00:00:00:00 - 00:00:22:14

Hey, everyone. So we're talking to Tom Shay from agile. I've known Tom for a little while. We kind of go deep into the technicalities of out-of-home advertising. Why? It's really important, and why a lot of consumer brands are starting to engage and do it again. Please watch the episode, like, subscribe and I hope you enjoy the show.

00:00:22:16 - 00:00:51:16

But I guess to kick us off, Tom is the main source of your business right now. Truck advertisements. Are you doing other sorts of out of home? And why start there? Yeah, definitely these last mile delivery trucks that are hero products. I mean, there's some, like, pet projects where we're playing with scaffolding. And we have this product called polygon, which, you know, might eventually be, more productive business units for us.

00:00:51:18 - 00:01:17:03

But for the moment, it's these last nine delivery trucks with the cool technology and attribution that support it. In terms of, you know. How we got there, like, it didn't always start as this product. It was actually much more complicated. So in 2018, when we started agile, we were putting digital screens on trucks, like literally screwing them in.

00:01:17:05 - 00:01:37:17

And we wrote, a bunch of software on a Raspberry Pi, I swear to God, attached to a GPS chip. And we made the ads time and location and contextually aware for the ad delivery. So as it was moving around, much like, like, look at the taxicabs in New York City. Those are smart. They know where they are, and they know what type of demographic and psychographics in that location.

00:01:37:17 - 00:01:58:06

And they serve advertisements that reflect that. I think what was challenging that was what was it, you know, was that was like a hardware company very fast. And from a CapEx perspective, expensive screens were like $40,000. So max and I still have the original ones and they're coffee tables. Now turn them into coffee tables, because we don't want to throw them out.

00:01:58:08 - 00:02:18:15

And when we went to investors pitch out, they're like, listen, kid, you're only 20 now just to figure out if there's a real business here, why don't you prove that there's, a demand and a market for ads on trucks broadly speaking, because no one's even done that. And so we simplified the product on the front end to vinyl wraps, which is what you see today.

00:02:18:17 - 00:02:45:16

But we complicated the product on the back end. And essentially we're able to create a tech stack that allows us to do offline, online or in-store attribution so we can file the customer journey after exposure to see if, and they do end up converting, and then generate a return on ad spend for an offline media investment. And that's when we realized that was actually solving a problem like the digital screens on trucks was just like two kids that wanted to start a business.

00:02:45:18 - 00:03:02:11

But we stayed around long enough to, I think, identify that what people wanted to solve for was, is this thing actually a creative should I continue to invest, invest in this channel or not? So I think that's what's kept people away from out of home for so long. I mean, it clearly like has legs. It's been around.

00:03:02:11 - 00:03:32:02

It's like the oldest form of advertising and it's still around and it's a $50 billion market. But I think we're sort of at the beginning of the technology measurement attribution story for that category, which is incredibly exciting. I think you have it's exciting for a new generation of marketers who grew up on digital, and now they're recognizing that there needs to be other placements in the media mix, in order to build brand and, you know, grow the business.

00:03:32:04 - 00:03:55:05

I'm curious for you, I would love to walk through that attribution equation and how you guys think about it and, yeah, how you kind of derive signal and tie it back to purchases both in-store and online. Yeah, sure. So, this is what the trucks look like, except the real ones. And in every single truck we have under management across North America, there is a GPS embedded in the vehicle.

00:03:55:06 - 00:04:14:05

If they don't have one, we're sending one and all of that GPS. There is a callable API that streams latitude longitude, timestamp every second. So we are hitting that API so we know where the vehicle is in real time. Then we're using software on the back end to geofence around the vehicle every second, capturing mobile phones that have location services enabled.

00:04:14:07 - 00:04:33:19

So if you have, which is like every app, every mobile, every mobile phone, well, it's actually it's 20%. And there's this gets into a little bit of nuance where it needs to be running in the background. So, you know, I have the swipe up to kill it. And when it's running in the background and not actively being used it, it has like a heartbeat signal.

00:04:33:19 - 00:04:58:18

So it doesn't ping every second it's pinging like every couple of seconds, like once every 10s. And so, you know, you can pass the vehicle and not be captured if it that doesn't like fortuitously overlap, if you know what I'm saying. But I mean these campaigns like these start our campaigns get 10 million impressions. So from a is the sample population a good representation of the broader population?

00:04:58:20 - 00:05:20:23

The stats and the confidence intervals end up being pretty tight. Okay. So carry that out a little bit further. So that's how you're actually getting, you know, understanding who's actually viewing the placements. Yep. And then you're passing that data. Go ahead. Yeah. So essentially once we capture someone's mobile phone around the branded vehicle, it kicks off the entire stack.

00:05:20:23 - 00:05:40:03

So the first thing we're able to do is what's called ID stitching. We can go from that person's mobile phone to their desktop, tablet, connectivity partners, devices, etc.. And the reason that's important is it solves for what we call platform promiscuity, whereby the people who are exposed to the branded vehicle and the source of captors, but likely going to be their mobile phone.

00:05:40:05 - 00:05:58:02

However, there will be a significant non-zero percentage that actually goes home and engages with the brand on their desktop or on their tablet or tablets. There are about it, and so being able to stitch across ideas and resolve what we call the household level allows us to more accurately measure the impact of an out-of-home investment. The next thing we're able to do is resolve the demographics inside graphics.

00:05:58:02 - 00:06:18:21

So age, education, housing, income, race, as well as a ton of behavioral segments like pet owner, celebrity obsessed, makeup obsessed, video game streamer, etc. the reason that's important is less so on the attribution side, but more so from the campaign planning perspective. Different assets have different routes, and you know, some are going to be great for brand and some are going to be awful for our brand.

00:06:18:21 - 00:06:38:23

And an understanding of those nuances is valuable insofar as you can set people up for success. And then lastly, probably most interesting and important is in the context of attribution. So we'll just use the e-commerce business for now. But essentially we're putting a pixel on their homepage and post conversion page that are listening for the same population exposed to the branded vehicle.

00:06:39:00 - 00:06:56:09

And what is a fun and convenient narrative to say, oh, look, someone sell the truck and then shut up on your website and bought something that actually doesn't tell you anything interesting, because that is one touch in a media mix that's going to have organic paid influencer or affiliate PR, maybe direct mail, maybe CTV and like 17 other things going on concurrently.

00:06:56:11 - 00:07:16:12

And so the business equation we had to solve was how do you isolate and identify Incrementality or the unique amount of website traffic and conversions that actually resulted from this investment? Because this kind of because it's got added to the mix. So everything I just shared with you about capturing people near the truck and following their behavior to the website is our High Paladin's group, and our hypothesis group only.

00:07:16:14 - 00:07:41:22

But simultaneously and at all times, we are creating a control group by taking the truck's live GPS information and ten minutes backwards on its route and dropping a pin using software that we call our ghost truck. And we're redrawing a geofence around this ghost truck every second to capture an unexposed population. So functionally, you can picture real truck, fake truck, ten minute lag from each other, both moving through society, both being geofence every second, one capturing an expose, one capturing our control.

00:07:41:24 - 00:08:01:12

And then the reason that's valuable is, keep those confounding media variables constant. Then we are looking in or reporting out, the difference in conversion behavior between those two populations. So if 5000 people convert around the brand truck within 14 days of exposure, we're not sitting here saying we drove 5000 conversions. That would be sort of delusional.

00:08:01:14 - 00:08:25:17

We're looking at the control group, which might reveal 4500 conversions, which represents the efforts of the rest of their media mix, would be backing those things out to report something like your ex Armenian restaurant Agilent drove these 500 incremental conversions, which, based upon your AOV and LTV, results in a row of why, for example. Okay, so you're giving them that's is that delivered in a like a PDF or a report or a dashboard?

00:08:25:23 - 00:08:51:22

I've never interface with the agile software suite. Whatever you guys are working with. Yeah. So we generally do a mid campaign meeting and end of campaign meeting. We, you know, so early on we were like, let's build a customer facing dashboard. But at a time like there's not a ton of dynamic variables. And so like maintaining at least as as a startup I think eventually we'll get there.

00:08:52:03 - 00:09:17:16

But maintaining a customer facing dashboard is more so just like a transparency thing. And I think it has value in that. But it's not like, hey, let's re shift from this commercial to this commercial because this one's, you know, converting at a higher rate. So there's not like there wouldn't be a lot of dynamic components, but I still think it'd be interesting to be to your point, we're giving all the attribution data at the midpoint and the end of the campaign.

00:09:17:18 - 00:09:44:05

So basically the way you do attribution right now, what you just described is like a form of holdout test. And you're just seeing how the population exposed responds and how that's driving Incrementality in theory, you could provide could you provide like agile data to and a. And integrate it just into the entire media mix and have you, you have internal memes that you're trying to see what the media mixes.

00:09:44:05 - 00:10:02:20

We don't. I think we'd love to be included on them, but most are just not set up to support out of home or ingest that data. Like if you look at a triple well or North Beam or any of like the these companies, there's just no part for out of home and like you know that's well those guys try and so like try to be much louder.

00:10:02:22 - 00:10:27:06

Yeah. Yeah yeah. Triple Wells is trying to solve I love triple. Well by the way like our general philosophy on attribution is like you want to have multiple. There's no one single source of truth that tells the entire customer journey is just too complex and humans are too erratic. Behaviorally. But we like to see like a triple well pixel plus and.

00:10:27:08 - 00:10:46:20

And then, you know, a self-reported attribution like just to kind of triangulate and then it's like the marketers responsibility to triangulate what makes the most sense. But, I would think it would be an interesting exercise instead of using like attribution is different than incrementality, I think it would be an interesting exercise to put agile data. I don't know how much is it, but into a meta.

00:10:46:23 - 00:11:07:02

Yeah. See what. Yeah, we definitely would have the inputs. And I think the thing like when you think about where we are in the funnel and the thing that should be most obvious is if it's if we're supporting retail, like is velocity increasing. And then if we're supporting like a DTC brand, I mean the function of out of home is do I know what to do?

00:11:07:02 - 00:11:23:15

I want to Google this. And do I remember what to Google. Right. Like you can't click on it. So the only way someone's going to see it and want to learn more is by going to Google. And, you know, having Google, you know, when the last touch attribution component or they fortuitously get hit with a retargeting ad. We didn't really go into that.

00:11:23:15 - 00:11:58:07

But that's right. Yeah, I mean retail this is so an. Has a really tough time like deciphering what the incremental I mean in most cases there's not a lot of incrementality of what like the incrementality of like your national Facebook spend is on your retail stores in a given location. Yeah. On the contrary, though, I feel like running out of home and, you know, for instance, these last mile truck ads, you know, with a launch of a retail store, there could actually be some pretty significant lift.

00:11:58:09 - 00:12:26:16

Yeah, I, I think so. I wrote like, some thoughts on this. I think what Facebook is really good at and TikTok etc. is finding people who index to their brand and shop online because the success event that it's going to power its lookalike marketing algorithms is did someone actually purchase something or not? It's really bad at finding people who index well to the brand and shop predominantly in-store.

00:12:26:16 - 00:13:03:14

And so we typically get activated when brands are making that leap because, you know, it's it's a different game. And you're right, like the local market strategy, out of homes, you know, major value profits getting tried and getting into community. Yeah. It's proven to I mean, it just doesn't make sense if you're running, metaphor e-com to your point, or for Amazon Marketplace to like, run a geolocation strategy, like, it's just it's it doesn't make sense to optimize for that, which is what you want if you're opening a retail location in a geography.

00:13:03:16 - 00:13:29:22

So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge value add for you guys. Where where are you going to take this? So what other placements do you have in the mix? Yeah. In terms of like our coverage where we have campaigns active in about 40 cities across the US. I will share, though, that especially for the emerging brand category, which I think we do, you know, like 89% of our customers are first time out of home buyers.

00:13:29:22 - 00:13:47:18

So we do do a lot of, the emerging brands. I generally coach them to stay with them like the top ten markets because out of homes value prop sort of drops off when population density drops off. So, you know, activating in a place like Cincinnati versus New York, the dollar is just going to go much further in New York.

00:13:47:20 - 00:14:10:05

So the obvious question becomes, okay, and why are you in 40 cities? Generally someone is activating in outside of those top ten. If there is a business case that overrules the need for a short term Roas. So like for example, PepsiCo wants to do a campaign in Cincinnati. I'm sitting there saying like, what's. And I would rather that you do this in New York because, you know, we'll get a better return there going, no, no, no.

00:14:10:06 - 00:14:27:13

Like we are saturated in New York. Cincinnati is more of like a market share, defense ability and longer LTV equation. And we're trying to crack open a place we haven't cracked open. So we do end up with a lot of business, with that type of use case. And then there's also like this weird third one, which is pretty fun.

00:14:27:13 - 00:14:51:16

But we have we have like unique access into hard to reach areas like the Hamptons, Cape Cod, we get a lot of campaigns because there's only two billboards in the Hamptons. Mayor there on a Native American preservation. That's like a loophole, which is a fun piece of trivia and and yeah, like the markets, like Austin, Texas, where the population has ballooned quicker than that of home infrastructure has boomed.

00:14:51:20 - 00:15:14:01

And so there's like this weird lag mismatch that people are trying to solve for. And obviously there's a lot of trucks. Are you doing any like additional pushes during like specific events. So you brought up you know, Austin obviously South by Southwest comes to mind. Like how does that kind of shift your. Yeah your equation there. It's a great question Chris.

00:15:14:01 - 00:15:35:18

It's so this is newer for us I'd say like last time around this is really picked up speed. So let me talk about experiential marketing which is different than out of home marketing. Out of home marketing's where you're letting that placement with get an efficient CPM and work that way. Experiential is more like betting on earned media equations and people posting about it and amplifying it.

00:15:35:20 - 00:15:58:14

So personally, I hate experiential marketing and I'll go on the record and say that, because, you know, a lot of brands do this, like $50,000 coffee cart that they wrap for one day, and I know what their contribution margin is. And I know that math equation is not working out unless by chance it goes viral somehow. So, you know, I'm a pretty dry dollars and cents gruff guy.

00:15:58:16 - 00:16:23:17

And sorry, I hate that. I hate experiential marketing. And now I'm going to tell you that we do experiential marketing and we do a lot of it. And it's not some kind of it's I want to it's because the market made me, so we do what I call is experiential lite, where whereby if there is a tentpole brand moment, retailer moment, or in-market moment, that's going to bring together a ton of high end sexy, high indexing individuals, we can very inexpensively deploy the assets in support of it.

00:16:23:19 - 00:16:48:00

So, we haven't we put together cool newsletter, different things people have done. But we launched August, into target. We are part of every glossy on retail launch. We are all over those Taylor Swift concerts over the summer Super Bowl. Launches in retail. A lot of people like doing sampling events in front of the retailers that they just launch, and to show that they're investing and supporting that retail partner.

00:16:48:02 - 00:17:11:15

And really, I think in summary there, like Out of Home has always been, I think, praised for its ability to create those like serendipitous moments. I think because we have something on wheels, we've been able to sort of manufacture serendipity, by staging the asset, getting it to important events so that people can film content. And when I when I say experiential light, I'm talking like hundreds of dollars or not talking thousands.

00:17:11:17 - 00:17:38:10

Are you doing all of these mela trucks that I'm seeing at Expo West and other places? I'm not? Okay. Not, whose else is running these truck? These truck ads? There's. So there's. I just want you to know, Tim, I always I only think about you. So just I appreciate it. Now, this is 6 or 7 companies, and people should explore the other options and put them head to head, in my opinion.

00:17:38:12 - 00:18:05:23

But there's, you know, if I had to distill the differences, it comes down to supply. So interestingly, if you look at New York City, we have 3800 assets under management here that we're measuring and have access to. The average truck sucks for advertising. It gets 220,000 impressions over 90 days. The top quartile of assets gets about ten x the average at 2.2 million impressions over 90 days.

00:18:06:00 - 00:18:26:17

So just like any media, like there's a really wide distribution curve of performance and therefore desirability. I think what we realized early that gave us a pretty big advantage is 60% of last mile delivery vehicles are leased assets, which means a handful of leasing companies control more than 50% of the market. So leasing companies think like Penske, Ryder.

00:18:26:19 - 00:18:44:00

We think that we think of them as rental truck companies. But the much bigger part of that business is leasing a Bob's Bread delivery company in New York. Right? So we went straight to them and said, open the GPS information, like let us simulate all of the assets that you have under management and you have a GPS estimate because it's your asset.

00:18:44:00 - 00:19:11:08

Even if you leased it out, you have the title. And then we'd be able to look at which assets had the greatest, performance based on utilization rate and geography. So is it in the right place and for how long is in the right place? And through the leasing companies, we got, the introductions to all those underlying operators that like Bob's bread delivery companies of the world that have a couple of trucks each, to allow us to work with the top or the top performing assets, across the country.

00:19:11:08 - 00:19:37:03

And we're able to do that pretty quickly. So that gave us a pretty good head start. I think what's interesting and what you might appreciate is like, how did this get venture funding? The technology is cool, but that'll be table stakes in five years and there's no way to protect it. So when we did raise money, we raised money as a real estate company because the only thing that's in retain long term shareholder value in ten years is do we control the top performing assets across the country on exclusive basis?

00:19:37:03 - 00:19:54:18

And like in the same way that that that Times Square billboard will always have inherent value regardless of what sort of happens? Same is true of this asset class. With this top sliver, performance. So sort of a little non-obvious. I think to most people they think pursuit knowledge is the cool part, but it is a it's a land grab, right?

00:19:54:18 - 00:20:14:19

We're like, invest in Williamsburg before Williamsburg was hot is sort of the thesis. Well, so are those main assets though. Just to kind of like dig a little bit deeper. Are those main assets the the movable objects like those, those, those truck routes or. Correct. Okay. And then I'm sure I mean, tell us a little bit more about like where you want to take this though.

00:20:14:19 - 00:20:32:10

Is it, is it still like movable out of home or. Yeah. Would you because I'm assuming educate us like I was out of okay. Took a hit for a little while. I'm sure you could get some of those really expensive assets for, you know, there's a period of time where they were, like begging you to do out of home.

00:20:32:16 - 00:20:53:15

For sure, I hundred percent. I mean, it's interesting, right? We have I have impression there aren't spy market are going back all the way back to 2019. And you can see kovat just like decimating the industry on this annual graphs that are stacked next to each other. Well, where do I want to take it? All right. So here's my here's my thought one.

00:20:53:15 - 00:21:13:06

There's a shipment of trucks across the country. And so I think you do have $1 billion opportunity just in this truck side. What is interesting to me is there's there is people to our left and people to our right that are crushing. So let me explain this. Taxicabs, those are called random route assets. They stay in a geographical area.

00:21:13:08 - 00:21:32:12

But the actual route day to day, week to week is going to vary all over the place. You look to our left you have bus side by side is fixed route. It doesn't matter if there's an accident on second AV. They have to pick people up, so they're staying in this exact, sort of route schedule, the bus side industry.

00:21:32:12 - 00:21:53:05

There's a company that's doing $125 million in top line with 20% EBITDA that has been bought out by a private equity company. The taxi top front, Firefly, which is the digital screens, the first mover, it's raised $150 million from Google Ventures and a bunch of other kickass investors left make an acquisition to then join, that fight.

00:21:53:07 - 00:22:12:23

And then Uber announced that they think they can get their advertising business to $1 billion by the end of the decade. And so no one's played in this middle ground, which I call fixed stop assets, where the routes are sort of consistent. But like if there's an accident, they can deviate and but they're going to the same spot because there's like an exchange that's happening for them.

00:22:13:00 - 00:22:42:23

And so I think there is like a true big opportunity just with this like current product that we can tap into. But, you know, it's we're like the biggest in the space. And it's been two years and it's going to take a lot of time and education to get people excited about it. I think we've played the hand out right by going after the emerging brands, because now it feels like we've had a critical mass and these fortune five hundreds are looking down and going like, oh shit, like this company and riding in our heels.

00:22:42:23 - 00:23:05:10

This is part of their marketing stack. Let's go figure out what's happening there and just win on economies of scale, like flex our ad budget and who cares if we're both doing it? We're going be able to get it for cheaper than you're going to be able to get it right. So, the only other thing that might be interesting is I do want to get back to digitizing the assets, like the super, super top 1% of performance assets.

00:23:05:12 - 00:23:32:14

I think it's probably worthwhile to invest the capital to, you know, haul 20 grand. So it's an interesting product for you, right. Like especially on those high value routes, you can sell a higher value, probably higher margin service. I think what it is, there's also just like a wave of digital out of home, I think is kind of like out of home will be bought and sold on an exchange through real time bidding in my opinion, within like the next 50 years.

00:23:32:16 - 00:23:52:03

And so I want to make sure we tee the company up to be able to capitalize when that trend does play out. And there's a lot of like DSPs and Ssps where if you have digital assets, you can just like programmatically when business. Right, just by adding your real estate to it. And so there's obviously something really attractive.

00:23:52:05 - 00:24:10:00

We're out here, you know, banging on doors trying to, you know, when deals and when new clients day after day, for programmatic, they drive out of home. There is a world where you don't need to have such an aggressive sales team. It's hard to just own the inventory. And it if you build it, they come sort of the strategy.

00:24:10:02 - 00:24:40:03

What's been the major friction with like I guess just integrating the product into the everyday performance marketer's stack. Like I think the the hardest thing for us is like getting someone to just open up their media and like allocate budget to, to newer initiatives. It's so it's really important though. Yeah. What's been the greatest friction?

00:24:40:05 - 00:25:08:15

I mean, I think the biggest friction for us is like brand awareness and like, people look at the trucks on Twitter and LinkedIn and they go, oh, cool, wraps trucks. And like the whole magic of what we do and what makes us interesting, just like doesn't, there's no visual way to explain it, right? We try to put little like icons that show a sales signal above the truck, but people are generally just thinking, oh, we wrap trucks and the trucks make it look like they're delivering your product.

00:25:08:17 - 00:25:30:05

And people like the idea of all these people seeing these trucks, and it it's seeming like everyone's buying and ordering their product. Or are you guys helping them with creative like, thinking through. Okay, interesting. Yeah. So we used to not get involved. Now we get very involved. And it's not because we are creative. You have to there's information asymmetry.

00:25:30:05 - 00:25:50:21

We measured 350. Like you can just follow the data at a certain point. So one that you'll like look it's color psychology color red crush as an out of home. Because what does red communicate to humans when we're outside red brake lights, stoplights, stop signs, etc. like we've been hardwired to associate red with stop and look at your surroundings.

00:25:50:23 - 00:26:09:09

And so when prominently featured as part of Out of Home creative, it has that same impact. But, you know, we have that from where should the love they'll be here over at lifestyles, right? How much copy is too much copy. So we added it to our flow about 18 months, because that's the biggest risk to our business.

00:26:09:09 - 00:26:33:01

You could do everything right. And if the creative sucks, I mean, the campaign will flop. I love this this is these, you know, tidbits of information from consumer psychology. Take us back. Tell us, switching gears here about that colonoscopy study that, yeah, for sure brought to our attention for context. I just was like, what the fuck?

00:26:33:03 - 00:26:56:11

Yeah, I remember this. I do remember that. Yeah. So, Dark Room had me come speak at an event recently, and my, I was there to talk about marketing, but I renamed the The talk. What colonoscopy is can teach us about marketing. Because, you know, you gotta you gotta pull people in with some sort of a hook.

00:26:56:13 - 00:27:21:20

And so, you know, let me, I guess, explain what I mean by that. It was to, highlight the what's called the peak and effect. Our remembrance of an experience and life is characterized by the peak and the end. And so if you think about, Disneyworld, you know, you go to Disney, your kids see Mickey Mouse. It has a really high peak, but the end of that experience is not.

00:27:21:20 - 00:27:50:05

It doesn't end when you leave the park. It ends when you get on that plane. Your kids are screaming, you're like three, three weeks worth of laundry. You have to dig yourself out of all these emails that have piled up. And so the end was actually a pretty negative experience. And so what Disney did once they are, they, added those RFID wristbands, they would, take pictures of you and your children enjoying themselves in the park and put that all into a scrapbook and send it to your house two weeks after you arrived back from your vacation.

00:27:50:10 - 00:28:11:23

Is that the end? Remembrance of the experience was now a positive one. And so you now have Mickey as the, you know, super middle, high peak and then the end as, oh, look at the scrapbook. We had so much fun and I forgot about it. That also exists in the context of colonoscopy is and that's sort of how this, was like one of the studies that actually proved this the most.

00:28:12:04 - 00:28:35:07

So colonoscopy very uncomfortable experience, 30 minutes of water moving around your body. You hate it. The doctor probably doesn't love it. Everyone's having a bad time. So strong negative peak and pretty bad and peak also is they have to remove that wire, which is a really uncomfortable experience. Not speaking firsthand, but I'm sure it's awful. And so that was the control group.

00:28:35:10 - 00:29:04:21

What they did is they then made a treatment group where the colonoscopy was 45 minutes. So they went from 30 minutes to 45 minutes. But for those last 15 minutes, they kept the wire at the edge of your body and weren't moving it around. They're pulling it out fast or anything like that. And when they extended it, but made the and not as, uncomfortable for you, people's review of the experience, skyrocketed.

00:29:05:00 - 00:29:27:23

So, you're taking a strong negative peak and a really strong end, and all they did was shorten or narrow how dramatic that negative was at the end, and people's review of the experience versus those who had a 30 minute colonoscopy were much different. And that data was very clear. And so people have taken that lesson and applied it to all sorts of flows, marketing Salesforce.

00:29:28:00 - 00:29:52:10

And like even when I'm thinking about meetings and pitches, I just think about that now, like, are you what's the peak and what's the end? You know, like make sure you're designing around those things because that's true. That's why that's why dessert comes at the end of your meal, right? No, I think first impression I mean, it's just true that we just have such, I think poor attention spans, we really subconsciously absorb certain information that informs how we think about experiences.

00:29:52:12 - 00:30:16:11

It's the beginning first impression, and it's how that experience ends, for the most part, so important. I mean, I actually looked into that study after Uber brought it up at night school. And, the data is so interesting because, you know, the average pain during the colon escapade was virtually even if not more intense when it was longer, because it was over a longer period of time.

00:30:16:13 - 00:30:45:03

And yet patients thought it was a more pleasant experience because for those last few minutes, like you were mentioning, it wasn't as significant. Yeah. So it just shows how we have like a narrative self that rationalizes certain experiences, even though the data might suggest something totally different. Yeah. And here's an example of how we even applied it at agile, obviously, we're trying to make the peak like one of those cool experiential moments.

00:30:45:03 - 00:31:02:16

You're seeing it in real life that you know, for the first time and you're doing an event. We have it go to a Whole Foods, for example, and it's it's a really cool, like, powerful experience. But at the end, you know, we're sending results. Ideally the results are good. But regardless, we also send a toy truck at the conclusion.

00:31:02:16 - 00:31:21:16

There is a literal HubSpot automation for our team to print and ship a toy truck so that it arrives at the end of the camp. And they're our clients. And so really, you know, that's it. There's several things I think you can do and incorporate it on like a micro level and to your daily work and personal life.

00:31:21:18 - 00:31:39:07

I this is why I see people are so important and I think as a founder, you need to be so dialed into the experience of your product and the client experience in general. Even on the agency side, it's those little things for us as an agency. It's like the first month of services. They need to be so dialed.

00:31:39:09 - 00:32:03:09

And I think because it's how people judge you, and they're already hesitant going into relationships. So we've really invested so much time into making that experience as as red carpet as possible. Exactly. You have to and that's tough too. On the services side, when you like, have a new client, you kind of want to take it slow, bring them up to speed, but you kind of always need to be on.

00:32:03:12 - 00:32:33:17

That's how you need to think as a business owner. Yeah, absolutely. You know, so obviously one of the challenges that you mentioned that you're solving for is obviously the attribution, component of it. So I'm curious kind of one of the things I'm most curious about is like when coming out of these campaigns, are marketers looking about looking at them as a short term addition to their medium mix or a long term campaign that they're running and like how does your attribution play into like sharing that information side of it?

00:32:33:19 - 00:32:54:20

So you guys, I find it fascinating. It essentially moves 1 to 1 with whether we're whether the person activating us as a brand marketer or a growth marketer. So brand mark brand marketers, they're used to like scheduling out of year like this. This month we're going to do trucks, and then this month we're going to do this really cool on retail pop up.

00:32:54:20 - 00:33:14:17

And then this month we're going to do billboards. And if you're talking to a growth marketer, they're looking, you know, specifically like, is this creating value or not? I think what's been nice is marrying those two people together because they've sort of been siloed. And the brand marketer now has something to talk about with the graph marker that when in the past they didn't really have that bridge.

00:33:14:19 - 00:33:41:10

So the magic happens when you have both. But to answer your question, the people we see returning and renewing and looking at, you know, going from 80, 20, where we're in that experimental bucket and adding it to the core, 80 are typically growth marketers that are taking the data, comparing it across channels, and realizing it's a creative. The people who are looking at more of like a short term hit to support a retail launch, launch a new skill launch, a new partnership with a sports team or celebrity.

00:33:41:12 - 00:34:02:10

Those are the people that are activating it for a moment in time. And that's okay, right? That's that's it's retention in our business is really confusing because, like, we have people who do something and then they don't need us and they come back in two years when they do need us again. So I remember talking to BK is now like, is it a mirror and might not really sure.

00:34:02:10 - 00:34:27:02

It's like campaign based revenue with a high retention rate and some of it's recurring and some of it's more, you know, we had we had a use case and that is this, this transient. Okay. How do you like this space? Go ahead. Chris, it's super exciting. No. What I also want to hit on. So you talked about in 2020 obviously you could see like everything sort of get decimated because of Covid.

00:34:27:04 - 00:34:45:12

I'm curious how things are improving for you now based on, you know, kind of iOS 14 updates and kind of what's happened with, we'll call it the consummation of meta and, and things like that. Like, are you now seeing kind of more engaged interest because from like where I'm sitting, like, we're at a time where you have to start getting more creative.

00:34:45:12 - 00:35:04:15

You have to start thinking like more interesting things to do. So how is that playing into your model right now, or how is that supporting your business? It's not going to make a lot of people happy, but iOS 14.5 was the best thing that happened to our business. I think it's actually when that started to take off, and not because you're a customers that time.

00:35:04:15 - 00:35:25:16

Just remember your customers. I mean, it was the worst area I know, and it's tough. I mean, but you know, if we boil it down, essentially nothing changed about our business. And the relative value equation made us more attractive because it wasn't 1 to 1, we were adding we're moving at closer to 1 to 1. Despite not being at 1 to 1 for maturation perspective.

00:35:25:18 - 00:35:52:11

And on their predominant channels, it was moving from 1 to 1 to more like deterministic and probabilistic models. So it definitely made our business more interesting or attractive. I think it continues to do that now. Something that's been really interesting, like, yes. IOS 14.5 deprecation of cookies on the horizon. Another one that's interesting and non-obvious is just temporal components.

00:35:52:11 - 00:36:18:03

So like Q4 ends up being crazy because Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday, you have all of the brands, you know, crushing the same demand or the same, more demand into the same supply, through those Facebook channels, TikTok, YouTube, etc.. And so almost like Uber surge pricing, those channels get very expensive. And usually it's okay because there's intent and people are more likely to buy.

00:36:18:03 - 00:36:39:04

And it all nets out what we see out of home get activated for the same reason. It's a relative value equation just changes fundamentally because it's not priced dynamically. It's still priced the same as it was in Q1, but it becomes a very common strategy as people try to hedge against their other, digital channels. And it creates a little bit of like a short term arbitrage equation.

00:36:39:05 - 00:37:03:14

But, you know, the I'm not rooting for the downfall of these channels, but how it's played out the past couple of especially the past couple of weeks, you know, makes a case for exploring other channels. Yeah, for sure.