An Essential Intro to Programmatic Advertising with Josh Aston
Overview
Josh Aston explains how programmatic is different from traditional marketing and how to make your programmatic strategy effective.
Guest
Josh Aston, CMO & Co-Founder of Above the Fold, has a proven track record of successes as a talented marketing leader who possesses the experience and strategies needed for the continued success and growth of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. His successes include creating aggressive digital marketing strategies, content, and channels which increase business development and visibility in competitive markets.
Reference
Transcript
Billy Bateman 0:00
All right, everyone. Welcome to digital conversations. I’m your host, Billy Bateman. And today I am joined by the great Josh Ash. He asked How are you doing, Josh?
Josh Aston 0:11
doing really well. Thanks, Billy. I appreciate the invite to be on.
Billy Bateman 0:15
Yeah, we’re excited to have you. Josh is the founder and CMO of above the fold digital. And we’re going to talk a little bit about programmatic today and break down what it is.
But before we get into that, you’ve got a really interesting background and love for everyone to hear a little bit about your background and how you came to start above the fold.
Josh Aston 0:36
Oh, yeah, love to you. I love my story, I’d love to share it. Um, so I got my start at a company called one 800 contacts, which I know you had Lauren Joyce on a couple of episodes ago. And it was fun to be able to relive kind of that one 200 contacts, memories that she shared of what they’re up to 100 contacts.
But yeah, I got my start there, I got started at the call center. And I loved that part of my background. Because I was on the front lines, right? I was doing phone calls, talking to customers, it was awesome to be able to start, I guess, in my career there and quickly moved up to the marketing team. It’s kind of a cool story.
1800 Contacts
I met my wife of 100 contacts. And we were on a similar team. And we were getting a little bit of pressure that we may be needed to change teams or something just because they just want to make sure they kept it appropriate. Because when I started, we were married and got married. Anyway.
So that job opened up a marketing . I was kind of getting burned out from the sales team side of it. I realized I loved the experience, but it wasn’t for me long term. And I went to the marketing team and said. Hey, I really want a job. What can I do to get this job, and they said, go home, learn everything you can about Excel, and good luck on the interview tomorrow.
So, I went and called the Excel Bible, the driest, biggest book you could find, and read it that night, literally went through it that night and landed the job. So that was my first career, I went from being a call center agent to actually being over digital marketing for 100 contacts in a matter of about a year and a half, which was really cool.
Progression
Um, then moved over to another company for about 15 years, the company is called Progression. And the cool thing there is, when I started, there was under a million dollars in revenue. There wasn’t any formal marketing.
I was really the first marketing hire that they had. And when I left 15 years later, it was valued at over a billion dollars. You can imagine the kind of cool experiences that I got working with amazing people.
For the last couple of years there, my budget was about $15 million a year just for digital marketing, which was really cool.
Yeah, so I think those are the two things that really found in who I am. And that leads probably more into what I’m doing now, which is above the fold. So right before COVID, I left progression.
And I was interviewing at some other companies just trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my career, my life. And I had a couple really good jobs, I had some offers in hand.
Entrepreneurship
And my wife said, what are you doing? I love you for these offers, but we’ve got a little bit of a nest egg, we’ve got some money, and you’ve always wanted to go do your own thing, why not go pursue that. And my wife is awesome for me because I’m very risk averse. And she keeps me a little bit riskier than me.
So, I said, okay, I’m going to do it. Of course, COVID happened and lots of crazy stuff happened. But, 18 months later, things are going really well. In our agency. I’ve got a co-founder named Jessica Chase, actually worked with Jessica back on 100 contacts, and we reunited as business partners.
And they had a programmatic agency that is going really well. Jessica has 12-13 years in programmatic. I’ve got a rich background in digital marketing and working on the advertiser side. And then we spent a couple $100,000 a month on programmatic progression. it just was a really good fit. And it’s been a lot of fun already.
Billy Bateman 4:09
Awesome, man. Awesome. you’ve got a lot of experience in digital marketing, how do you see it changing and evolving over the last couple of years?
Josh Aston 4:19
Oh, such a good question is one of my favorite questions, um, how it’s evolved. I think it’s just become super competitive, to be honest with you. back when I started, in the early 2000s, like 2004.
it was possible for me to kind of stay on top of everything that was going on. I actually truly felt like I was a pretty good expert at email marketing, and paid search and all these different areas.
So much going on
And I actually managed those all really well in the beginning of progression. Like I did a good job. I could never do that today. There’s so much going on in each of those areas and beyond. And all the new areas that pop up every day that it just takes
I’m super competitive, and it’s been hard. But you really got to, I feel like you really got to find a niche, a niche a niche and focus on it. And that, let that be your let that be the place to hang your hat on.
So anyway, I think that’s one big thing that’s changed.
Efficiency
You, I think the other thing is, you just got to be hyper efficient at what you do. And that definitely lines up nicely with programmatic.
But I think the room for error, the margin of error is very low at this point. And with people using machine learning, Ai, programmatic, over 70, to 80%, of all of all marketing is done about digital marketing is done for programmatic.
And if you don’t, things like that working for you, I think you’re just running up a really steep hill to try to try to compete.
Learning on the Job
I agree, especially on those specializations and things have gotten so much more competitive. Like, 15 years ago, when I got my first job in digital marketing, I didn’t know what was going on, they sat me down, they’re like, this is Google AdWords, this is how it works. I was like, okay, and they’re like, this is your goal to figure it out. And I’m 18 years old, and I’m like, okay, we’ll try to figure this out.
And, given a little bit of time, I was like, oh we can get leads pretty cheaply, and bring them in, but, and now it’s, it’s a whole nother animal I don’t even pretend to get in and know what’s going on and pay per click anymore. So
Figure out your Audience
When I first left, when I first left Progression, one of the things that I focused on was for about six to eight months. I actually just went really wide, because I wanted to see what that niche area was that I should focus on. we’re just like b2b partners, and I didn’t have a lot of experience. And anyway, a lot of things.
And man, that was the biggest thing I walked away from was how deep all this different marketing has become. The other thing I’d say, too, is it’s just so important to focus on to really figure out who the right audience is for your specific company.
Really Learn that Audience
And you’re really good with that audience to really learn that audience in and out so that you can speak the right message and get them to actually convert. Agreed, agreed. you mentioned programmatic before, before I hopped in.
that being one of the key areas you think people need to focus on. I mean, I’ll be honest, I know what programmatic is that? Like the five-year-old level?
So, if you could, and I don’t think I’m alone, either.
Billy Bateman 7:29
So, what is programmatic?
Josh Aston 7:31
Yeah, it’s so cool. I mean, to just to clear the air on that, honestly, we speak with people all day long. I speak with people all day long about CMOS enterprise levels, small, medium sized businesses, SMB, everyone, almost everyone has that question.
And even if people are running programmatic, and sometimes it’s even pretty healthy budgets and programmatic, they will be the first to admit that they really don’t understand in a deep way, what programmatic is. you’re definitely not alone, Billy, and it’s been a huge focus of mine for the last 18 months is just going very, very deep into a program and what it has.
Definition of Programmatic
And if, this is a this is a fun conversation that me and my business partner debate all the time of like, what’s the best answer to how to concisely kind of elevator pitch type explain what protocol programmatic is.
And honestly, I think the thing that I like the best is using technology to target users that will help advertisers meet their end goals across display native, CTV audio and video formats. But there’s a little bit of a time pack there, it’s really hard to just say that in Toronto I hit a runaway.
Target Users
Yeah, there are two parts. When I said one part of it is, when you’re saying target users, they’re super sophisticated ways that you can target those users. it might be behavioral, demographic, or geographic, we like to kind of be bundled into those three different categories. that those three areas alone are pretty deep and programmatic and usually are far more advanced than what most people realize they are.
The technology is very sophisticated beyond what I knew was possible before I got into running this agency. Actually, the other side of that I would say is once your hyper target those audiences, there’s a lot of value.
Target them with the right message and format
And the real kind of secret sauce is in figuring out once you’ve targeted the right audience with these really cool technologies and approaches, making sure that you’re targeting those people appropriately with the right message across all the different formats. So cross display, native, CTV, audio, video, all those different formats. That’s where you really see the huge left. If you’re doing one of those things. It’s great. It does well, it stands alone, fine. But once you get all those things, working in conjunction with one another, that’s kind of where the magic happens. anyway, yeah.
Billy Bateman 9:49
Okay. All right. what really, like we have a lot of different tools in our belt as digital marketers. What do you think is the one thing that really makes programmatic unique? like, I came from a paid search background and like, you get into those long tail keywords and that’s where you are hyper targeted.
but dude, those came up like once a day if you were lucky? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we’re finding. Yep. with programmatic what’s the unique thing that just makes it this way? You gotta have it in the belt?
Josh Aston 10:24
Yeah, it’s a good question. And it might sound a little bit repetitive. But I actually think the hyper targeting part of programmatic is what makes us special. And just to dig into that maybe a little bit deeper than that I previously kind of relayed. , there’s three different ways we think about programming: there’s location, there’s demographics, there’s behavioral location. by itself it blew my mind.
I was completely blown away at what we could do on vacation, maybe we could spend some more time on this later, but like iOS 14 stuff, and what’s going off cookies, people are used to losing capabilities right now. And actually, programmatic is not really losing those capabilities. And the abilities that come with programmatic to target people based on location is exceptional.
Target based on Location
So just an example. , you can use you basically, any location, whether it’s a residence, a commercial, like an actual business, or even just a store or a place where people’s re recreate, all those things are very customizable and targetable with programmatic.
So, the, there’s no end to kind of hike, use location to target the right audience, it really comes down to whether where your audience is hanging out or where they’re going to be, if you know that programmatic makes it easy to actually get to those individuals to actually put an ad in front of them.
Billy Bateman 11:44
Okay, so you might share a few examples of how you guys are using this with clients.
Josh Aston 11:50
Yeah, for sure. Got a couple of cool examples. There are always fun things that we’re up to on location, especially.
One of the cool ones we recently did was actually that maybe kind of to come to mind. One is, it was during the winter, and we were working with some outdoor Retailer type brands. And they were ski related. They want to target people that are skiers.
And to take that one step further. It wasn’t just about targeting skiers, it was about targeting people that were active skiers, and they were actively going to the ski resort a couple times a week, like frequent skiers, right, like kind of upper end skiers, for sure. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Targeting specific groups
So, what we did is there’s about 530 ski resorts in the United States, which was our target area. we set it up so that we could target all 530 ski resorts which included the lodge, the ski runs, the trends, the whole bet, right? I didn’t want to just target the lodge, they wanted to catch everybody on the slopes as well.
And then we overlaid, hey, we want to make sure these people they’re there frequently, a couple times a week. We pushed that all together and targeted very efficiently and very quickly all 530 ski resorts and pushed it to the desired kind of CTA or goal that the brand had, which was getting in front of those individuals.
It was kind of a community-based approach. They wanted them to join this community and give them benefits. And it was kind of an influencer play. And yeah, super cool. Super Effective.
Billy Bateman 13:18
Oh, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Anything else besides just like the geo? I think the location is really cool. Yeah, I know, I have a friend who’s a personal injury attorney, and they have areas where they’re like, hey, we do a lot of ads focused on where people are based on location that work for them. But anything besides, the location that Yeah,
Josh Aston 13:43
maybe 2.1. It’s cool. We bring in a personal injury lawyer, we have a personal injury lawyer that we work with, it does a really good job, bringing our business out of their law firm out of California.
And obviously, things got a little bit challenging for them during COVID, especially in California, where things were locked down pretty tight. I say that’s about the time we met with this individual.
What we did there is we definitely targeted places that we knew his clients would most likely be. And the cool part about it to spend a little bit further is he was paying 100 to $400 cost per click on Google. Wow, insane. Like it’s one of the highest if not the highest spend places you can go to spend on Google ads, right. And like he was he was maybe scraping by on that, but it was a lot to pay.
Cost per click goes down
So we said hey, let’s go target these people, these places that to target. Let’s do it programmatically, which is basically everything non-Google. Everything is not gated. And let’s see what that does for and let’s see what we can do for your cost per click, and it brought it down to like five to $7 cost per click. And then the quality of people that he was driving was equal to why he was paying for the 100 to $400.
So obviously Can you imagine he’s pretty dang excited about taking his costs from 100 to $400 to five to $7 anywhere further than that, but the other is attached to your real question about the types of methods we use to target.
Demographics and Behavioral
The other two are demographics and behavioral. Maybe I’ll focus on behavioral. One thing we do which is not uncommon for businesses is site retargeting. But what makes site retargeting unique for us is obviously, so retargeting is when people come to your website, you track them, and you target them usually with display ads later.
We’re all very familiar with getting ads, after we’ve gone to a website for four months and for whom it feels like it never ends. But the cool part about programmatic site retargeting, is once you’ve targeted individuals that come to your site, one, you certainly can get very granular about what they viewed and make sure you put a relevant site retargeting ad in front of them.
Different mediums
And the second part of that is all those different mediums that I mentioned before, when you’re retargeting with programmatic, you can show us a connected TV ad or a podcast, audio ad, display native, you name it. And that, I think, is not something that people really think of very often, but what with programmatic, it’s second nature of like, hey, if you’re going to get these people to your site, you’ve already like, that’s a huge hurdle, just getting them to your website. Now. We use the power of video and audio and all these great ways to make sure we help them progress down the funnel and convert.
Billy Bateman 16:16
So let me pause. Yeah, I just want to dig into a few things you mentioned. So yeah, one of the like, podcast ads. you can do that with programmatic. somebody comes in, visits the website, I go to listen to my favorite podcast. And then I get an ad for whatever website, even though I went to my own website, and I’m running those ads.
Josh Aston 16:38
Clearly and I think the game changer for both the marketer, the consumer and the podcast owner, right? Because obviously, the more relevant and this is what programmatic is all about. Back in the day, it was like you just did your best to get as close as you could to your target demographic like us. But that might have been buying all the commercials you could on HGTV or whatever.
Hyper-target
Well times have changed, and it’s become Hey, don’t you don’t go waste all that money on you 80% of that money may go towards people you only want to target. This is about finding the audience’s hyper target on those people. And if you replace a podcast, it’s phenomenal because you don’t really, I don’t think people expect especially with TV and for radio and an audio or podcast. I don’t think people expected me to be quite so customary. Sure.
Getting ads for things you like
It’s, it’s, it’s surprising in a good way. Because I listen, you’re hearing ads for what you want. It’s funny because now that I know, you know how this works. I’ll go listen to podcasts. I love podcasts. And I know which podcasts actually employ more programmatic type ads.
And it’s crazy. This is horrible. It’s crazy how many things I’ve actually purchased from those ads versus not getting targeted or programmatic. It’s just so effective. Man, I thought that was an audio ad. It was super well done. And it’s the actual core product that I was already looking at oh, man, it’s powerful.
Billy Bateman 18:01
Yeah, no. I mean, I listened to an AD that I was like, how do they know I was a podcast I’ve listened to for years. And all of a sudden, I’m getting ads that actually are like, well, yeah, I did look at the website for that.
It was interesting. I had no idea that I thought, Oh, just a coincidence. Like, it kind of meant that for the audience. ? Yeah, actually, probably some programmatic. Now that you’re bringing this up. That’s cool.
Josh Aston 18:27
One funny one point on that it’s I think, maybe I’ve shared this with you before we’ve chatted. But when I was looking at trying to build that programmatic tech stack, you have to have reporting and have to figure out how you’re going to build a target and all these all these big questions, right.
Which, without my co-founder, Jessica would have been spending five years on this. Luckily, she knows the space really, really well and was able to place in the direction really quickly. And we finalized a couple different partners that we wanted to work with relatively quickly.
How he decided to go into programmatic
And I was at home watching TV with my wife, and we hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, we were just close to making a decision. We were watching Apple TV. The Apple TV didn’t update or something. I had to restart. In that brief moment, it was about a minute where it was restarting, our TV flipped on right, just regular TV.
And in that one minute, I got served an ad by one of those companies that we were investigating. They literally said your agency should be using our technology, which of course not so often. Sometimes you wonder if it’s just by coincidence. Well, clearly my wife, that’s insane.
Customized, personalized experiences
She’s like, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. And that’s not there’s no way that’s coincidence, right? So that was actually a key thing that happened to me, where I then decided like, hey, we got to go with that technology.
But it’s fun to have those experiences. It’s rare to have customized, personalized experiences like that.
Billy Bateman 19:46
For sure that’s crazy. Yeah. Let me ask you this what’s the ideal company look like? That should be using programmatic.
Josh Aston 19:55
Yeah, super good question. Um, we talked about this all the time, because obviously Of course, we’re trying to figure out who should be our best target audience, but I think there’s a couple of things I’ve kind of risen to the top of. And it’s not really industry-based.
Is there a best industry?
Like a lot of times, companies, I think expect you to focus on a particular industry. We’ve worked with so many clients in so many different industries that that really hasn’t been a thing that’s risen to the top yet. What does rise at the top is making it a better fit is kind of where people are at in the types of marketing and investment they want to make with their marketing dollars.
How to measure
And what I mean by that is, people that do well in programming are a little bit different. As a challenge, it’s a challenge, you can’t just open up Google Analytics and see how it’s doing. Usually, yeah, usually it takes a little bit more of a robust number of KPIs and metrics that you’re watching to get the fulfillment of what it’s doing for your company. That does not discount the fact that there are metrics that you watch to make sure that it’s ROI.
And then there’s row as that happens, that’s how it has to be. But it’s more complex than what you know, a lot of people are accustomed to. The people that do best with that are people that already are running things like billboards, TV, radio, direct mail, people that believe in filling up the funnel with good prospects.
More sophisticated
It works really well for them, because they already understand the value of those types of mediums. What we’re saying with those individuals is, hey, this is going to be way more sophisticated in advance. But it’s still building the funnel and helping you drive people down the funnel, just with very hyper targeted care capabilities.
And if you’ve got an open mind, say, hey, we’re going to look at like four or five different things to measure the results. But we’ll make sure you’re comfortable with those things, you’ve got to be comfortable that we’re going to do that.
Not as easy
And it’s not going to be so easy as just cracking open ga and getting a report every day. It’s going to take a little bit more work and the rewards are worth it. But you gotta be willing to do that. I’d say just those people that are willing to dive into those types of areas.
Billy Bateman 21:50
Okay, okay. I like it. What kind of, let’s talk about measuring results? Where yeah, yeah, you’re the number one. How do you measure the results?
Josh Aston 22:02
Yeah, the number one result that people like to measure that we love to measure to. It’s our number one question, his role is just returning on ad spend. And that can be very different views of different people. But honestly, just making sure we’re on the same page of like, hey, what if we, if you spend X dollars, what do you need to get out of this?
That’s we love to do that, because programmatic is, is leveraging technology so well, that if we set the settings the right way, and set things up the right way, it’s going to, it’s going to do very good at hitting that role as and maximizing the dollars and getting the most out of it.
Throwing a dart in the darkness
But if you don’t know what that role is, like just with anything else, you’re just thrown out, thrown a dart into the darkness. Row as is number one, there are cool things that we look out for with vendors, our foot traffic increases.
One cool thing I didn’t mention earlier is with that geo component of programmatic, it kind of works bi directional. So not only can we target people in a really cool way, like I mentioned at ski resorts or anywhere.
Geofencing
but you can also like if you’re running, if you’re running digital ads, you can actually put a geofence, we’ll call it around your stores or around other locations. And, if people came from your website to those locations. So gone are the days of like, well, I think we drove enough people to the store.
It’s like we did a campaign for a very large outdoor vendor, that everyone would know the brand, but it was about driving. , it’s about driving traffic to the stores. And with programmatic you can now 100% know that you drive traffic to the stores. Cool. Foot traffic is definitely one thing that we like to hang our hat on as online sales increase.
Brand Searches
The other one that I think’s pretty surprising and cool for people is brand searches. there’s lots of times we’ll talk to companies. And they’re like, man, we love paid search, we love SEO, we’ve kind of tapped out we don’t know where else to go grow. We’re kind of beholden to whatever the industry trends are, or whatever the trends are going on that we don’t feel like we have control of.
When we do programmatic, you’re targeting such a defined audience and the right audience, that you usually always see your branded terms and your industry terms go up with a programmatic investment. We love it’s one of my favorite things to put up a report and to set it up where it goes out to him. They can see that as we’re doing programmatic, they can see Google Trends or their internal data rise as soon as we increase and spend money on programmatic.
Equipment company example
We set up a heavy equipment company. They sell heavy equipment to construction companies, farming companies, and we were targeting very specific stores and very specific locations, and to be able to show them how much the traffic was going up at those locations and on their website.
It was not disputable at all. And it was really fun to see it year over year and more than that month over month and so on. The other ones I’d say there’s maybe just like the typical ones, impressions, clicks, actions. We put all that tracking in place as well. So
Billy Bateman 24:56
okay, okay. And then how is I mean, COVID changing things for everybody to some degree, how do COVID change or impact programmatic? , we didn’t have as many people going into stores last year. starting to happen a lot more now. But what changed for you guys?
Josh Aston 25:16
Yeah, great question. I would say that COVID impact is pretty, pretty heavy for about 45 days. And it was really from the moment that things kind of paused, let’s call it kind of March 15, or whatever. Yeah. For about 45 days, it was because budgets were paused, nobody was moving, it didn’t matter what you said, it didn’t matter.
So that was an interesting time, it was the beginning of where we were really focusing on programmatic. We simply use that time just to focus on our technology and our approach and our technique for 45 days. which was time well spent. you usually don’t take a moment to pause and do that. I think there’s some silver lining and COVID for us.
Target people based on behavior
But the other part I think I didn’t mention was much about behavior. the other thing. We can target people with this behavior, and it’s really anything like non-Google. as people are doing searches, or people are reading things online, contextual-based type stuff, we get all that data as well.
And we can target people with ads based on that. The cool part is, I think a lot of people really struggled with man, what are trends doing right now, like what are consumers doing in this Paramount time that no one’s ever experienced ever before. like people struggling to get real time data of what was going on within their respective areas.
Monitor what people are reading
And the beautiful part was, we could monitor what people were reading, what they were searching on, not Google, in a cheaper, more efficient way. We could use that data to then target very specific people based on what they’re reading and what they were searching on. We turned our attention when location kind of went away, we turned our focus to online signals that were very powerful. So
Billy Bateman 26:57
great, great. Before we wrap up, I have a couple more questions for you. One is, you’d mentioned the ski resort campaign, which I think is pretty cool. What what’s the coolest campaign you guys run since you’ve been an agency?
Josh Aston 27:14
Oh, the skiing was good one, the heavy equipment was good one. There’s another good one, too, now that things are opening up again. It was closed off for so long, this is a little bit new to be just because we’re fairly new to programmatic.
I’m new to the programmatic agency space. But events are starting to come back online. And it’s so fun to talk to companies and say, hey, did you know like, you may not be opening some companies or opening up to events? And some are not?
Live events
Yeah, there’s some really big companies that are cautious about opening up to events because of the liability. It seems like the smaller companies are a little bit more like we’re going for it. The bigger companies are like how we’re going to hold it out this year.
And what’s fun is we can go to those companies and say, you’ve got a huge budget, you would normally spend on events, you’re not able to run an event like there’s, you don’t have a choice your executive team has decided that that’s not in the cards this year.
What if we went to target your competitors? Or what if we went and targeted other relevant events, industry type events that are running, so that you can actually put that money to get used to not let it go to waste? And that has been really fun. It’s been fun to show people that you can even do that, but it’s really fun to then select which events, which competitor events, do figure out which ones exist? That has been awesome. And very effective.
Billy Bateman 28:33
Yeah, I’m sure, I’m sure. And then what do you see is the future, programmatic the rest of the year, anything big changes are coming or new trends?
Josh Aston 28:44
Yeah, I think so. Um, I think, let me think about this for a moment. Cuz, we talk about this all the time, as we’re trying to predict where to put our dollars and where, where to invest our technology. I think some of the more interesting ones that are getting a little bit outside the box are, well, one, cookies. cookies are going away in a big way. Third party.
Multi-touch attribution models
So, programmatic is relatively unscathed. But I think especially when it comes to management, like we really, really encourage vendors and help vendors with their attribution models, like their multi touch views on people coming to us and they either don’t have something in place or they have something that’s not really fully baked.
For programmatic it’s so valuable, valuable to build to have that multi touch attribution veal place. We really, really value helping companies with that I think as cookies are changing and tracking is changing.
Third-party cookies
I think that’s a really important place to keep your eye on is how you still track attributes of your multi touch. but without those third-party cookies, so that’s it, I think it’s very vital, especially as cookies are going away. but it’s also an area in transition because of cookies going away.
The other one I would say is a close second is it’s called deal Ah, but it’s basically digital out of home marketing. And it’s kind of like our conversation with podcasts. I think programmatic very much was a display-oriented thing initially.
Media examples
And then it’s expanded to connected TV now podcasts, now streaming radio. The next place that I’d love to see it go to is more digital out of home, like billboard, wearables.
There’s a lot of cool conversations going around on around how you would use wearables and how you use billboards and make them more programmatic meaning, like more hyper targeted, yeah, companies like blood that are in our backyard, which are doing really cool things to digitize the billboard space and beyond.
More targeted
I think the next step was like, how do you actually make a little bit more one to one? How do you make it a little bit more targeted? Or how do you kind of transfer those programmatic principles to DLL Ah, I think that’s really interesting. And worth watching.
Billy Bateman 30:57
Yeah, that is pretty interesting. Yeah, Blip does, some does some cool things, and to even make it I see one, one thing and somebody else sees another that would be amazing. Very cool. Yeah.
All right, man. Well, Josh, thank you so much for hopping on today. And breaking this down. I feel like I actually kind of understand what programmatic is now. And if people want to get a hold of you and continue the conversation, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Josh Aston 31:25
Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place. I’m very, very active on LinkedIn. I usually get my messages instantaneously and respond pretty quick. The other one is, is our website, it’s get abovethefold.com. Definitely good place to go learn more.
We’re very active on our blogs and educating. We like the approach of being transparent with programmatic which is somewhat unique. We open everything up on our blog and on LinkedIn. If you want to learn more, those are great places. Okay. Thanks, man. And we’ll chat later. Thanks, Billy. Appreciate it.