Why I Chose OneScreen.ai

I started OOH Insider because I wanted to tell better stories about Out of Home. Better stories about how to use it, how to measure effectiveness, better stories about how it is the most undervalued ad play we'll ever see.

Ya see, before I became an OOH evangelist, I was a hater.

I'd bought millions of dollars in tv, radio, digital and direct mail but I'd never bought a dollar in any sort of outdoor advertising or anything that could reasonably be considered "out of home".

FUN FACT: Before working for Adams Outdoor, I tried to fire them as the Marketing Director at an automotive dealer group who had an existing contract, more on that later.

The reason I was a hater was for one very simple reason - you couldn't measure how it works.

2 Strikes

"So I can't measure it and you sell it with non-cancellable contracts?"

You can see where this is going...

I was confused (see also: frustrated) about why it was so hard to work with. As a digital marketer, we can adjust budgets on the fly, turn campaigns on and off, and we get to control the campaign based on the feedback we're seeing and the campaign goal.

But OOH has not traditionally worked that way and, frankly, I believe it is one the reasons for stagnant growth. Despite the advances in programmatic, and the optimistic outlook for growth in 2021, the key to unlocking exponential growth is easy - make it easy.

Don't believe me? How often do you price check Amazon against other retailers?

Point made. If you make it easy for people to do business with you, they will do business with you. There is value in easy and it's amplified by control of the process. Sprinkle in some elements to make the decision making easy and BAM!

Setting the hook

Despite my frustrations, the greatest opportunity came when Adams Outdoor Eastern PA was in the market for a digital strategist, to help sell their online advertising suite to new, and existing, clients.

Sell some $1,000/mo in display ads to clients already spending $10,000/mo in outdoor?

Seems simple enough.

So that's what we did.

But what came next I never expected...

We did a campaign for a non-profit that helps homeless men get back on their feet. We layered some mobile geofencing with their digital billboards and voila - website donations went up almost 40%, comparing the same periods, year-over-year...and the client didn't change anything else. Just added billboards and geofencing/display.

Seeing OOH translate into a language I understood, analytics, made sense and I wanted to know more. The hook was set.

Evolving

I continued to find more stories like this.

Different types of clients, short sales cycles, long sales cycles, brick and mortar businesses, online businesses. There were consistent indicators, of good campaigns, that showed up in the digital analytics.

The data helps us tell better stories and sales is equal parts storytelling and problem solving. So if you can tell a better story about a way to solve your client's problem(s), guess what?

You win, we grow.

There was just one problem - resistance to change as an industry.

Breaking thru the resistance

To break thru the resistance, I realized it would have to be the power of the collective. That to really shift the conversation, we'd need more people talking about it.

It couldn't just be anyone talking about it though, it had to be believers and so, OOH Insider continued to evolve...and in July of 2020, I met Greg Wise, Co-Founder and CRO of OneScreen.ai.

Greg coordinated a call for one of his other co-founders, Sam Mallikarjunan, CEO of OneScreen.ai and they started talking about being able to buy OOH like Facebook ads and with actual attribution for things like phone calls, store visits, and QR code redemptions.

They weren't just pitching heat about some "wouldn't it be cool" idea, they'd actually been working on this for a couple of months and were curious if the industry was ready for that conversation. So, while I couldn't speak for the industry as a whole, myself as a marketer was chomping at the bit.

I knew how effective OOH could be, I'd seen it myself. I'd helped strategize the campaigns and saw the results in Google Analytics, heard the feedback from the clients themselves.

But how do you scale one guy's excited observations?

Build a platform to do it for you.

Love at first sight

It was somewhere around 5 minutes after getting off the call with Sam and Greg that I told a friend "I have a feeling I'm going to work with those guys someday".

Having no idea that 'someday' would be 5 months later, here we are.

The team is made up of some of the smartest, and highest-performing individuals I've ever met. Indepedently, they've been instrumental in building some of the biggest companies in the world, in their respective spaces. As a team, they helped build Hubspot, the $17.8b company that inspired the brands around the world to do a thing called 'inbound marketing'.

What does it all mean?

OOH Insider will continue to be the loudest voice in OOH and grow with the community.

But here's where it gets really cool...

Leading the marketing team at OneScreen means that I'll be able to help media owners understand plug-and-play analytics for their networks, help advertisers learn about advertising in the real-world (while being able to measure RoAS), and create experiences for customers that they care about.

How would it change the world if instead of being connected to our phones, we were more connected to the world around us?

Here's to changing the world, one screen at a time.

Check out our shiny new website and grab $500 in free ad credit @ www.onescreen.ai