Earning Marketing Buy-In with Charlie Riley

Full Transcript

Lightly edited for filler words, false starts, and crosstalk. Speaker language and phrasing preserved.

Intro

Dmitry: Welcome to What's Your Process? Today we're joined by Charlie Riley, Head of Marketing at OneScreen.ai. Charlie, thank you for joining me. It's good to see you.

Charlie: Great to see you again, thanks for having me. Just getting through the end of the year, it's been a fun one, and enjoying some cold weather in Buffalo, New York.

Dmitry: What do people need to know about you?

Charlie: People that are listening are probably other marketers. I've done this for a couple of decades now. I'm a marketer by trade. I've dabbled in some sales leadership, which I have a deep appreciation for. My first passion, I'm a dad three times, so that brings a lot of elements of learning. Fellow Lego fanatic like you are, fellow football guy like you are, even though we have different choices in our clubs and teams. I'm a lifelong learner. I've always been intrigued by trying different things, and I think that's an approach I've taken to how you approach work and home. Career marketer, still try to play a little soccer when I can, and always trying to learn from others. I appreciate the guests you've had on, I've picked up ideas from everyone.

Dmitry: Thank you for listening and checking it out. What position do you play?

Charlie: I'm a center back because I have no touch. The prototypical screaming at everybody else, just boot the ball, get the ball out, and protect my goalie as best I can.

What is one thing you're world class at?

Dmitry: That's a critical role. And although we're both stuck watching mediocre football on the weekend, marketing is anything but mediocre when it comes to you, which is why I was really excited to get you on the show. That brings me to the big question of the show: what is one thing you're world class at?

Charlie: I'm going to cheat and maybe answer two things here, but I've found a way or a niche to be brought in to start a marketing function in a wide range of industries and company sizes. I know you said not to be humble here, but I think I've been able to do that fairly quickly, because you don't usually have time to waste as a marketer, especially in my current environment, I'm a marketer of one. So I've been able to really quickly observe, ask a lot of questions, assess, build a strategy, execute on that, and then iterate. And I've had to do that learning everything from performance plastics to insurance to cybersecurity software, and now to out-of-home advertising.

So it's been nice to adapt that framework of being able to build a function from scratch in an area that I understand. I've bought out-of-home before. I sit in the seat of the people we sell to. So it's been nice to match those two things up, to build from scratch and be successful with that.

Dmitry: I love that you haven't niched yourself in that specific way where it's like, "I'm only part of this industry, this is the only thing I know, and this is the only thing I care about." Being able to shift focus or move from one industry to another, that's got to be tricky to a certain extent, right?

Charlie: It absolutely is. I like being challenged and having to level-set yourself with new terminology, with new ICPs. Sometimes with a whole new process, you've got regulations you have to think about in certain industries. So I've gone back and forth in a few, and you bring some of that back. But I like to be challenged, I like to learn, and being able to do that across a wide range of industries, I've been able to adapt some of those things. I think it rounds out how you think about the world.

And I think this happens quite a bit, especially with SaaS marketers, we think the world revolves around what we do. There is so much more out there: how people brand things, how they tell stories. There are so many ways to think about how to approach selling and educating, and I've been able to take that from different experiences. There's a learning curve to each of those, and there are pros and cons for sure, but it's a fun challenge. It's like learning a new language sometimes. It's fun to pick up a new instrument or a language, it's probably relatable in that sense.

Look for Product Market Fit (PMF)

Dmitry: So let's jump into the process. Let's say you haven't even accepted a role yet, you're evaluating a new industry. What are you looking for? What are you thinking about where you need to decide, does this make sense for me? Is this the right step?

Charlie: I think any marketer would agree with this, but if there's not a product-market fit, you're going to be wasting a lot of time and effort, and you're probably going to get undue blame, right or wrong. So make sure the product is something that people actually need, and that there's hopefully a moat. I think AI has changed that quite a bit, the brand is really important. Where I'm at right now, we sell out-of-home advertising, and branding is a big piece of that, so it's good to see brand come back. But if someone's evaluating an opportunity, you want to make sure it's something you can sell, something you can get behind and tell a story behind. That's the first piece.

The other part is understanding how things have worked in the past. There are three sides to every story, and just because something has been done a certain way doesn't mean it was executed correctly. One thing I've learned across my career is that it's very easy to make assumptions about somebody else's marketing. You look at a brand, you look at an ad they put out, "That's crazy, why would they say that? Why would they do this?" But you don't know what's under the iceberg, how it got to that point. Everyone in the C-suite probably had an opinion about the marketing that went into it: "We've got to change this word, we've got to do this." So you need to go into things with eyes wide open, understanding that just because it was done a certain way doesn't mean you can or cannot change it. But you need to get an assessment of whether you have the ability to change things.

If you repeatedly hear things like "We've always done it this way" or "This has worked for us," without being able to question that, "Did you try it this way? Did you think about executing it this way?", if you don't have the bandwidth to experiment with that, to me, that's a red flag. So the biggest things are: is it a product or service you can sell and get behind? That's sometimes hard to find. And if there's a good fit there, do you then have the ability to impact it in how you think you should approach it? Because you're going to do things differently, you're going to make suggestions differently. But you should also not assume that you should throw everything out and start over because "I've done it this way in my previous role."

It's that self-awareness and that assessment of being a really good internal listener and hearing how things were approached in the past. Because if everybody's bashing the former marketer or just a lack of marketing, well, what do you think they're going to do about you? I don't care how great you are. There's maybe a lack of appreciation for what real marketing is. So if you're a marketer thinking about a role, those are probably the first questions I would dig into quite a bit.

Dmitry: That point on "if everyone is bashing the previous marketer" is gold. Everyone thinks they're the smartest, everyone thinks they're going to be the one that makes the change. I routinely think about the quote that every dead body on Mount Everest was a highly motivated individual at one point. No one went into a job thinking, "I'm going to suck at this and hopefully get a check on the other side." Everyone wants to do a good job. Could they have messed up? For sure. Could they have been put in a bad environment? Also for sure. You highlighted a really big red flag there, are there other red flags you look for? Anything to give you that sense of, "This product is good and I can sell it, but can I impact it?"

Charlie: I like to dig into what has been done, and I always like to ask everybody: what does good marketing look like to you? Because they're going to name a brand, they're going to name a campaign, and that can give you a feel for how they think about reality. Say you're a small startup and they name enterprise-level brands over and over again. You'd have to go deeper with secondary questions: What do you think worked for that? What do you know about the infrastructure around that? How is that comparable to what we would have as a resource here? That might give you some insight, the expectation is here, but the reality is way below that, because those are apples and oranges.

I also like to ask, especially sales leadership, about the revenue side: how do sales and marketing work together? And you can dig deeper, "If we don't land this deal, who gets the blame for it? How did marketing impact that? What could they have done wrong for us to lose that deal?" You start to see from the answers: are they blaming marketing? Is it the proverbial "the leads were terrible" versus "sales didn't close the leads"? Is there blame going back and forth?

You're never going to hit a home run every time in marketing. A lot of this is experimentation and the learnings you get from the campaigns you run. So understand how much of a leash you have. Are you expected to hit home runs every single time? Because that's not reality, and you don't want to be set up for failure by being nitpicked on every single campaign you do. If you can see there's some appreciation that not everything's going to work, but we're going to learn from it and not do it again, or learn how to do it better next time, you can tell from those answers whether you're going to be a partner to sales and the rest of the team, or looked upon as the problem if things go bad. Is marketing the first place someone's going to look?

Dmitry: Great call. And we'll make sure all of the things go viral, right? That's always been my favorite. "Can you get it a million views?" Sure.

Charlie: It's easy. You hit the viral button.

Dmitry: You just pay an extra 20 bucks a month on YouTube for the viral button.

Learn what people care about, stack some wins, repeat

Dmitry: So assuming you found product-market fit, you found an organization where you can make an impact, and where marketing is respected, it's your first day. What's going on? You're jumping in, launching a big campaign, right?

Charlie: Right off the bat. You're probably doing a rebrand, a new website, and you've got a big user conference next week you've got to execute on. No, you've got to go on a listening tour, and there's a balance there. Like I said before, you have to make a quick impact. You should not be expected to build a massive strategy in your first week.

You have to go on a listening tour. I've always said internal marketing is sometimes more important than the external. So you are digging in with the sales team. You're hopefully listening to calls, you're already asking, "How can I sit in on a call? How can I hear the terminology the customer uses?" You're talking to product. You're working with your CFO to figure out how they assess marketing, hopefully not as a sunk cost, but as an investment, and figuring out the vernacular you need to use with them. You need to ask a lot of questions. You need to ask "why" several times to get to the meat of the story.

But then you have to have your eyes wide open to think about where you can make some quick impacts. The sooner you can show even incremental changes, "You've done email marketing this way, but this small change is going to get our emails delivered to the inbox, where before they were all being flagged as spam. Boom, here's the difference on open rates," or whatever metric you want to use. If you can find some of those easy wins, not just to say "I made a quick one in the first day", that starts to build momentum with people who, right, wrong, or indifferent, might have opinions about what good marketing looks like. It shows: we're going to build on this. We're going to make some quick wins, but here's the long-term strategy.

You don't want to spend three months talking to everybody, go back to your cave, build your plan, and come back and throw it out to everybody. You should be iterating on that early, tease it out a little bit, get some feedback, build on that. You don't have to do it on the first day, but right away you should be asking a lot of questions and thinking about how you can learn from everybody. How can I show that I want to be a genuine partner with them, and not that I'm interrogating everybody? You need to hear how people talk about marketing so you can think about how to educate them on what you can do to help them. So we're partners. But hopefully you can identify a couple of quick wins you can start to execute on in the first couple of weeks.

Dmitry: Love that. So are you looking for low-hanging fruit? This is a terrible example, but it's the first one that comes to mind, the joke that if you ever go to prison, you have to punch the biggest guy in the face. I've come into organizations where sometimes the smallest win was actually going up against the biggest proponents of "marketing only does leads and the rest of it is a waste of time and money." How are you thinking about getting those small wins?

Charlie: That's a good question. In that situation, I'd assess: does that person or department, that confrontational opinion, have so much weight within the organization, or so much credibility, that if you can't get on their side, you're going to be working backwards the entire time you're there? Is that just noise, or is there signal there? That's a good way to think about how to approach quick wins.

Everyone has a different learning style, too. Take that person who says, "All you do is top-of-funnel leads, and they're not high quality." There's obviously a backstory to why that person believes that. Do you confront them publicly, internally? That might be a bad idea. You have to understand their learning style. Maybe it's a private conversation afterward: "Hey Julie, you said something like this. Did you have different experiences in the past, with marketing teams here or in previous roles? Help me understand why you think that way, because here's how I'm approaching it." That's probably the way to back-channel your way to getting an advocate.

You should be a really good communicator internally. You might not pick up on it the first day, but you should start to understand how people think, how they communicate, and their preferences. If you can figure some of that out, that's where you can pick things off your list: "I'm going to be butting up against this forever if I don't address it right now," or "I'm obviously not going to bring this up in an exec meeting, but I'm going to back-channel it." Appealing to that person's style is going to get you way further than being the brash person coming in, "I'm the marketer, I know everything, here's how it's going to go." That's probably not going to go over too well, especially if, like my experiences, you're a first marketer. If the function hasn't been there or isn't mature yet, there's a lot of education you need to do to help others understand how you can help their functions get better.

Dmitry: I love that you're doing it proactively, too. No one wants to butt heads. And you attract more bees with honey, you know what I'm saying?

Charlie: I'm terrible at analogies, so I would butcher that one. But I've learned that firsthand, negatively. I've stepped back and internalized, "People don't want to know the details about this campaign." I've told myself that story, and it's not accurate, because what happens is when you don't share that, people make their own assumptions about what is or is not happening.

So I've learned the hard way that you need to over-communicate. In certain instances I'll do a Loom video every Friday and share it with whoever you want. If they want to watch it, great. If they don't, it's not a big deal. But here's what we accomplished, here's what we set out to do, here are some blockers we have. You use that as a tool, because part of your job is to educate others on what you're doing. The more proactive you can be, the better.

It's a bit of a balance, you don't want to be arrogant or brag, "Here's everything marketing did." Marketing is so visual; it's sometimes easier for people to see than other functions. However, it's your job to help people understand what you did, but more importantly, how that contributed to revenue, to brand building, to recruitment, whatever that might be. You need to tie that to what's important to them. And that's where that buy-in comes in.

Dmitry: Such a good point, tying it into what they believe in. I've run into that firsthand, especially on the brand side. You speak a certain language; there are certain metrics and values you care about, and some metrics you may not care as much about, because in a lot of cases you're setting up for the long term rather than the short term. But you will not get as long a leash as you want or think you deserve if, one, you're not converting in the short term, and two, you're not creating advocates through the things they care about. Sales cares about brand because it makes the calls much easier, when you get someone on the phone, they know who you are. Customer service: we're projecting a friendly, approachable nature, so people come into calls more open-minded. Recruiting: cool people apply at a higher rate because this seems like a cool company with a cool product. If you explain it in ways they value, that just gets the job done.

Charlie: Yeah. And going a layer deeper, the more you understand what motivates them, the more you can align your messaging toward that. Sales is usually motivated by money. There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to channel it. We're building a brand, and that might take more time than a very specific direct response or demand gen campaign. However, you're going to get a higher percentage of people that actually show up to your calls. What's that going to do? Your close rates go up. This is going to put more money in your pocket. That's what they care about. So it's not "we're building a brand because we think it makes sense." It's "we're making sure we get our company's name in front of the right people, so that when we do the outreach, they actually take the call and respond to the email."

It's the same as saying, "Our web traffic's up." Okay, that's a vanity metric. What we should really be saying is, "We're getting in front of the right ICP we're trying to talk to, and we can track that the right people, not just any person, are spending more time on our site." CS, what are they motivated by? Probably a retention number. "We're helping provide resources to help you keep your customers, so what you're evaluated on, and what you're probably paid for, is going up." The more you can align that to what they care about, the longer leash you're going to have, like you said before.

Build your framework for long-term success

Dmitry: Love that. So you've gone on the listening tour, you've made friends along the way, you've got a few small wins under your belt. What happens next?

Charlie: At that point, you should hopefully have the framework for a wider strategy and execution. You've knocked off a couple of things, but you're building the framework for long-term success and repeatable success. Like I said, you shouldn't be building that in the back corner and then come out and propose some grandiose idea where everyone says, "Hold on a second, I wouldn't do that," or "That doesn't align with our goals."

If you're having those conversations frequently with others, you should start to have that framework, and you want to get the buy-in. You want to make sure everyone agrees with the strategy and that it's a collective. This isn't my strategy. This is our strategy. You want to get that verbal or written buy-in so that when you look back, it's like, "No, we agreed to this. We're not going to make brash decisions and abandon this campaign just because we're not seeing leads come in in the first 36 hours. Here's why we're going to continue."

You should be able to build that fairly quickly. You'll iterate on it, it's not going to be 100%, and you might not get sign-off from the C-suite on your first pass, but you should have a good framework and be able to articulate it and get everyone excited: "Wow, we've got a really great strategy. It sounds like we're going to execute, and we have the right measurement in place so we can feel confident in what we're doing." And then you iterate on it. At that point you should also have a pretty good idea of what's needed to be successful, not just for your goals, but for the company's goals. The last thing you want to do is sign up for something you know you're not going to be able to attain with the team, the resources, and the direction you have. That's where making sure everyone's in agreement, and having something to go back to, is important for a lot of marketers.

Dmitry: Two questions based on that. One: how often are you iterating?

Charlie: I'd say two things. You should be looking at things monthly, well, it depends. Some channels you're looking at daily; there are paid channels where, if you're not on top of them, you could be wasting a lot of money. But the big rocks, the big strategies, you can look at quarterly, maybe even biannually, and revise. It's really difficult to plan out an entire year and have a good assessment of what's going to work.

We did this at OneScreen. We made a plan last December, using as much data as we had, but we were limited on some of that, so you do the best you can. And if we look back at what we assessed then versus what reality was, we exceeded our goals, which is good, but the path to get there was very different from how we laid it out. So set yourself up for a good half year, "These are the foundational things we're going to work on", but iterate on those at a monthly level. Look back and say, "Maybe we're not pulling the string on this 100%, but there's some tweaking we can do. There's enough signal to think this is directionally right; we're just not seeing the results yet."

You should be able to plan some things out for the year, but I think things are going to be drastically different six months from now, nine months from now. That's the reality of how people buy now, the reality of new software that comes out. At the quarterly level, you should be able to make tweaks and adjustments to keep on the right path. You could still have the same trajectory and strategy, but you might have to change some of those tactics. And at the quarterly points, you should have a good idea whether you're on the right track or you've got to make some bigger shifts.

Dmitry: Very cool. The other question: we joked about the rebrand, the new website, and the user conference, but the other fun one is "I need headcount. I need to hire 10 people to do all these different things", which is generally laughable, because you have no idea who's on your team or what their capabilities are. You don't know what you don't know, and that's why you go on the listening tour. So now you're in it, doing the work. At what point do you look at the plan and the numbers coming back and say, "If we hired one person for X role, I could see this taking off"?

Charlie: In the interview process, if there's a current team, you should hopefully be able to have conversations with some of them and get a feel. You should give the benefit of the doubt, like we talked about earlier, don't make assumptions like "This function isn't great" or "This function doesn't do this." Maybe they weren't set up for success. Maybe they didn't have all the resources, or the training, and if they did have the training, there's some opportunity there.

Early on, as you're building the plan, you should have a pretty good idea of the functions you need. You shouldn't base it on the people in seat right now, but on the functions you need, and you should be able to figure that out pretty quickly. Then you have to understand the dynamics of the organization. What does hiring look like? Are we more of an FTE organization versus finding freelancers or agencies? The more you understand how they've historically approached things, the better idea you'll have: "We're not going to be able to get full-time equivalents for these types of roles. These are my primary roles. I might be able to ask for two full-time headcount, but I know I'm going to have to supplement these other functions with freelancers or agencies."

Then it's a matter of: do I truly feel a full-time person in-house would make that much of a difference? You're probably going to have to make some trade-offs, and that's okay. As you stack-rank, "These are the functions I think we need in-house, and here's why it's more important there." And if you can do some math, "Here's what we can do exponentially if we had full-time equivalents, versus a fractional person only spending this much time focused on it." Or it's a rebrand, do you need an agency like yours? Do you need someone in-house to do that full time? Maybe not, but find a specialist who's really good at those things.

I've had to flex. Right now I'm a team of one. I've led bigger teams. I've led teams with agencies and fractionals all over. You can flex up and down depending on what the needs are, but early on you should have a pretty good idea of the functions you need. Then it's a matter of whether you can articulate why you feel strongly about having internal teammates.

Dmitry: That's a great way to describe it. Especially in this era, where companies seem somewhat wary of hiring full-time employees at the rate they were a couple of years ago, having the ability to assess talent, assess where you need it full time versus where you don't, and then scale up and down in a smart, healthy way is so critical to building longevity for your team.

Charlie: And that triggered a thought: you might need to start with fractionals or agencies to prove the point. Marketing is responsible for probably 20 different functions if you really think about all the things that fall under the marketing bucket now, and it's impossible for one person, or maybe even a small team, to do all those things really well. There are so many really talented specialists now in those different lanes. So you prove it: "These are the five things we're going to focus on. It's really hard to be great at everything, so we need specialists for these five things." It might take a couple of months, but "we've shown success because we have people that know this job." It's a lot easier to hire full-time after that than to build a plan early on that says "I need to hire 10 people", no one's going to sign off on that right away. But if you can prove that once you have someone who knows what they're doing in a function, they can do the job really well in half the time I can, "look at the output they do", it's a lot easier to build a full-time hiring strategy after you've proven it.

Out of home (OOH)

Dmitry: Love that. I'm going to shift gears, because it'd be silly of me to have you on here and not ask about this. There are a lot of thoughts on out-of-home, specifically within B2B marketing. Where in your framework are you thinking about out-of-home?

Charlie: Yes, B2B marketers should think about out-of-home, and here's why. First, let me take a step back, because with the term "out-of-home," there's a lot of education that needs to happen. Most people who've never run an out-of-home campaign might think big billboard. They might think of the personal injury attorney who dominates billboards in every city, which is part of it. Billboards are a foundational piece of out-of-home. But there's so much more. If you're doing experiential marketing, street teams, sampling, sponsorships inside stadiums, or even the ads you might see in an elevator in a business office, those all fall under the out-of-home umbrella.

I do think it's important for B2B marketers to find a space for out-of-home, and they don't need to go massive right off the bat. We actually have a lot of B2B customers right now that want to look big in San Francisco or New York and Dallas, which is a great execution. But there are other executions that are tied to driving revenue, and there's a way to measure that.

Everyone's going back to in-person events; field marketing's back. Everyone wants to be three-dimensional, and out-of-home adds one piece to that channel. If you're doing a major sponsorship at a conference, your ROI is going to be how many people you talked to and what kind of deals you did there. You can start that process by understanding the right terminals people are flying in from, and we use data to figure that out. You can wrap airports; you can buy billboards along the path and set up the brand building as they're going in. You can't turn that off. You can't block those ads. Even the subconscious viewing adds up, and there are ways to track that.

You can do things outside the conference: a street team sampling things, QR codes on trucks driving around, a swarm of cars, very bright, bold, it stands out. People notice those things, and it drives more people to a booth. Say you're doing a VIP dinner, you have a truck outside that dinner with the pictures of the CMOs or CFOs or CISOs, whoever you've got in that room. When they walk out, it's their pictures on that. That's a shareable moment. They're grabbing their cameras and sharing it on social. So events are a great execution for that.

We've done a lot of ABM-focused campaigns, and someone might think, "How does a billboard fit into an ABM campaign?" If you've got your top 50 prospects, we can identify not only where their headquarters might be, but if they're a remote company, there's data to understand where their executives live. And this isn't creepy, you're not going to be right outside their home, but we can see inventory where people traffic: where they're driving their kids to school on major thoroughfares, where they'd commute back and forth to an office. You can strategically put out-of-home ads there, and you can measure it: how many meetings did you get from that top 50 list that were exposed to out-of-home ads versus a control group?

So it is a fit for brands. The first assumption people have is "We can't afford it." You'd be surprised at what you could do in Times Square. It might not be a huge brand campaign, it might be just to get social shares, and people run campaigns like that. They also run very large brand campaigns in three major markets for three months at a time. There are a lot of opportunities, and I think it's the one three-dimensional piece that adds to digital marketing. We've seen results: when someone's running out-of-home, their digital ROAS goes up. We've seen organic search go up. So it should be a consideration. There are different price points and different use cases, but it's not just a D2C channel. There are a lot of really great B2B brands that see it as the missing piece in their overall marketing mix.

Dmitry: I'll never forget the very first billboards we ran at HubSpot. For years there was a ton of internal debate, and then one day we said, "We're going to do this," and threw together a campaign in San Francisco. Literally up to the last second it was "Should we, should we not?" And then all of a sudden Twitter started exploding, text messages, DMs, "I just saw you on the highway." Everything changed in an instant; the perception of what it was changed. The number of times it was referenced on calls, people would say, "I was walking with so-and-so co-founder, we saw this, I said I use HubSpot and we love them, and that person took a call." All these random anecdotes would come out. And from that point forward, I remember taking over Logan Airport, so when people flew into Boston for INBOUND, you'd see all these cool graphics, and those would translate into the actual on-the-ground experience.

And then we went from being the challenger to the big event in a lot of ways, and we saw Mailchimp start showing up and doing things outside of the event, sponsoring cabs and all of it, a really fun, cheeky challenge on their part. I loved seeing the creativity, where it's not just a giant sign in the sky. There are so many clever ways to connect it to a broader campaign, and that's where a lot of B2B leaders drop the ball: "We bought a billboard, we got a TV spot, we were on the train, and that's it." No, what's the next step? How do you connect it to something deeper? In that ABM example, what happens when they see that billboard and want to interact? There's got to be a step three, step four. When you think about it as a roadmap, a user journey, out-of-home takes on a whole different meaning, because it's a key part as opposed to the thing.

Charlie: Everything you just said is spot on. It's a piece. We would never suggest to somebody to take their entire budget and put it in out-of-home. It complements everything. Those examples you gave complemented all the marketing you did for INBOUND. It complements sort of an ambush campaign, Mailchimp may not have been an official sponsor, but they could have spent a fraction of that outside and made a presence, and maybe that's all they were trying to do. The key is to align your out-of-home strategy with everything else. That's one of the first questions we ask. It's not "How do we sell them billboards?" It's "What are you measured on? What are you trying to accomplish?" Because we may not suggest what they have in mind, "We need a billboard on the 101", we might say, "Actually, this is more cost-effective. This is more aligned. You're going to get more of the eyeballs you're trying to attract with this campaign."

So it's really important that the strategy aligns with everything else, but the creative is a big piece of it, too. We spend a lot of time using data sources to find the right places for people to see it, but the creative is really important. It's such a nice canvas, sometimes a very big, broad canvas, where you can tell a cool, compelling story. But on a billboard, you can't sell. You don't want 50 words. You don't want to take your Facebook ad, stretch it out, and replicate it on a billboard. You've got three to six seconds. Now, with a transit ad, bus shelter ads in major metro markets, you have more dwell time for someone to actually read, so your messaging and branding there is a little different.

And what are you going to do with it? Are you going to have a QR code and drive them back to something? Are you going to measure it that way? It should be one piece of everything else, similar to a paid search campaign. You're not going to buy keywords for one day and turn it off, or buy one keyword. You're going to buy a wide range of keywords. Same thing with out-of-home. You're not buying one billboard, that will not be effective. We'd actually tell you that's probably a bad idea in most instances. We're going to recommend a mix of billboards, transit ads, maybe airport ads, whatever the right mix is to fit that audience. That's a strategy. That's not just a random act of marketing to buy one billboard and think, "Well, that didn't work." Of course it's not going to work, the same way one email and that's it isn't going to work either.

What's next?

Dmitry: Well, everyone knows email is dead, so it's fine.

Charlie: Everything's dead.

Dmitry: Being mindful of your time, what's next? Where can we see your process in action?

Charlie: Hopefully if they check out OneScreen, you'll see some of my work, because I'm the team. If you like it, great. If not, it's me, too. We're trying to build a brand and tell the story of why out-of-home fits in with marketing, with other marketers that maybe haven't tried it yet.

I'm going to be at some events, and I'd love to talk more about the process, I love your line of questioning because it makes you think about how you approach things. I'll be at a couple of events, so happy to talk in person. We sell real world advertising, so it's good to meet people in the real world.

Happy to connect on LinkedIn. I share more than just marketing things on there sometimes, but hopefully I share some ideas people can take away. The biggest thing for me, I've talked a lot about internal marketing, and I think that's extremely important. So connect on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to chat about things I've done, pro and con, from an internal marketing standpoint that will hopefully help other marketers not make the same mistakes I have.

Dmitry: Incredible. Thank you for sharing, Charlie. For everyone checking this out, Charlie's a fantastic follow on LinkedIn. He's also a great guy, we met for the first time in person at Drive two years ago, and we've become buddies as a result, even though our football allegiances, American and European, are not aligned in any kind of way. Charlie, thank you so much for doing this. It's been a pleasure.

Charlie: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Go Spurs.