Transcript

Welcome to the Advertising Forum. This is episode one of our new series From Screen to Store, sponsored by Jam Loop. Joining us today is Leaf Welsh. She's the founder and CEO of Jam Loop. He's here to discuss how the definition of performance is changing and evolving and why the mid market is leading that shift. Leaf, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the Advertising Forum. Thanks. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Let's jam out. Yeah, Jam out. I I loved that story. I did want to ask you. If prior to the call we chatted quite a bit about the industry and what you guys are doing in market and how you how you got to where you are today. But I'd love to talk a little bit about quick overview of Jan Loop that you could share with everyone what you've built over these last seven years and who you're serving in market today. Let's start there. Sure, yeah. So we built Damlip around a very simple idea and that's to have television advertising Dr. customers real sales, not impression so. It's not just about driving ad exposures, it's about driving real outcomes, both online and offline. O we've been doing this for about 7 years. We're focused mainly on local brands, so these are brands all around the US. Some of them have national operations, but they're winning and operating locally. And so the majority of our customers are independent agencies. So these are independent agencies, maybe 5 to 50 people. They're working with local advertisers, car dealers, health and Wellness centers, local banks, credit unions, etailer retailers and so on. And they, but we also work with brands directly. So it could be, let's say, a retail brand. That has a national presence, maybe hundreds of stores that need to activate locally. So we work with all of those. Yeah, it's kind of like how we got started. Initially, the play was all about bringing transparency. So when we launched back in 2018, the problem with the time was we could see a fair amount of traditional television advertisers that we're moving over to digital, but they weren't getting a lot of transparency in the process. So they were starting to spend budget and they don't really know what. Maps of my running on, what zip codes am I running in, who am I reaching? There's there was not a lot of ways for them to verify. And so we thought, OK, the real opportunity is to bring transparency to the market. In order to do that, we decided, OK, it's absolutely critical. We've gotta start building our own tax starting with our own bidder. That's gonna give us access to control over the the granular bitstream data and to what extent we share that transparency with our with our own customers. And so that's where we started. I think overtime we've evolved. So we've evolved now from not only capturing the transparency around the ad exposure. But since then, we've built mechanisms to figure out, OK, what happened then you got all this exposure on the CTV ad. What happened there was, was there any kind of impact on the business? And so we've built out not only the bidder, but a measurement and attribution engine, incrementality engine, kind of a custom reporting layer and so on. So this is all about, in the end, it's all about trying to figure out what is the impact of CTV advertising in the real world, both online and offline. I think the other thing is probably worth noting is we try to be pretty flexible in how we deliver our our solution to the market. So we offer managed service. We offer self-serve and then we have a white label solution. So on the managed service side which actually makes up the majority of our clients. A lot of these agencies, for example, they're, they want big market capabilities, but they're too small operationally to stand up their own trading desk operation. They are, you know, sometimes limited in expertise and adops resources. And so we work through our managed service, lend them our expertise and our operational resources and in many ways they think of us kind of an extension of their team. So that's one set of profile customers. They're going to be some that want hands on keyboard, they wanna, they don't wanna talk to a salesperson. They just want to be able to control the by themselves. And for those if they want to, you know, use our self-serve, that's fine. And then recently we rolled out a white label version. So you know, agencies I think are struggling to differentiate themselves out on the market. They are trying to figure out how can we differentiate and make more money. And so we we give them a white label solution where they can essentially Co opt our entire capabilities. Put it under their brand, sell it under their brand, make themselves look big and operate. It really is a big agency capability that's, you know, very well suited for the mid market. Thank you, Leaf. I love that background. It it's it's very helpful for us to understand the way you're working with your current clients. You know, we've talked about outcomes and outcomes in particular and connected television. Why has outcomes become such a dominant narrative in advertising and why is CCTV at the center of it all? So the the game really changed with the success of search and social. We've seen for the last 15 or so years, search and social advertising has done an amazing job of. Instantly being able to create the outcomes, see if this is working or not. I mean, it's low barriers to entry. You don't have to spend a lot to get going. It's very data rich. You're collecting a lot of metrics in real time. There's a great feedback loop and you can look at the data, optimize and get instant results. That is kind of created a new bar, a new standard such that any new format that wants to secure advertising dollars is going to have to at a minimum meet that kind of standard of instant feedback loop driving outcomes right away. So that's kind of the the big game shifter and if if any format, including CTV, wants to be successful and grow, it needs to meet that bar. Now The thing is that if you look at how CTV has gone to market. It's really got this legacy mindset still you, you still have mainly traditional advertising mindset applied to CTV campaigns. And by that I mean they're really looking at as a brand awareness vehicle, top of the funnel. You know, it does what TV has always done great, which is massive exposure, massive scale, really emotional impact. But that's really a limiting, I mean they're not thinking about the other half of the equation was like, OK, you saw people saw the ad, well what happened after that. And so the real untapped opportunity we feel especially for mid market is to take this brand awareness and move over to more of a full funnel outcomes based performance based approach. Now the other thing that's I think going on in the background is that. Assert not everything is rosy in search and social. You are seeing customer acquisition costs rising, and that's for a few different reasons. You've got, you've got more and more, you know, it's been so successful and more and more people are bidding up the keywords. You have a loss of mobile signals due to privacy issues, so you're not collecting as much information as you once were. You also have the whole AI thing which is really contracting the search path. You're not getting as many again as many click throughs and that means not as much information, all resulting in increased costs. So leave. Let me ask you this then, if performance is. About getting more customers, more transactions, yeah. And the ability actually to to tie all of these outcomes back to media and when you're working with these mid market customers, what does this ultimately look like in practice so. You have to think about how you would set up this campaign to begin with. So I, I would go back to, let's think about this in terms of how it works in a full funnel approach. You need to think it, keep in mind that the customer journey is, it's quite windy, it happens over time, it's very fragmented, happens over multiple devices. We're all, you know, we're jumping back and forth between devices all day long. And so you have to think, OK, how am I going to build up that frequency, connect with customers? At the top of the funnel. And then what am I going to do to start driving them down South that it moves from a lots of lots of exposure to actually taking some kind of an action. And I think practically speaking, I'll give you an example of how this would work in the real world. So imagine I'm a I'm a viewer. I'm sitting in the living room, I'm watching, I don't know, the Olympics. And I, I see a 30 second commercial there. It's this lean back experience, really good exposure, really emotional. And, and I might get served up that ad 345 times and start, you know, it starts building up that awareness in me. Now next thing a few days later, I'm on the go, I'm commuting, I'm on the train and I'm on my mobile device watching Olympic clip highlights and I get served up an online video ad. Maybe it's another C TV commercial. Maybe it's a video ad, maybe it's a display ad, but it's a little bit more action oriented, reinforcing the message. A few days later, I'm back at home. I get served a full screen pause ad. It's basically home screen takeover on the big screen. And it's got a QR code that allows me to now maybe scan the QR code and take an action, download a coupon to go into the store or go online and purchase something. So it's, it's kind of we think about it. As CCTV is the foundation, that's what's creating the awareness and then we work with complementary digital ad formats like old like display, like pause ads to drive the consumer down the funnel. So, you know, we like to say CT, the foundation creates the demand, the other stuff captures the demand and that's kind of how it works. And then, you know, in terms of like setting up the campaign, there are very specific things that we would go through to figure out how to execute on that list. Which the awesome explanation. Thank you. At the end of the day, how should marketers judge if that campaign is actually working, if they're advertising during the Olympics, if they're using the QR code? Yeah, love to hear your two cents. So as always, the most important thing is trying to understand how do you define success? What is your KPI's? You know, because sometimes you talk to different buyers and they're responsible for one part of the, you know, sort of campaign objectives and different team in the agency might be responsible for different part of the campaign objective. So it's really getting clarity up front what are the KPI's? And then I think what plays into that is really understanding. How does sales? What's the sales channel at this particular brand? Do they have an online presence? They have, you know, offline retail stores. There are some nuances sometimes. Are the retail stores owned and operated? Are they franchisees? They might have slightly different objectives. So it's really understanding where are all the outlets because if you're going to have a very holistic approach, you need to understand what are all the different places that the sales could actually happen, whether it's online or offline. Once you set up those expectations, I think then the next step is really setting expectations around timing. The scale. So for example, if you're expecting there to be an impact in two weeks. It's just not going to happen. This is more of a longer cycle. We often say you got to do a 2323 month test. That's what's going to lay the groundwork for creating that initial awareness and then using the bottom of the funnel tactics. So certain amount of time commitment and then I would also say certain level of scale commitment. So for example, if you're only spending $5000, that's really not going to move the needle, especially for a national advertiser. So come up with a budget if you're constricted on budget. Think about how if you're a national advertiser, maybe you wanna test it out in very specific markets, get it humming in that specific market and then expand from there. And then I think the last thing we think about is, you know, you can have all of the metrics in the world around. Add exposure. And the conversions to, you know, to the offline online sales, but then there's the question was, OK, what was that? Was that a correlation or was was that causality there? Would this stuff have happened anyway or did we actually drive the outcomes via the campaign? And that's where working within incrementality solution that's baked into the overall platform is also helpful. It's kind of a, I would call it a sniff test for is this real or not leaf. This has been such an awesome discussion. We wanna thank you for for for being on on behalf of Jam Loop and also just we're excited for the next episode with Tim Glover, the EVP of media at US Marketing partners. Thank you everyone for watching this episode and we can't wait for the series. This is going to be great. Thanks, Leaf, Really happy to be here. Thanks so much. Take care.