By Becky Smith Enterprise Manager, IBOUSA
Connections, Impressions, a Bite of the Big Pie. In a nutshell, these were topics that revolved around Chris’ vision of driving revenues for the independents in his role as Chief Vision Officer. The underlying theme was continuing to pool our footprint together to get seats at the bigger tables of deal-making and efficiency/speed gains.
Among the top billings were Anna Bager, OAAA President/CEO, and Ari Buchalter, Place Exchange CEO, who both spoke to the shifting advertiser budgets (the Big Pie) that represent about $300 billion that is spent annually in NON-OOH media like TV, web, and video. Compare that to the small sliver of $8 billion we have attracted in the past. These sands are shifting and they spoke to the critical role of impressions and accountability. Another top billing was Jessica Bragg of CSX Railways, who discussed the amazing opportunities currently available with the CSX/IBO process of acquiring land leases for billboards on their easements.
Pat O’Donnell, President of YESCO, participated in a Revenue Growth in Uncertain Times panel along with Randy Otto, Trailhead President/CEO, and Neil Bell, New South, Principal, hosted by Max Drachman. Pat expressed how important it was for the industry to come together with a common way of impressions for the buyers to be comfortable with and selling locally with impressions based selling was bantered about. Buchalter reinforced this theme by discussing the importance of the Media Rating Council (MRC) and their role of the standard setting for the industry as well as grading the homework and establishing believability for the buyers. He added that the latest hourly version of their PerView Impressions data is now available via an affordable bulk deal with IBO Speedway which is priced and managed by IBO. Many of the associates had opportunities to discuss their specific impressions numbers for their locations in Q&A hands-on sessions with incredible depth and transparency. Satellite traffic penetration metrics were also discussed that will augment impressions information and are currently finalizing their product MetricOOH for MRC accreditation, starting this fall.
Other speakers touched upon the need for fast, efficient, easy-to-access pipelines that have believable data to augment their buying decisions. Jeff Lamb serves as the chief technical contact at DoMedia, stressed the importance of accurate data, pricing, and availability, as they have gone live with the IBO Speedway Request For Offer (RFO) system. The RFO is powered by the BillboardPlanet EPIX API interface which provides current availability and pricing to buyers connected and beginning to reach our IBO goals of eliminating mountains of redundant administration for both the buyers and media owners.
Sandler Systems’ Nausley husband and wife team, now helps dozens of our IBO Associates sales teams and drove home the need to control what we can in uncertain times and the exploding technological change which is accelerating at a pace uncomfortable for most of us. One way of accomplishing this is by coalescing our inventory together to manage the connections to the revenue channels while reducing the middle ground tech fees and increasing the share to media owners surfaced numerous times as the IBO Speedway methodology illustrated.
Navigating the core need to sell OOH using our creative juices was very professionally done by one of the big guys in the industry Jarrod Glick, OUTFRONT South Region Creative Director, and assisted by Mark Peterson, Blackbird Media COO (operates THE Nashville Sign). Ourdoorlink announced the acquisition of SignBird, OAAA Mike Hershey brought us up to speed with legislative issues, Chris Rothfelder and Mike Fallick focused on permit dispute resolution, rounding out with Nick Gonzales of Alerus chatting about the lending landscape 2023 and their favorable positioning for media owners. BillboardPlanet’s Mike Donaldson shared his years of experience in land lease negotiations, Siroky Group’s Crystal Dhir introduced their suite of products to IBO, and Billboard ETC’s Rebecca Thurman shared how increasing productivity with technology and talent can benefit us all.
This conference set into motion longer breaks and lunches for one on one networking time which were a hit and also spurred suggestions for the upcoming conference this spring in Houston. While this Charlotte conference was the largest attendance in our 20+ year history, the next one will have a printing process panel and oodles of case studies on how to sell locally using impressions and prepping for the budgets shifting to OOH. Be sure to participate!
About IBO Speedway
The IBO COOP Speedway is a cloud-based set of data solutions and technology “tools” for IBOUSA Associates that enable our IBO Marketing team to aggregate inventory information from just about any source and deliver data to just about any buyer or operator in any fashion.
IBO Marketing has grown to over 250 companies with about a 100K face footprint and uniquely functions on a break-even basis to represent the IBO Associates as a cooperative manager, much like a rural electricity or water co-op. Our centralized technical effort enables a one-stop functionality for buying interests whether automation-assisted, programmatic, or the good old-fashioned manual way.
For more information contact Becky Smith, IBOUSA Enterprise Manager via email becky@IBOUSA.org or call the office for immediate attention, 580-226-2234.
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