Insider caught up with IBO CVO Chris Cowlbeck for his comments on recent stories from CFO of Outfront Matt Siegel, CEO of Lamar Sean Reilly and former CEO of Adams Kevin Gleason addressing their growing concerns on Geopath and the implication for independent operators.

Chris, many of our readers tell us independents do not sell locally using impressions, so why do the comments from the recent stories matter?

I’ve sold locally myself for years in a small market using traffic counts and understand the reasoning behind the media owner’s perception of various metrics.  It’s certainly confusing and the abundance of terms used in planning doesn’t help.  It wasn’t until COVID with traffic disruptions and learning my local advertisers were spending as much as 10X of their spend with me to get online traction and sales, which sealed my understanding better and helped us build more useful tools with the help of some industry insiders.  Many local, regional and national brands now use extensive modeling to best allocate their campaign budgets and try to find the venues that drive the highest return for their objectives. They primarily use impressions in this modeling and they appear to be moving advertising dollars to the areas that cross over most efficiently for them. Ignoring their needs is like ignoring a sales opportunity.

Another thought is that national agencies want so much unnecessary information, but who could possibly want this sort of detail? 

In a word, BRANDS!  For years it wasn’t clear to me why I spent so much time completing RFPs without much success. Now it’s crystal clear: if I didn’t have the info, I didn’t get much return. Sure, a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, but it wasn’t until we developed our connections with AdQuick that I fully understood the impact of what the brands want and why.  AdQuick has taken the time to share what they need and many of our tools have been developed with those data validation needs in mind.  As we check off the boxes that brands need, opportunity follows for both large and small brands.  And according to AdQuick, it really is indeed necessary information – the brands need it for bolstering their buying confidence in OOH.

Local advertisers get confused with words like DEC, impressions or consumer insights – why should we muddy the waters if we can just give them traffic counts?

The advertisers know more than you think and in my own case, how could I know what I didn’t know, unless I opened my mind and listened to the folks doing lots of business. Where some sales teams rely on one set of data to keep things simple, the magic happens when you can see multiple sets of data to spot anomalies. What turns muddy waters into pristine pricing strength, turns out to be raw data and understanding then what drives advertiser interest aka pricing optimization justified by reliable data. What’s more valuable, knowing 10 cars went by or the one on the way to buy a diamond necklace after shopping on the Internet?  The typical sales person can sell diamonds more than data points, so my intuition suggests that our industry needs piles of education in ways that our indies can understand best and we are bringing some of those into play currently with our OOH CHARGER.

If another data provider enters the market, how can we believe the data, given the comments made about the OOH industry norm for so many years?

This is a concern that many brands have had over the years as the methodology was developed for online since around 2000. They simply need to compare their spends equally as they cross over for all the channels where they spend money like TV, radio, video, etc. Fortunately, a group of people helped press for an OOH Standard published by the Media Rating Council in April 2024 and now we can hope that the brands will press data providers to seek the accreditation audit to give the market confidence.  The likes of Google and Meta subject their metrics to the MRC and they enjoy MANY 10s of billions in revenue EACH compared to our $10 billion OOH share which is then carved up between hundreds of companies. So my experience says that MRC accreditation is critical to give the transparency and confidence for brands to allocate increasing amounts of budget to OOH across the country whether metro, suburban or rural in placement. We need to make OOH easier to buy, whether that is through an agency, programmatically or direct. Trust in the data and reliability of our audiences is paramount.

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