL or CBRE. And so he says, Scotty, I just do billboards.
17:48 Speaker 05 I helped him get into billboards and he ended up loving it. And this is a commercial real estate guy all around town because all my competitors have offices everywhere and they have brands that people know. Now I'm everywhere in traffic patterns where high income people are going by on their daily commute to work and they see me everywhere and it just gives them a sense that I'm as powerful a brand as my competitors who are much bigger than me. So I think you're seeing a lot of SaaS companies do that, to your point. To make it stand out, I look for ways to do things on the billboard that other people aren't. I love what I call extensions, so extending something off the billboard. I love doing things where, let's say there's two billboards in a row and one has one message and maybe could have a second message. So just thinking about things that are more innovative in the space.
18:33 Speaker 05 I'm working on a really interesting campaign that I can't talk about with a major Fortune 500 brand and a really respectable agency where we're doing something that hasn't really been done in the out of home space. And I like using elements of the board as part of the creative, whether that's the pole or the bottom or maybe elements around the billboard that just sort of use it in space. You've seen this done in other markets. European markets, their percentage of spend at billboards are in the double digits in terms of your percentage of ad spend towards that category. Call it 10, 20% of total advertising going to out of home where in the US market it's like 3 to 5%. And you see some really unique things like you go into a tunnel and the tunnel's wrapped and it's using sort of an element of the tunnel with the ad. So you want it the same way like
19:18 Speaker 05 video game people are advertising within phone games that like make a fun game with the ad. Like use the out of home asset and element of driving and the environment around it as part of the creative. But a lot of times you see designers that are designing billboard ads and they design it like a banner ad. And it's a horrible mistake because these are not banner ads. And you have a lot of people and designers used to making banner ads and so they think they're billboard ads. And I never freak out at creative teams. I've freaked out at creative teams over the years because they've made a lot of bad billboards. I'd say 70% of designers make bad billboards. They just don't know how to do it. They're looking at a computer screen. My rule of thumb is print the damn thing out, put it on the wall, tape it up the wall and walk 10 steps back. And if you can't read the thing, first of all, then it's done. You start over.
20:03 Speaker 05 You need to print it out and you need to walk backwards and look at it. And then imagine going 60 miles an hour by the damn thing. So this isn't a banner ad. Don't get cutesy with the fonts and the sophisticated fonts and the, all the different offers you want on there and how it looks. It's gonna look like crap. It's a giant sign. So you need to think about if you want it to interact with somebody, it needs to think about the environment it's in, the community that it's in. Is it on a wall or a billboard or a projection? How big is a billboard? Is this little one? Is it a big one? What's around it? What's that headline that gets somebody's attention? Is it something unique? Is it cool? Is it conversational? Is it current? Is it pop culture-y? Like, there's so many ways to do it. And you've seen, I would say, maybe 10% of the market that's
20:47 Speaker 05 doing it well and about 90% of the market that's doing it half-assed. So I do think there's a major opportunity for people that are doing out of home and using it right to really step up their game creatively. And it's two things. It's, the first step is it's gotta have contrast and it needs to have less than seven or eight things. And then the second part is it needs to interact with people that drive that same route over and over again in a fun way to get their attention.
21:10 Speaker 04 We're also wrapped up in digital marketing. We've gone through this evolution where we're able to track and account for virtually everything that happens online and we try to shoehorn the type of tracking and analysis that we do with digital media into all channels and all things. And yes, with something like billboards, you can be very strategic with your media buying when you're looking at digital. You can also do some analysis on the backend, but fundamentally a billboard, as Scott said, is a giant sign. It's a sign. It's got to have a great message. It's got to be legible and it's in context of the real world. It's not on a screen. So when you're designing the billboard, which is probably the most important part
21:55 Speaker 04 of this process, you have to understand where it's going to be and what the experience is. And without that, your tracking, your analytics, none of it matters. All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Scott Harkey, the founder and CEO of the Harkey Group. If you'd like to get in touch with Scott, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. He's on Instagram as well under Scott Harkey, or you could visit his company's website, which is theharkeygroup.com.
22:29 Speaker 04 If you'd like a summary of this podcast, or if you'd like to apply to be one of the next guest speakers on the Martech Podcast, head over to martechpod.com. You can also find us on YouTube, just search for Martech Podcast. And if you'd like to contact me, you can find my LinkedIn handle in the show notes, or you can just search for Ben J. Shap, B E N J S H A P. 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 and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
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