Modernizing Out-of-Home Advertising and Customer Journeys

Dan Levi: Advertising, especially one that is such a local business, people, relationships, they're really important. And I think there is a very big risk in trying to move too fast to embrace automation in a way that undermines the strength that we have, which is we have people on the ground in our local markets, working with our customers.

Kailey Raymond: Hello, and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond. Out-of-home advertising, you may have some preconceived notions about this channel. Historically, billboards relied heavily on location-based targeting to capture the attention of consumers in close proximity. But today, we'll explore the significant transformation out-of-home is going through as it embraces digital technology and data analytics to enhance its impact and relevance. With advancements in mobile location data, marketers are now able to uncover granular insights on audience behavior, preferences, and conversion patterns.

Kailey Raymond: This digital evolution allows advertisers to plan and execute campaigns that are more contextually relevant, measure the effectiveness and incrementality of their efforts, and align more closely with modern marketing strategies that prioritize both reach and engagement in a privacy-conscious environment. Clear Channel's Dan Levi and I are discussing consumer journeys, the role of out-of-home advertising in driving conversions, and the need for adaptability to optimize brand performance.

Kailey Raymond: Today, I am joined by Dan Levi, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Clear Channel Outdoor. He leads the organization's marketing strategy and connects brands and consumers through innovative advertising insights and solutions. Prior to joining Clear Channel, Dan held positions at Captivate, Zoom Media, Monster Worldwide, and MTV. He's had a proven track record of driving significant revenue growth, developing brands, and creating opportunities for both B2B and B2C organizations. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Levi: Thanks, Kailey. Glad to be here.

Kailey Raymond: I am excited to learn from you. We already had a little exchange about your MTV days, but I want to hear about your career journey in your own words, Dan. Tell me how you got to be where you are today at Clear Channel.

Dan Levi: So I've been in my role here at Clear Channel for coming up on nine years, which is kind of unprecedented for me. I've been working for 37 years now, and I've never stayed at the same place more than five years. So to have landed at a place where I not only like what I'm doing and I love the people that I'm working with, but I feel like we're making progress, it's just... It's a real... It's a good thing for me at this point in my career. No one goes to college and says, I want to be a billboard marketing guy. There's a journey that you go through to get there. And for me, it was a combination of some opportunities to work on some big brands, like MTV. I worked on MTV, the marketing team from 1995 in the US. And then I moved to Singapore and helped launch MTV Asia and ran marketing there and then did business development and licensing for a period of five years. I was at World Wrestling Entertainment for four years as head of marketing.

Dan Levi: So I've had some big brand experiences that have been really meaningful for me. But I've also, especially since 2000, when my wife and I moved back from Singapore, I've worked at primarily smaller to midsize companies. And I sort of fell into this groove of being either the fixer or the builder, if you will, someone who was brought in to help either step on the gas or to turn around a marketing organization. And that led me through a series of companies that eventually gave me an opportunity to do something that I'd always wanted to do, which is go out on my own. And so I left, I was at a company called Captivate and left and started a consulting business at a time when the out-of-home industry was recognizing that there was a need for modernization of the approach. There was a need for an embrace of data analytics, of integration with mobile, of preparing for automation and programmatic.

Dan Levi: And it gave me an opportunity within the out-of-home sector to use some of the knowledge that I had and the experience that I had to help other companies kind of modernize their approach. And very fortunate for me, it also helped elevate my profile. And Clear Channel was looking for head of marketing at the time. And I was really drawn to the opportunity because it wasn't just billboard marketing guy, it was a change in innovation job. And that's really what's kept me here for coming up on nine years now, it's the ability to be a part of the team that's helping to reinvent the world's oldest advertising medium of out-of-home.

Kailey Raymond: I love this. I'm excited to dive in because you're right. I think a lot of marketers have these preconceived notions about what out-of-home can or cannot do for you and kind of like what avenue it exists in. And that modernization towards a digital landscape is something that you've been helping transform in Clear Channel for the nine years that you've been there. And it's probably one of the bigger trends, I'm sure, that you've kind of seen catalyze a lot of the progress that you've been making. But I want to hear your take. You talk to CMOs from global brands all the time in the work that you do. Talk to me about some of those trends that you're hearing them talk about right now that are impacting marketing and customer engagement.

Dan Levi: So we'll start at the macro. I mean, the thing that has, I think, most influence in the opportunity for Clear Channel Outdoor and the out-of-home sector overall are, frankly, the challenges that are happening with digital and performance marketing and digital performance media, whether we're talking about things like signal loss, privacy regulation, just the recognition of the massive issues that so many marketers have with their advertising supply chain, MFA sites. All of these challenges are creating opportunity for out-of-home because, one, we've invested in the data, the technology, the infrastructure to be able to operate as a digital media. So, for example, we have a platform that we call RADAR.

Dan Levi: It's basically a mobile location data platform that allows us to help advertisers understand where people go and what they do in the real world and the role that out-of-home can play and influence in those behaviors because they're now able to connect an exposure of a billboard ad to downstream behaviors, whether those are top-of-the-funnel, like brand awareness and intent, all the way down to conversion behavior. We're basically bringing a digital orientation to a medium that consumers actually like, they pay attention to, it's seen positively, it's creative, it doesn't have any issues with fraud, bots, viewability, all those kinds of challenges. So that's probably the biggest trend that's driving opportunity for us.

Dan Levi: But there's an interesting trend also, I think, that's happening at the same time, which is, we have a sales organization that's been selling billboards for a long time. And 65% to 70% of our business comes from local markets. And a lot of those marketers have been buying billboards, they've been buying location. And so while we're seeing the macro trends around signal loss and challenges with digital media, we're also seeing the opportunity to train up both our sellers and our local clients on the potential of out-of-home, and the ability to think of out-of-home, not as a siloed, solely location medium, but as an audience medium, and as a performative medium, one that we actually have the ability to sit with marketers locally and talk about their business differently, to talk about their business, not just based on where our billboards are and where their stores are, but the role that we play in that mix. So that's exciting to me to be able to change that narrative and have that discussion. Another trend that we've been thinking about, and I've been spending a lot of time on is, advertisers still love their TV, especially locally.

Dan Levi: The challenge is so much of that activity is shifting from linear TV to CTV. And there are so many problems with CTV, so many challenges, the viewer experience, the advertiser experience, the platform experience. And so that's creating an opportunity for us to have different conversations about, why do you like your TV? Why is video important to you? And here I'm talking mostly about local advertisers. And oftentimes it comes down to either it's a medium that they've always used, or frankly, from a storytelling standpoint, they're used to the stereotypical car dealer that puts their daughter in the commercial and talks about the personality and the people and all that. That's real. I'm not making fun of that. That's real. That's really...

Kailey Raymond: Very real.

Dan Levi: Important to local advertisers. So how can you use a medium like out-of-home to deliver that same kind of reach, that same kind of storytelling, but in a way that doesn't rely upon video and that people actually watch and pay attention to and like? So I love all those kinds of things coming together into the kind of challenges that get me excited to get up and go to work in the morning.

Kailey Raymond: It is really interesting. You're kind of seeing these ebbs and flows of things happen over time, where there was a shift towards performance marketing and people started putting dollars in, especially in the COVID era. It's like, okay, it's really easy to measure in a lot of ways. You can really understand the impact of your dollar. There's this catalyst that's happening in tailwinds for tech, where you're saying, I work in tech, so this is going to be a bit biased here. But you're working in tech and you're seeing the dollars that you put in really come out in pipeline. And there is this shift probably with brands not investing as much in brand and top of funnel and these kind of awareness or traditional tactics. And I think right now, you're seeing this trend back over to the other side and they're shifting their mix and making sure, oh, yeah, we actually do need to work on the entire funnel at the same time and be able to actually track in a modern way, how out-of-home is impacting the rest of the funnel as well. So tell me a little bit about how you're bridging the gaps. I know you talked about this platform RADAR that you've been developing and how you're actually making sure you're tracking consumer behaviors and connecting the dots between those conversion events. Just walk me through how some of that actually works.

Dan Levi: So I want to unpack a lot of what you said there, because there's a couple of things built in. And the first thing, I mean, you work at an ad tech company and a digital marketing organization. And you're also our client. Like just putting that out there, that we work with so many venture backed or Silicon Valley companies to help them get the value of that reach and impact and scale that Idaho provides. It's not a binary. It's not a choice of performance media or branding. It's really trying to help people understand how the two work together. So I think that that's an important piece of it. What we do with our data solutions, so our platform, like you mentioned, is called RADAR. RADAR primarily uses mobile location data. So opt-in consumer data from location-aware apps for which people have given the approval for those apps to understand their movement. And it's all a self-selecting process because we work with the companies that provide the data and analytics to those location-aware apps. And it's the location-aware apps that really need your location data.

Dan Levi: I'm so thrilled that we're past the days of the calculator app that wants to know your location. So there's been a really nice kind of leveling up process of Apple and Google's platform policies, driving publishers to be more transparent with consumers about why location data are needed and the value that that brings. So I think we've gotten to the point now where consumers have a deeper understanding of the value exchange. That's one. I think that's really important. What we do is we have a platform that allows us to persistently observe those devices that are exposed to our inventory. And we use that understanding of that data. We've got a data platform. We work with a company called Aquifer as our partner on the data platform. And it gives us the ability to understand prior behaviors so that we can profile the audiences. So every piece of inventory, we have about 4,500 audience segments that are applied to it that help us to get very granular with our customers in terms of understanding who you're trying to reach. To be really clear, out-of-home is always going to be a one-to-many medium.

Dan Levi: We're never going to be targeting individuals. This comes down to composition and efficiency. If one board delivers a million impressions a week and the other board delivers a million impressions a week, but 30% of board one aligns with your audience targeting and only 10% of board two, it's a pretty straightforward decision, which is a better location for you. But we use the same approach and the same data to also then be able to get into understanding of efficacy and performance. We have built the data platform in a way that allows us to connect with other platforms, other data sources. We've integrated with most of the primary data clean rooms. So it gives us the ability to work with our customers' data, either to bring their data into our platform to do custom planning for them, or for us to syndicate those data out to different measurement platforms or to the clients directly. And so it gives us the ability to operate as a digital media with the strengths of out-of-home and importantly, to be able to connect the dots, to be able to understand that we're getting better at this. It's not with everyone, but we're going from, does out-of-home work? To how and why does it work? To now getting to where we're really excited, which is incrementality. How does adding out-of-home to the mix make your mix perform better? That's kind of a high level of where we're going.

Kailey Raymond: I was just going to say that. I was just going to say incrementality, if you're able to understand the movements of folks and the demographics of people that are kind of going by this location, if you get any given day and then matching it up against clean room technology, you're going to be able to show advertisers, the folks that you're adding to your database or your impressions or whatever. And one of the interesting things that I think you're pulling here too is this idea of consent. You're taking out-of-home as a medium is privacy first. You aren't collecting anybody's information. You've never had that problem, but making sure that you're continuing to be on the forefront of that and making sure that the technologies that you're building on the back end with RADAR are consented and making sure that you are working with the right technologies to build in that consumer interest with the consumer at heart is key. So that's a really interesting thing that you're doing. So are you with incrementality now able to suggest new locations for folks to be able to invest as opposed to like, yeah, here's the one that has the most eyeballs on this particular interstate. This is the one to go for. So you could even say like, yeah, this might sound weird, but Des Moines, Iowa, is actually where you want to be.

Dan Levi: So we're not 100% to the point where we're saying you should be in other markets, but what we are doing... So we have the ability to do the planning and the inventory selection based on our desired audience, whether that's one of the audiences in our taxonomy or using their chosen data. And we have the ability to report on the behavior of the people who are exposed, including the converting audiences. And so what gets interesting is I'm making up a situation to illustrate the scenario. A client says, I'm trying to reach women 18 to 49 with a household income of 100,000 plus. We're able to come back and say, one, did we hit the mark? And is it effective? And two, are there others that we're seeing convert at scale? Whether that conversion is visiting a store or going to a website or downloading an app or watching something on video, what we're able to do is start talking about not just did it work or not, but what did we learn and how do we help? How do we improve? Sometimes that's further inventory selection. Sometimes that's iterations on the creative. And sometimes it's actually questions that we bring up.

Dan Levi: I love being able to go to a client and say, we understood, like we're looking at the data, we saw... I'll give you an example. There was a restaurant chain that we worked with. It's very simple. We call them visit studies. Did out-of-home drive people incrementally into your stores? And we were able to show this client, not only yes, did we see a strong correlation between those who are exposed and those who are visiting your stores, but we saw this pop on a Tuesday and we had no idea what was going on. Why were people visiting so much more on a Tuesday? And we saw that the unexposed audience, the control was also popping on Tuesday, but the exposed audience significantly greater. We sat with the client and we found out that they had a direct mail piece that dropped to promote a sale that they had for basically business launches.

Dan Levi: So they were direct mailing businesses saying, come to our stores on Tuesday. And there was a discount offer. What we took away from that is not only did out-of-home drive performance, and it was effective, but it made their other tactics work even harder because the combination of the billboard exposure and the DM, led to people actually performing even at greater scale. So that's the kind of stuff that we really love getting into. Help us understand what's going on here. Are you seeing this across your other channels? And how do we attribute that performance to out-of-home, whether that's in and of itself or the way that it works with the other tactics? 

Kailey Raymond: That's really interesting. And I think this has always been true, but it's probably true now more than ever is making sure you're understanding your attribution as it relates to all of the channels and how they're working together is going to be really important to making sure that you're investing in the right mix. And you cannot just do one tactic or one channel alone and try to make sure that you're attributing all of your pipeline or all of your revenue to that particular channel. It's just not the way modern marketing works. You have to make sure you're investing in a lot of different things. One of the things that kind of came to mind, I had a conversation with an advertising executive a few months ago that we're talking about CTV. And in particular, some of these CTV advertisers were talking about this thing called outcome-based marketing, where they're maybe guaranteeing an outcome off the back of this impression that they're delivering. I'm wondering what your take on that is and how that relates to the metrics that you're kind of providing back to any of the businesses that you work with.

Dan Levi: I can take it on a couple of ways. There's actually like one of the cinema advertising companies that's embraced an outcome-based model that they brought to marketing for us this year. So it's interesting to see what the response will be to that. I have a challenge with it for our business, two reasons. One, the value that out-of-home brings varies by marketer. For some marketers, we are a top-of-the-funnel efficient reach medium that's like highly, highly effective at driving scaled impact on their brand. For others, we're mid-lower funnel. And for others, we're finding that we're actually able to measure top-of-the-funnel impact and the conversion level impact. So I would have a hard time with a broad offering saying it's outcome-based because outcomes vary by brand, by stage of development of business, all of that. The other thing that I'd be careful about is even if it's a performance marketer that we're working with, even if it's someone whose KPIs are all the way at the bottom of the funnel, they also still get the value of the top-of-the-funnel. And I think one of the best illustrations of this and how squishy it is, if you will, direct-to-consumer brands. There is literally now a playbook that DTC brands are using. They all start with performance marketing within social media for the obvious reasons of being able to target people who have an interest in that idea, that lifestyle, whatever that product may be.

Dan Levi: And it doesn't matter which social community we're talking about. At some point these brands reach a point where they can only squeeze so much performance from that lemon. They have to think about how do we grow beyond that even when we're talking about Insta and TikTok and all of that. And so the DTC playbook typically it aligns with the C round of funding where they really need to step on the gas for growth, is they start thinking about brand and they start thinking about out-of-home. There's actually an agency who's developed their business on this realization that DTC brands need that help going from performance marketing to branding and how do they work together, right? So I think that becomes a really good illustration of this opportunity. We love working with DTC brands, not just at Clear Channel because we love supporting them with the advertising, but because of the data solutions we can actually connect the dots between that brand growth and how that actually drives performance as well. So I think it's a really interesting time for kind of thinking about top-of-the-funnel middle or lower, where the value is unlike so many other media where everything, the question is what are we to you as a specific marketer? 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, that's interesting. I certainly always have this perception of top of funnel but DTC is a really great observation of a particular business that I could definitely see it being lower conversion based funnel for out-of-home and making sure that there's a couple of advertisements literally around me right now that I can see from my window that are DTC brands and a lot of them have like the codes on them of actually conversion events. I'm like okay, yeah, I see what you're talking about now. One of the trends that we haven't talked about yet is AI and I'm wondering how AI intersects with Clear Channel. Are you using AI, in-house in RADAR and your teams. Like talk to me about how you're thinking about AI as a trend.

Dan Levi: I'll answer that initially from the company perspective then specifically focusing on marketing. From a company perspective, there's elements of our business that have been using AI for years. Our finance team, our business operations teams. It's been integrated to a degree but not at the scale that you're obviously asking about and getting at. We're very cautious about AI. We are absolutely using it in certain areas of the business more than others. My creative team, we use the Adobe suite of tools and Firefly is an integrated AI function that's been built in to Adobe. We use that for a number of reasons. One of them is it's a closed environment where there's very little risk of our teams either inappropriately using IP that they would get on the open web or also making sure that our work doesn't get out to the open web. We're seeing a lot of benefits for our creative teams to be able to move faster, to be able to think of something that would take them maybe manually a whole lot of time and effort to try and do and be able to move faster on that, something in my world we refer to it as spec art.

Dan Levi: If you've never used billboards before, sometimes you need help visualizing what your brand would look like in a billboard. So it really helps us move faster with spec art. It's fun. I was prepping for this the other day. I listened to one of your interviews you did specifically with Shannon Duffy from Asana. We're a big Asana shop, we love Asana and what Shannon was talking about with you we're already down that path. How do we leverage AI capabilities and specifically in partnership with Asana to allow our teams to move faster, to be smarter about the way that we're managing workflow and the insights we can get from the reporting on it. So those are areas that we're really diving into. The things that I get excited about are the moving forward things. We have the second largest archive of out-of-home imagery in the United States, and since 2000, almost all of that has been digitized. And we talk all the time about wouldn't it be cool if we were able to look at this massive, massive digital asset management platform and start to get to understand these are the things that we won't be able to see on our owns, the patterns that we see on our owns.

Dan Levi: What's really interesting is all the issues we were talking about before in terms of the challenges of digital marketing are moving digital marketers to embrace context. We are always and always will be a contextually relevant medium. How can we use AI to understand that context by observing those photos that we have? That's something that's on our wishlist to dive into. As an example, with RADAR, we've got a planning platform we call RADARView. Basically leverages those 4,500 audiences as well as proximity, targeting POI database, all kinds of variables to be able to create plans. And for my marketing team, for the research team, for our data team, it's all very intuitive, for a lot of our sellers it's new and a little intimidating. And so one of the things we've started exploring, we're not operationalizing but we started exploring, is there like a plain English approach? 

Dan Levi: Can we empower our sellers to not do pull downs and enter data but rather say I wanna build a plan for a local coffee shop that has six locations in Albuquerque. They're trying to reach this type of a... What would be the ideal inventory to reach that customer? We're not there yet, but those are the things that I get kind of excited about. The other thing that I do wanna, and I apologize, I've said this on other interviews recently, but I think it's really important, this is not an original thought, it's the Amara's Law as it is referred to, we tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate in the long time. I think that's where we're at right now. And all you gotta do is look back in the last 10 years, blockchain, NFTs, all the things that the metaverse, oh my god, the number of calls that I've taken over the years about billboard advertising in the metaverse, where have we landed on it? It's in-game advertising in Roblox.

Kailey Raymond: Tell me, Dan, where have you landed on it? [laughter]

Dan Levi: But people get over excited in the short term, and I think it's wonderful thing about what we do for a living. It's the ability to get overexcited and a lot of these ideas come from that over-exuberance in the short term. I think we're so far away from landing on what really truly will be the impact of AI in a business. For now we're just continuing to explore it and try things and do it in a way that make sure that we're not opening ourselves up to unintended risk.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. I mean, ultimately the reality is that AI has been here forever really in tech terms, especially like a really, really long time. Over two decades certainly. And what does it mean? It means efficiency and it means automation. Okay. That's a lot of what we've been working on for a very long time. But I love this example. It's exactly where my brain went was like a private LLM for your sales team, which is just fed all of the data from a database or creative that you have and the information that you have from RADAR of how you can actually target, so you can create such a customized plan and maybe even suggest some of the ways in which they could compete with other brands out there. What's been working for what part of the funnel, like whatever, all within written language of how would you suggest, imagine a pitch deck coming together in three prompts, like that is the future. And there are actually quite a few businesses that are already thinking about doing that. It's just, how do you make sure you're connecting your own private content to that in a way that you can scale and make sure you can put the right guardrails on so that you aren't...

Dan Levi: Exactly.

Kailey Raymond: I don't know, going out of your brand or going out and saying something that you wouldn't necessarily want to.

Dan Levi: Yeah. And just to be clear, we are very far away from that future that you just laid out.

Kailey Raymond: Totally.

Dan Levi: But I think it's interesting... And this is not an original thought. I love Shelly Palmer, I've known him for a long time. Shelly talks about the change in the workforce and the need to develop people skills around prompt engineering, right? And so what you just laid out sounds amazing and what I immediately start thinking about is, oh God, now I gotta train my teams on something completely different that they've never done before. There's always choices that you need to make and there's always like the unintended cost of embracing these kinds of changes. I do think at the end of the day, advertising, I can't speak about adtech, martech the broader solutions, but advertising, especially one that is such a local business, people, relationships, they're really important. And I think there is a very big risk in trying to move too fast to embrace automation in a way that undermines the strength that we have, which is we have people on the ground in our local markets working with our customers, literally going to their stores, going to their offices, building trusting relationships. And anytime I visit one of our local markets, I see the benefit of that trust, that longstanding relationship and the opportunity that creates. So there's a real risk in undermining that too fast.

Kailey Raymond: I agree. Yeah. I mean, when you're talking about like one-to-one digital, that's a place where everybody wants to get, but at the end of the day it's... I mean, it's built on like a really robust data set. I do think that's kind of where we're going, but that human impact of speaking to another person, building that relationship and building that through trust, I do think you can't lose that. So how do you pair those two things together to make sure that you're developing the right experience as a brand? I think is like one of the biggest hurdles to overcome, is human AI working together. That exact conversation with Shannon about the handoffs that can happen within an organization between an AI agent and a human being. Like that's gonna be the rub that we're gonna have to figure out and there's gonna be some mistakes along the way in the next couple of years, but certainly that learning experience is gonna get us to a better place for customers.

Kailey Raymond: I think some of the themes that we're talking about right now have to do with some of the risks involved, certainly with implementing AI and over-automation. I'm wondering what you think some of the other challenges are in developing this journey towards great customer experience and great customer engagement.

Dan Levi: And for us specifically, I think our strength is also one of our challenges. We've got such institutional knowledge and such history. We have people who have sold for our company for 30, 35, 40 years. There is a depth of knowledge there about our markets, about our customers, about our inventory and how to use it that we absolutely cannot undervalue. We have to embrace that. The challenge then becomes how do we help that kind of legacy side of our business embrace some of the more contemporary tools and approaches and data and things like that. And so that's what not just I, but I and so many of my colleagues and overall as a company are working on, is how do we build on that history and that legacy and that real institutional knowledge in a way that allows us to be more relevant for more marketers today.

Dan Levi: And the answer for us continues to be, don't think of the medium solely as a location-based medium. Think of it as a medium based on audiences and locations. Embracing the idea of journeys, of movement and the data gives us an understanding of how we can help drive better performance for our customers in ways that obviously grows our business. I wanna talk about journeys for a second 'cause I think it's really important. When I started my career a very long time ago, television, not even cable, television, radio, newspaper, magazine, billboards, those are your choices as a marketer for the most part. Direct mail, let's throw direct mail and maybe Yellow Pages if we're being creative. Very few options for a marketer, right? We obviously are in a very different world right now where there are so many options and we have the ability to be able to speak to those options through the filter, not just of the medium that you see 'cause we are out there in the real world, but the data that we have to be able to talk about performance.

Dan Levi: So I think it's worth kind of embracing the way that the world has changed so dramatically from back then and the options that marketers have today and what that means for a traditional medium like out-of-home. Because to compete with digital and performance media, to be able to compete with search, to be able to compete with CTV, we need a better educated sales team. We need a better trained sales team. We need a marketing team who sees their job not as sales support but as being at the table with those sellers as a solution provider. It's a really big transition as far as the business goes and I think the risk is trying to move too fast for the organization. When I started here almost nine years ago, there was a woman in our organization who said this to me and I quote her on this all the time and I've told her I do this, said, "Dan, we've got a lot of people in this company who know how to sell rectangles." And that really resonated with me 'cause we need rectangle sellers. There are a lot of marketers.

Kailey Raymond: Totally.

Dan Levi: They don't need data, they don't need all these other bells and whistles. They need to know that their billboard, not the billboard, their billboard is there and they know that it's important that they're brand beyond that 24/7 throughout the year, because they have customers coming in saying, wow, you changed your creative on your billboard. I love that. That's an important part of the business. It's just not the part of the business that's gonna drive growth. So we need to embrace that, build on that, value that, but also bring in new tools and new, more contemporary approaches to reach the marketers who haven't seen billboards as a core part of their mix. CPG, good example, CPG in the US has not really embraced billboards as a part of the mix in the way that they do in Europe, for example.

Dan Levi: We've done some really great work with data analytics to help brands understand when you advertise on billboards, what's the impact on household behavior? Because the way that they're measuring their impact is through the panels, the NCSs, the Circanas of the world, right? Well, because we built a data platform that allows us to integrate and match our data against other panels, we've now answered those questions. And that gets to not just the efficacy, it gets to incrementality, it gets to impact on category sales, brand sales. It gets us to a deeper understanding of performance in a way that now we are starting to see a lot of these big CPG companies embrace out-of-home, but not as a branding media as a performance media, which is really, really interesting.

Kailey Raymond: What you're talking about is fascinating and it's built on this foundation of really understanding the data behind what your placements are doing for folks and what part of the funnel... And having that deep partnership that you're talking about to make sure that you understand what that outcome is and that you can make sure that you're delivering that back. So being able to suggest that actually we've seen that when you do a mailer in combination with this type of messaging, it can have this type of impact, like that insight and that suggestion, that's the thing that really builds trust and I think that's again, it's just built on a rich, robust amount of data to be able to make those decisions. And this is gonna bring me to the thesis statement of the show, Dan, which is, how would you define good data? 

Dan Levi: I think at the end of the day, my first thought is not an original thought. Data in and of itself is meaningless, it's the insights. And for me, the insights in the world that I'm in, they have to be actionable. There's lots that we can pull from our RADAR platform on behalf of our customers. How do you know what's relevant to that customer? We can't start with the data or the insights that come from this data. We have to start with understanding of vertical, understanding of brand, where the challenges are and the role that the data can play in driving performance for that customer in a way that drives our business forward. So to me, good data is actionable data that allows us to deliver for our customers while delivering for our business.

Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering, you've mentioned a couple of things that I think are really interesting, but have you ever learned anything surprising about your customers based off of data? 

Dan Levi: So short answer is yes. Billboards traditionally have been used locally to proximity target. I wanna look at billboards that are in three miles radius from my store. And we have been challenging that premise, especially over the last few years because certain exceptions, if you live in a dense urban environment, it's different. But most of the markets in the United States are vehicular markets that are sprawling markets. Last week I was in Dallas and in Houston, you can't go anywhere in Dallas and Houston three miles and get anywhere, you're traveling. People travel on longer journeys than ever before. And so we've been using our data to understand travel distance and conversion behavior. And we've been doing this primarily initially with visits. So with restaurants, QSRs, retail stores, things like that. Businesses that you're trying to get someone to come to a physical location. And we are consistently showing that more than 50% of the measured visits are coming from people who traveled significantly longer distances than the way the billboards were planned and bought, more than 50% traveling more than five miles from their home, their business or the last billboard location that they saw. So we're challenging that notion that billboards should just be used to reach the people when they're near your store. You wanna bring people in. Can I indulge you for a second in the premise that I have? 

Kailey Raymond: Yes, please.

Dan Levi: When my wife and I first moved to Brooklyn 24 years ago, we lived in a neighborhood where there was Rocky's Pizza on the corner and one or two restaurants that you had to walk to. Other than that, there really wasn't anything. And so if we wanted Thai food for example, we had two options, we either knew of a Thai restaurant that we would go to or we broke out the walk and cooked ourselves. Now, things are infinitely discoverable and navigable because of smartphones. And so if we want Thai, we don't think about the neighborhood, we go to Yelp or we go to Google and we find recommendations. We then look at how far away is it, and I don't know if you've thought about this before, you don't measure distance anymore geographically, you do it in time, it's not 10 miles away, it's 10 minutes away, right? 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah.

Dan Levi: So you make the decision. Yeah. I've heard about that restaurant and I'm like, "That's only a 20-minute drive. Let's go." Right? You see that across all of our markets and I think that consumer behavior and that access to that discoverability and that navigability gives you the ability to then speak to a brand about you're leaving money on the table. If you're only thinking about customers that are near your store, you're missing out on the opportunity to bring you to the store. There's so many brands think about In-N-Out Burger or Whataburger down in Texas or Shake Shack, just using QSR space as an example of brands that have gone beyond a burger joint to an aspirational brand that's differentiated in the minds of their consumers. And so we're showing people over and over again that if you think about things not based on proximity, about audience journeys and bringing them in, you drive better performance.

Dan Levi: The other big discovery for us is around frequency. If you're using digital and performance media, you're not frequency capping, you're creating problems, right? There was a study that was done last year about CTV and the problems with excessive frequency on CTV. I don't know if you saw this, this just something that media brands and Magnet did together where they were showing literally if you are overexposing consumers on CTV to your brand, it does harm to your brand. It doesn't help you. Well, we have been able to show that actually frequency in out-of-home is a strength consistently. Out-of-home, we see consistent straight line correlation between frequency and conversion behavior. And I think if you take a step back, the data makes sense because you don't wake up in the morning and decide to take your kids to a different school. You don't wake up in the morning and say, I'm gonna go to a different employer today.

Dan Levi: You go on consistent journeys and on those journeys you're seeing a frequency of exposure to brands and messaging that when you get to the point where you have that need, you do tend to go with the top of mind brand or the one that you feel good about. The best example of this in our world, and I love the fact that lawyers use billboards, but you don't need a personal injury attorney until you need them. And when you need them, you're gonna think about who do I know, right? And our friends at Morgan & Morgan understand that. They understand that you may not need us today, but we wanna be top of mind for you when you do need us. I think that behavior is something that we're seeing consistently across verticals and the frequency of out-of-home directly being a benefit to advertisers, because once I know I need you, whether it's an attorney, or a roofer, or an HVAC company, or I'm hungry and I'm looking for a place to get a burger, being top of mind does absolutely drive that performance.

Kailey Raymond: This idea of [0:41:27.5] ____ frequency is really interesting and I think that your concepts around kind of time and distance is related to this in a lot of ways. 'Cause I mean, a consumer lens right now, yeah, if I'm watching CTV and the same brand is advertising to me at every spot, I am annoyed. I'm annoyed. And I think it has to do with also the fact that it's 30 seconds or a minute of your life and you're seeing the same thing over... It's way less offensive or intrusive to your life if you are walking by and the birds are chirping and you can look or you can not look and it's this thing where it's not inundating your... It's not in your face and it's not like a prison. [chuckle] It's like something that is just a part of the landscape. So it is a different feeling. I have one last question for you, which is what steps or recommendations would you have for somebody that's looking to uplevel their customer experience in that strategy? 

Dan Levi: I think we have a fundamental challenge right now in much of the advertising ecosystem in that the interests of the larger agencies, the holdco agencies are no longer as closely aligned with the interests of the marketers as they used to be. And that creates some real challenges. And this by the way, I'm not faulting the agencies. There's been a lot of trends that have led to this kind of disconnect between what the agencies need to do in terms of their growth and their profit versus the performance that the marketers are looking for. So my advice to marketers is agencies are critically important. They're huge partners for the brands, for the media. Absolutely, we love working closely with our agencies. Be curious, don't rely upon the information to be brought to you. Think about ways that even a medium like out-of-home that you may look at as legacy and old school media can add to the mix.

Dan Levi: This is not about spend less in digital and more on billboards. It's about thinking about what your mix is and is it aligned with the behavior you're trying to drive? And importantly is it aligned with the way the consumers consume media today? We've got now two generations and counting that have been trained inherently on how to avoid advertising. What do you do about that as a marketer? Don't just keep throwing money for things that have worked 10 years ago to think more broadly about that. And it's on us to tell the story that I've been trying to tell with you here, which is we've put a tremendous amount of innovation, time, money, into building tools and data and analytics capabilities to help you as a marketer understand the incremental value. Be curious, open the door to new ideas, even if those new ideas may seem like old ideas.

Kailey Raymond: Always be innovating. The consumer is changing and so do you. That's great. Dan, thank you so much for being here. Your passion resonates and it was a great conversation. I learned a lot.

Dan Levi: I appreciate it, Kailey. I appreciate that you're leaning into out-of-home and seeing even with a podcast whose entire premise is around data, I appreciate that you saw that what you're doing is relevant for what we're doing. So I love the opportunity, appreciate the opportunity to talk about what we're doing and if people have questions, they can always go to our website, they can look me up on LinkedIn. I love talking about this and I would value the opportunity to answer the questions that people have and talk further about it.