Today on CBT, our host Jim Fitzpatrick sits down with Jeff Brown, the chief revenue officer of Force Marketing headquartered here in Atlanta. Jeff discusses his upcoming panel, the new revolution in video strategy at Digital Dealer 27.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Jim Fitzpatrick: Hi everyone. I’m Jim Fitzpatrick. Thanks so much for joining us on another edition of CBT News. We’re so happy to have in our studio today, Mr. Jeff Brown, who is the chief revenue officer of Force Marketing headquartered here in Atlanta. Digital Dealer 27 is coming up and obviously, it’s just 19th through the 21st. They’re going to be having a panel discussion, which is The New Revolution in Video. Jeff Brown is going to be hosting that, right?
Jeff Brown: I am.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Sure. Great.
Jeff Brown: Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me. We appreciate it.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Sure. Great. Thanks for joining us on CBT News. Talk to us about what the panel discussion, who will be included in it along with you, and then what the topic of the panel discussion will be.
Jeff Brown: Yeah, absolutely. We think there’s a huge opportunity that’s happening right now in the online video space. We wanted to get not just our opinion represented, but we wanted to have the opinion of those from Facebook.
Jeff Brown: We have Google, who will also be on that panel specifically focused on YouTube.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Wow.
Jeff Brown: Then we’re also going to have a senior representative from Oracle talking about the opportunities with advanced data. We feel like between those three or four folks, we’re going to have a really meaningful discussion that’s going to be super interactive with the dealers.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I would say Facebook, Google and Oracle. This is going to be a panel you’re definitely gonna want to catch, which is Tuesday at 2:25, right?
Jeff Brown: That’s correct.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay, great. The new revolution in video, talk to us about what you’re going to be discussing.
Jeff Brown: You know, to sorta like back up from this and think about the macro opportunity. Dealers, over the years, have done a terrific job with sight, sound and motion. They have historically done that through two mechanisms. It’s been linear television and then second to that, it’s been linear radio.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: Today, with the advent of everything that’s going on with online video, and not just, you hear a lot of people talking about CTV and OTT …
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: But there are also immediate opportunities on Facebook, on YouTube, on Programmatic, and down the road on Amazon.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: Those conversations are the ones that we’re looking to have right now. We think if you take ABC, CBS, NBC, of 30 years ago, which used to be your television strategy …
Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right.
Jeff Brown: Right?
Jim Fitzpatrick: Things have changed.
Jeff Brown: They have changed, they’ve changed a lot, but they haven’t changed that much. That’s what we want the dealer to understand.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: What used to be a TV strategy, Jim, today is a video strategy.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: You still need great creative that connects.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Jeff Brown: Then you want to deploy that creative through the right pipes. The pipes of yesterday: ABC, CBS, NBC, it was very simple.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right, yeah.
Jeff Brown: The pipes of today, from an online video standpoint: Facebook, YouTube.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: Let’s start with those first. Those are two of the most underutilized channels for video from dealers. That’s where everyone is.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right, right.
Jeff Brown: It is a blue ocean opportunity for the dealers that are willing to get out in front of that right now. Then once they’ve done a good job with Facebook and YouTube, the opportunities to extend into connected TV, into OTT. Think about your smart television. Like, we don’t have to overthink what CTV is.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: If your TV is smart and it allows you to jump around into programming other than your cable provider or local network, you’re in the CTV space.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: We have the ability with our partners at Oracle to help them build an audience that they want to connect with, make sure that they can see their spot.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Sure.
Jeff Brown: Make sure that they see the entire spot, with effective frequency and across each of those channels. While it can seem complex …
Jim Fitzpatrick: It does seem, just you talking about it right now, putting my dealer hat on, I’m going, whoa, this is a little bit of a different buy than having your, you know, your cable representative stop by and say, “Hey, here’s your schedule, you know, for the month,” and let it fly, right?
Jeff Brown: Well that’s exactly right.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Jeff Brown: To further simplify it, you sort of have to move from buying schedules and buying channels to buying the audience.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: If I’m a dealer, I want to know how many people are in the market for what I sell.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: How do I get in front of them? Then once I have my on-brand in-market audience built, if I want to aggressively conquest because somebody has been getting in my backyard, I select those audiences. That’s really what you’re buying, is the opportunity to connect and transact with an end market audience.
Jeff Brown: Then where we come in, is we help find those folks across these different channels, and we give them a contextually relevant experience that’s personal to how they now consume video. The way you and I consumed television 20, 30 years ago, 10 years ago, that’s not what’s happening today.
Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right. That’s right.
Jeff Brown: It’s a video consumption game.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it really is. It really is. You’ve got the technology that will show the dealer where that audience is. I mean, dealers want to fish where the fish are, right? That would, that’s what this allows you to do.
Jeff Brown: Well, that’s exactly right, and we’ll get into that in some great depth with Tim Derr from Oracle. That really speaks to the audience, first strategy, is making sure we know based on all our data providers, who are the best people to target first.
Jeff Brown: Then that’s how we’re going to lower cost per acquisition. Then as we lower cost per acquisition, we can also learn from those campaigns, because the campaigns get really smart.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: We can not only optimize against the audience, but we can also optimize against those channels that we’re going to be deploying on to the benefit of the dealer.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Sure, sure. What do you say to the dealer out there that says, you know, for so long my ad agencies come to me and said, we gotta be in digital. We gotta take all these dollars and put them in digital marketing and we gotta, you know, buy those key words, and we gotta be on a pay-per-click campaign. We’ve got to be there where customers start out. Is what I’m hearing is that’s changing a little bit and that’s now shifting to video, rather than the pay-per-click campaigns of the world, and some of the targeting, retargeting ads, and some of the ads that I see on Facebook?
Jeff Brown: All of those things that you mentioned are important.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: It is also really important to create an emotional connection with the target.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: I believe that nothing does that better than video. Keep in mind, this is still part of your digital campaign. It’s deciding how much of this makes sense in conjunction with everything else that I’m doing. If we’re doing that right with online video, we could be combining demand generation with demand capture, lowering the friction points for the customer as they move through the journey.
Jeff Brown: It really just depends on where the dealer is, what’s important, what are the market dynamics, and how do we best craft a campaign that works?
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. For a dealer that is spending, the average dealer is probably safe to say that they spend, well let’s say they spend $100,000 a month just for the sake of argument. How much of a dealer’s budget should be allocated to this kind of marketing?
Jeff Brown: That’s a bit of a dynamic question. Let’s say that inside of that dealer’s budget, they’re spending 50% on linear television, and they’re spending 50% of that across the different digital channels that you just mentioned.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: We would have a conversation with them to say, “Why don’t we take half of that $50,000 that you’re spending on linear, and let’s take 25,000, and let’s spend that in the most focused manner we possibly can against the right end market audience, and let’s utilize some dynamic inventory technology where we can not only show them your upper funnel spot to really connect on why buy from me, but not why buy right now, but at the same time, scrape inventory from the dealer’s lot, and connect it to that customer based on their down funnel search habits.”
Jeff Brown: Look, at the end of the day, all dealers are trying to do is connect a piece of inventory to a person that can buy.
Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right.
Jeff Brown: Right? That’s all this is. As it can sound complex, when we break this down, it is really more simple than you think.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay.
Jeff Brown: The hard part is the audience insights; ingesting all of the data opportunities, so that we can then optimize and make all that stuff happen. The beauty for the dealer is that’s what we do.
Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s, yeah, I was gonna say what you’re talking about is, is mind blowing, and not something that I’ve got on my staff or something that I want to screw around with as a dealer. You guys at Force know how to do that.
Jeff Brown: That’s what we do. Look, we want the dealer’s desk in deals, connecting with customers, sourcing great inventory.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Sure.
Jeff Brown: Thinking about the operational dynamics of their business while we think about the marketing component. Then just to follow up on the answer, the $25,000 that the dealer would have cut out of linear and put into online video, we tell them put the other $25,000 in your pocket.
Jeff Brown: What we have seen as we have run these tests, is cost per acquisition going down.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay, I was just going to ask you about that. Is that …
Jeff Brown: Yeah, sales staying in that same environment or moving up.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Jeff Brown: Each of these tests have been margin accretive to the business, and as I mentioned earlier, as these campaigns continue to run, human intelligence mixed with AI, it allows us to sort of further optimize and it gets better and better and better as the machines get smarter against the opportunity.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Okay. It’s so important for dealers to stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the marketing space today, because it’s just ever-changing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like standing on quicksand. I mean it just, you know, a dealer tries, just by the time they get their foot in and their marketing and they think they understand it, you know, four new products have come out that a dealer needs to focus on, such as some of the things you’re talking about now.
Jeff Brown: Yeah. It’s moving really fast.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Jeff Brown: One of the things that’s important for the dealers discernment.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Jeff Brown: That’s also where we come in, cause there are a lot of shiny objects that are flying around.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Oh, I know, I know.
Jeff Brown: We have a team of people who all they focus on is innovation. We want to filter out the things that don’t matter and really double down on the things that do matter. To your point on staying out front from an innovation standpoint, think about this: how valuable would it have been for a dealer at the advent of television to have been one of the first …
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that’s for sure.
Jeff Brown: … To really stake a claim and say, “I am committed right here.”.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Right, right.
Jeff Brown: Millions and millions and millions of dollars would have been made.
Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right.
Jeff Brown: What the dealers need to understand toda: you have that opportunity.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Jeff Brown: It is right now. Jim, there is a gold rush that the dealers can participate in that is still blue ocean. Will it be like that forever? It will not be like that forever, but those that get in now and get in effectively, and stake their claim, they will be out on the tip of the sphere, and they also position themselves in this advanced video universe for what is going to be next, because this evolution in this space will continue.
Jeff Brown: Get in, get in with a trusted partner, figure it out, and be ready when you need to be all over Amazon or whatever is beyond.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yep.
Jeff Brown: While these opportunities, you know, sort of sound new and fancy, they’re so big that the parade is today.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, for sure. Folks, you heard it here, Jeff Brown, chief revenue officer. He’s going to be speaking at the Digital Dealer 27 in Vegas, the 19th through the 21st, although your event with a panel discussion that you’ll be holding, we’ll be at 2:25 on the 20th, correct?
Jeff Brown: That’s correct. We’d love to see the dealers there. It’s going to be very interactive.
Jim Fitzpatrick: For sure. For dealers that are going out to Digital Dealer, you’re not want to miss this one. It’s with Facebook, Google, and Oracle, and of course, being moderated by Jeff Brown from Force Marketing. This is definitely a must-see, the new revolution in video. You’re not going to want to miss it. It’s gonna blow your mind.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Jeff, thank you so much for coming in today and talking about it, and I’d love to do a followup interview with you after Digital Dealer.
Jeff Brown: That’d be great, Jim. Thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it.
Jim Fitzpatrick: Thank you. Great.
