Revitalising Marketing: Charlie’s Out-of-Home and Team Alignment Strategies

GTM Tales Podcast: Charlie from OneScreen

Ivor: [00:00:00] So

hello everyone and welcome to GTM Tales. In each episode, you will meet a go to market leader. And the idea behind it is that there's some really great podcasts out there. There are a lot of podcasts out there, but there aren't any that are specifically focused on the growth stories in B2B. Stories that have helped bridge the gap between 10 customers and a hundred the path from series A to series B or how growth was achieved whilst bootstrapping along this journey, each stage and path is very different.

And the greater market landscape has been totally upended with the AI [00:01:00] revolution. And following on from the episode from Anjali from Resourceify. This is our second episode, and we're super pleased to have Charlie from OneScreen where he's the head of marketing.

Great to have you here, Charlie. How are you doing?

Charlie: I'm great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Ivor: So the way I like to kick off is pretty straightforward. I think it would be really helpful for the listeners to understand your background and you know, what's led you to, to where you are today. Yeah.

Charlie: Yeah, I've been a marketing leader. Uh, and I've kind of stepped over the line into sales leadership and a couple of experiences for 20 plus years now. Uh, and that's been from seed stage to series B companies, uh, traditional companies. I've worked for a few agencies. Um, but I've sort of found this niche of, uh, you know, finding some interesting problems to help [00:02:00] solve and tell some stories around.

Um, so that's, that's led me to, uh, one screen. Uh, we are a, a measurable, uh, out of home advertising platform. So we help, uh, bring a, a channel that maybe some marketers, uh, haven't used in the past or considered, uh, but we help them utilize that with the rest of their marketing mix. So, um, you might think of billboards.

Uh, or wrapped cars, for example, but we fit into ABM campaigns, um, product launches, rebrands, all a lot of different options. So yeah, I joined this team, uh, and it's, it's exciting to sell to marketers. We, I've, I've never done that before. So, um, we sell marketing to marketers. So, um, yeah, I'm excited to, to be part of this, the story and help, help tell their story.

Ivor: Awesome. And I think, um, something we talked about before, which I found really interesting was you mentioned around the importance of Internal marketing and internal operations. You know, [00:03:00] how can say aligning marketing sales, customer service and product teams, how can that create like a more seamless customer experience?

And then I'd love to get some more kind of insights on the, the out of home side of things as well.

Charlie: Yeah, internal marketing. I found in my career that that's a really important. Uh, it's, it's an important element sometimes more than more important than the external marketing you do is as a marketing leader, a go to market leader. Um, and that's, it depends on the maturity of the organization or just the appetite of what marketing truly is and where it fits.

But, uh, you have to be in line with, Uh, your leadership, you have to be in line with what the board's thinking. You have to be in line with your sales counterparts and your product counterparts, your customer service counterparts. Um, and it has to, they have to understand how marketing fits into making their jobs easier, better, um, telling their stories.

So it's, it's. [00:04:00] Understanding their learning styles, understanding, uh, you know, marketing is communications at its core. And so how do you help someone from a customer service, uh, perspective understand, um, how to help retention and how marketing aspects or how, you know, communications for certain things or why you want to sit on sales calls.

Um, why picking up, uh, the ways customers talk or things that they're saying, uh, why that's important to help educate your future marketing executions. Um, and it's also good to help, you know, for you to understand the financials of the organization and how to, uh, to market up to your leadership, uh, whoever you're reporting to.

So, yeah, I've always found that that's a very important thing, um, to be able to take a step back a little bit, especially as a marketer. And understand where they're coming from, understand the challenges they have and how you can help support them and how you can collaborate with them.

Ivor: Yeah, it's super, super important. I think earlier this year, we, we actually started working [00:05:00] with a company who like, On the, on the surface, they seem to have everything they needed to succeed. They had no good group of sales guys, um, all the tools to track the leads. But actually what we found was, um, the CRM, you know, the very system that's meant to streamline their sales efforts was actually barely being used and we. We quickly found out why when we started working with them, there was no structured sales process. No one was tracking how leads move through the funnel and without data, they were essentially flying behind. And honestly, it made, it made perfect sense. If you're not. Using data to understand what's happening.

Why actually bother with a CRM at all. And actually it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, which I use probably far too often, which is from Peter Dracula, you can't manage what you can't measure. And that was the key. So you actually. We worked with them and this is something that teams can do internally and do [00:06:00] themselves.

We worked with them to understand the whole go to market process. So that's creating the playbook, understanding each stage from, you know, the marketing side of things to the sales and understanding where they, uh, leads were dropping off. And the real challenge and, and the real kind of change actually happened when they brought that data into weekly and monthly meetings, uh, with sales and marketing folks. know, they had the real insights because of that. And one of the things they noticed was people were dropping off in the middle of the funnel. And as they started using the data more regularly, the sales team actually had the reason to update the CRM that created like a positive feedback loop. So it's super interesting to see that, um, alignment between marketing and sales, but you also touched on that with not understanding, I think it's really important from a marketer's perspective.

Yeah. How, um, leads are closing and why they're closing as well. So there's all these great insights that can [00:07:00] come from, um, aligning different teams. And I wanted to actually understand your perspective on like, I think it's good to understand what are the common pitfalls in, in any scenarios. So like, what are some typical problems that you might expect with aligning teams?

I think I can think of quite a few. Yeah.

Charlie: all probably, uh, we all may have some battle scars. Um, I think those examples you just brought up about, uh, Like, those are all trigger points to help everybody work together towards a common goal. I think marketing would want to know why the drop off is at mid funnel because they should be able to create content.

They should be able to find reasons to focus on that element of the funnel. But if there's not enough data or measurement inside of your CRM or if that feedback loop is not coming back to marketing, they're going to work in a silo and then sales is going to, and then it becomes a blame game.

Ivor: [00:08:00] Silence.

Charlie: and that's where some, you should be able to boil those conversations up in a respectful manner.

Uh, before they become a bigger issue. And I think that that's one of the biggest from a pitfall standpoint, having, having respect, uh, and understanding, you don't have to know the, the, the details and specifics of what everybody else does, but you have to understand their motivation and you have to understand where they're coming from to align how you get to the, to the end of the problem.

Um, and if you don't, then it's, yeah, you're just operating in silos. And I think You know, there, there's a lot of conversation now, uh, about measurement, attribution, and, uh, it's a difficult thing to do there. There's, you can overanalyze everything, but, you know, starting with some basics of here's what good looks like, and here's, here's the reason why we need information.

And here's [00:09:00] why we need, here's why when you update a CRM after a sales call, or even especially things like a close lost, like, why did we lose that deal? We should learn from that. That's not a bad thing. Okay. But how do we use that information to help us reduce the closed loss numbers? And for the future, maybe there's a trend there.

Marketing can take advantage of that. Customer service can look for lookalike customers to say, Hey, there's maybe a flag here. We should address this proactively versus waiting for them to churn. So, um, I think all that just, it comes down to communication. I think it's, it's a simple thing. It's not, you know, it's a simple term.

It's not easy to always execute. But, you know, to, to avoid a lot of those pitfalls, having the right vehicles and the right mechanisms to, to communicate is important. And I think one thing that I've, I've learned is that everyone has different learning styles. And so, you know, someone might need. Uh, some insight before a meeting so that they can [00:10:00] digest it and contribute to that versus maybe some of the things on the spot.

So thinking about learning styles is very important, uh, as you're thinking about those communication loops.

Ivor: Yeah, so, so true. And if you have more of a culture of, of blaming, it's going to be so much harder for you to actually learn from, yeah, those rejections of the, um, the lost deals or every kind of part of the, the go to market process as well, because it's not going to be shared and that's critical in, in a startup for you to adopt those learning. Um, so now one screen, you guys help companies launch and measure out of home advertising. So what kind of trends are you seeing in the paid world in out of home, but also, uh, advertising as, as a whole?

Charlie: Yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing a comeback to what we might, you know, out of home might be considered an old school industry, but it's a, it's a channel [00:11:00] that, uh, we're seeing people come to because there's a lot of digital noise. I think everyone. There's a playbook that's been run for the last several years, if not a dozen years, that, um, it was mostly all digital.

It was just inundating people with, um, ads that, uh, either through paid search, uh, through email, through, uh, programmatic, there's just a lot of noise and we're seeing, um, cost per acquisition go up. We're seeing ROI go down. Uh, we're just seeing people tuning out and that's where. They're looking at other channels.

Marketers are looking at other channels like out of home, um, to compliment, you know, not to completely replace, but to compliment some of the channels they are doing because they need a wider media mix. Um, and, and so it's, it's sort of having a revitalization, even though it never went really went away. I think the trends that we're seeing is you can measure out of home.

And that's where a lot of light bulbs go off when you talk to marketers around. [00:12:00] Um, well, you know, I can't attribute this back to, uh, as we were talking about before. you know, I don't have the data to know if it's working or not. Well, actually, out of home can be measured. Um, and so I think that that's one thing from a standpoint of we're seeing a trend and we're also seeing a trend in in brand becoming, uh, it's, it's, it's one of those kind of categories that, uh, it's a longer tail investment.

But the, you know, the, the proof is there about the companies that invest in brand, in addition to demand gen, um, are seeing better results. They're seeing their cost per acquisition go down. Um, and, and we're seeing that with customers and with just interest around, um, brand type plays and, or, um, you know, performance plays that, uh, that our category can solve.

So yeah, we're seeing revitalization revitalization in that, especially as, um, You know, people have short attention spans and digital spends are just going up and up and up in the [00:13:00] ROI is, is, is slowing that slowing down.

Ivor: Yeah, it's interesting that you talk about brand and it compounding over time, we were just talking about that before in the first episode with Anjali from Resourceify and yeah, the, the impact over time when you kind of invest in it over a period of, you know, decades. a few months, you really see those, the impact if you're doing that properly.

And I think with traditional, some paid channels, it can be hard to actually have that consistent growth. Um, so yeah, brand and all the kind of strategies that you can employ around brand really compounds over time. Um, So what are some outside, you know, out of home and for one screen, what are some key strategies and channels that you've employed that I understand you're, you're quite new actually to the role.

So perhaps it would be good to understand like a [00:14:00] flavor of what you have got planned and what's upcoming.

Charlie: Yeah. I going back to a previous point, marketing and storytelling and brand is storytelling over some time that buyers aren't always in market to, to make a decision. And there's some cyclical in this and what we do. But I think that there's some really interesting stories to tell around.

The mixture of data and creativity. And that's, I think what a channel like out of home offers, because You do have interesting canvases to show, you can do fun things like wrapping an ice cream truck and having that, a very experiential element that sort of ties into field marketing and PR.

So I see our opportunity to tell stories at one screen and really for probably the entire industry there's some stories to tell around maybe misperceptions. And so we've done some really fun campaigns. That are not billboards. We've, like I said, we've had ice cream trucks. We've given [00:15:00] out we've had street teams.

If you really want, if there's a lot of fun creativity there. So I think the channels that, we can talk to marketers and places, they spend time on LinkedIn and such, but I think there's a lot of organic storytelling around. Have you thought of this creative option that you may not have been thinking about for your marketing mix?

We may have already done that for somebody. So I think that there's a big organic storytelling opportunity with what I'm trying to build here at one screen.

Ivor: I think, um, what you touched on with the, um, the trucks in the UK here, we see it's really, really popular with, um, political campaigns. We always see like a bus being branded with whatever the slogan is for whatever the party and that becomes super, super popular. And it's like the, a real big focus of the, the whole campaign.

[00:16:00] I

Charlie: um, there's a lot of money being spent in that industry and, and we see it here in the States. Um, it's, it, it, it gets cyclical, but, um, yeah, I think, I think what we see is the ability to compliment, um, the places that, you know, everyone has a phone and they're probably spending a lot of time on their phone, but your attention spans are getting shorter and shorter for, for email, for everything.

And so when you can compliment your messaging on your digital channels, With something that sort of stands out, you're not expecting to walk by a bus and just have that, like, it's like an aha moment that people that people see. So, um, yeah, when you can have fun with creative, uh, you know, marketing shot, not every brand is going to have a fun story.

They're not going to do crazy ads. You have a canvas to, to, to get a little different or to just reinforce that subconsciousness that, [00:17:00] um, uh, that is what marketing is. It's psychology, it's. repeating the same thing over and over again. So when somebody is ready to buy, uh, they're like, Oh, I remember that brand.

Cause they've seen it and they may not even remember where they saw it, but it all comes together. And, uh, it's like, it's these, all these little deposits towards this final transaction of, Oh, I, I finally need a solution like that. Here's who I remember because I've seen them in multiple places. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting to see sort of that revitalization of that.

And, and, and. You know, no marketer is going to just focus all their efforts or budget on one channel. They should be, they should be looking at, at like, Multiple, uh, multiple options or touch points and experimenting with it. So, um, yeah, we've, we've, we've been able to have some fun with that, with, um, political ads and for just, you know, brands in general.

Ivor: feel often creativity comes from being quite scrappy and often [00:18:00] with limited budgets as well. Smaller budgets. You're kind of forced to, um, maybe look at things from a different perspective, from a new perspective. And that's something that you talked about when we first met was the importance of being, you know, scrappy and, uh, understanding how we can like bring that into our marketing channels and, and plays.

And so I wanted to, to understand that a bit more as like, how can we use that scrappiness and become creative to, to get our message out there? What, uh, have you seen them? Um, what kind of tips have you got to share in that respect?

Charlie: Yeah. There's some great examples of that. I, and it's, it's where you have to put on maybe a little bit of a PR hat or a field marketing hat. Um, but marketers should be creative and we should think of different ways. We, I just came from a conference where we had a client who was not an official sponsor.

But they, they brought a mobile [00:19:00] ad truck, um, that stood out. Um, like it was there on site. Uh, it, it was playing music. The visuals were just like, they popped, um, that was a way for them to do guerrilla marketing or just ambush marketing around, like they couldn't maybe afford the sponsorship. So they found a way to, to still be there and present.

Um, that's a unique way to do that. I think. You see, you know, like you think like a good example is the Masters, uh, in, you know, like the, the golf, uh, tournament, um, you can't advertise on that. That's just they're, they are like, they have that program locked in, but you know, the things you could do without a home, for example, people have to fly into that airport and there's billboards on the way to, to where that, that location is.

So can you advertise there? Do you have the budget to do that? Probably not. It's a huge event. Could you maybe have something on the way? [00:20:00] Cause you know, the traffic is going to be there, uh, going towards that event. You could do something like that and like ambush market there a little bit. So I think it's, that's where you just have to think creatively around where are people, where are they spending time?

Um, how can I make a quick hit impact that, uh, could be, you know, a fraction of the cost. Um, those are things that, uh, you know, it's just, you know, It's, it's going back and forth until you come up with some fun ideas. And that's what, you know, and marketers don't always come up with that. It, you know, they're not sitting at their desk coming up with that.

They might be going for a walk and say, Oh, that'd be a really cool idea. And then you just go in a rabbit hole of looking for different ways to do that. But. Um, you know, out of home offers, some channels to do that and some, some blank canvases and creativity to do that. There's other PR, uh, ways to kind of, uh, circumvent or like latch on to, uh, some trending stories that you can find a way to, to tap into.

That's always been effective for, for brands I've seen. So you know, it's just, [00:21:00] it's, it's thinking out of the box a little bit as cliche as that that term is. But I think the other thing to think about for marketers is you don't have to be the person to come up with the idea. Utilize your team. There might be someone in accounting who just has a unique idea that maybe you could run with that, and they just have a different opinion on it.

Um, your customers, your prospects might just come up with something different or say something that you're like, Hey, maybe there's maybe there's something fun there to do with that. So, um, yeah, I think You just have to have to think a little differently about ways to execute. Um, and you know what, we, we get to do some of that every day, which is fun, but there's other ways to do that in marketing that, um, can stand out and not be a massive budget or not have to be the official sponsor of something to still make an impact.

Ivor: Yeah, and that's where the alignment of teams as well has a real advantage, right? If the guy from the count is giving you some great ideas, then you're going to reap the benefits of that. Um, so changing gears slightly, how, [00:22:00] and speaking about perhaps the elephant in the room. So how are you looking at AI in your strategy at one screen?

Charlie: Yeah. I mean, we use AI for part of our planning. So from a product standpoint, we use that, uh, to help, uh, identify options. I mean, that's sort of what, you know, there's, Millions of out of home options. We use that to help, uh, accentuate the right placement from a marketing standpoint, um, it's a great tool to automate some processes.

Um, it's a great way to maybe reduce some time with, um, like some element of just some consistency there. You know, it's still, I think it's still in a place where, um, I'm never going to trust, uh, an AI. Uh, generated blog post or, or maybe, um, content. Cause I still think. People can read through that now, now in two years and two months, that might completely change and [00:23:00] large, large language models might be able to completely replicate, uh, a really quirky or funny post or something like that, but I don't think it's there yet, but I think it's, it's a great tool that I've been playing around with from like a, uh, a framework standpoint, or maybe even some research.

But I do still think writing and telling stories from a human perspective, um, it can be a, a, a, a tool or a guide there. Um, but it, it's, it's easy for people to read through that. So, Uh, it's, it's, you know, changing the industry and there's a new AI tool coming out every day that it's like, that seems interesting.

How do I maybe take advantage of that? Um, but it's, For me, it's probably been a little bit more of a crawl, walk, run of, um, how do I understand this better? How can I utilize this tool? I think there's some element there. Like I said, process. efficiency and maybe some, uh, content framework. But I do think that, um, writing from the [00:24:00] human perspective and telling those stories from the human perspective, isn't going to change anytime soon.

Ivor: Yeah, it, it needs a lot of data and a lot of context to supplement it and to get the good results back, I think. Um, if you, with that example you gave, if you just ask it to say, create a content or a piece of an article, perhaps, it would just come back with so much generic rubbish and everyone will understand that it's been written by generative AI, but then if you supplement it with your unique perspective and your unique context and point of view and view point of view.

Message you want to get across. It can just be super, super powerful in terms of streamlining that whole process and creating that content, but it does need a lot of handholding. Um, now, uh, lastly, so how are you, what are you focused on? Um, as we close out quarter three, uh, with one screen [00:25:00] and, and the rest of the year, what's, what's the main focus for you?

Charlie: Yeah, it's been a lot of learning. Um, I've, I've been trying to talk to as many marketers and customers as we have just to understand their, their understanding of, of, of out of home advertising, um, the breadth of what we can do. I mean, there's dozens of options and I've covered a few of them on this, on this conversation, but there's just so many ways to be creative around, um, how to stand out.

And especially if, you know, your competitors aren't doing certain things, it's like, how do you be different from them? And we have opportunities to do that. So it's been a, it's been a really great opportunity to learn. And to build some foundational pieces, uh, from a go to market standpoint. And then in Q4, it's going to be a lot of, a lot of experimentation and testing around, like, do these channels work?

Do these messages work? Um, but I've identified that there's a lot of content for us to build around, around the stories and the use cases, um, for someone to, uh, and again, going back to learning styles [00:26:00] for a marketer to sit there and see maybe in, in a visual format in a written format for them to say.

That looks like me and that's, that's a similar problem that I have. And that sounds like an interesting way to maybe solve that. I should talk to them. So there's a lot of content that we can develop around. Some of these fun executions are just different stories around how does out of home tie into ABM campaigns.

Well, it actually can. We could put, we could help you research and track and put a mobile truck outside of your top 25 customer or their customer headquarters, for example, like that's going to move the needle. So it's telling those types of stories that I think, uh, marketers who maybe haven't executed out of home yet.

Uh, they just, They need, they need to hear that and see that and visualize that and understand that looks like me. We could do something similar that way. So yeah, it'll, it'll be a lot of content development and, um, and just working with sales as we build, um, build up a partnership and referral network. I[00:27:00]

Ivor: Something we do to close every episode is we ask each guest to recommend a book for the next guest with a short reason why. Our last guest was Angelie from Sify and she recommended The Alchemist by Paolo Colo, and the reason she gave was leaders need to understand themselves. and understand their journeys of growth so they can teach and also inspire others.

The more you learn and grow and improve yourself, the better leader you become. So this book really taps into that. So what's your recommendation for our next guest here, Charlie?

Charlie: have my book, but first of all, that's an excellent choice. I love that book. Uh, it's one that I always try to go back to and reread. So that's a good trigger for me to go back to that one. So great choice on that book. Uh, I actually have mine here. It's. If you could see it, [00:28:00] it's called the power of habit by Charles Duhigg.

Um, and it is a marketing book, but I just, I, I always, I found it to be really insightful because the, the examples it gives, uh, is really, it's more psychological around how people buy and how you can, how over time there are certain points in someone's, um, there's certain things that happen in certain people's lives where you have an opportunity to change or build a habit.

And so, um, it's a great read. It gives some really good examples around, um, you know, how you can help someone build, build habits that hopefully either align with your brand or what your, you know, your offering or selling is. But, um, it gave some good insight into, um, the psychology around how people buy.

And how you can maybe change, uh, change their processes. So, uh, highly recommend it. Uh, it's, it's been out for a little while, but I always kind of go back to some of those examples in it.

Ivor: That's another one that I haven't actually read. So [00:29:00] my book list is, is really growing now. Um, so amazing. I love it. Thanks a lot, Charlie. Um, what an absolute pleasure. Some really, really good insights. And yeah, super interesting perspective with all the out of home side of things. And really, really glad to have you on for this recording.

Charlie: Yeah. Thanks for having me. This has been fun. Um, yeah, thanks. Thanks for, uh, the insightful questions and glad I could add another book to your bookshelf.

Ivor: Guys, thank you for tuning in to Go To Market Tales. If you're interested in the topics or want to be a guest, then please reach out to us. Speak next time.

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GTM Tales Podcast: Charlie from OneScreen

Ivor: [00:00:00] So

hello everyone and welcome to GTM Tales. In each episode, you will meet a go to market leader. And the idea behind it is that there's some really great podcasts out there. There are a lot of podcasts out there, but there aren't any that are specifically focused on the growth stories in B2B. Stories that have helped bridge the gap between 10 customers and a hundred the path from series A to series B or how growth was achieved whilst bootstrapping along this journey, each stage and path is very different.

And the greater market landscape has been totally upended with the AI [00:01:00] revolution. And following on from the episode from Anjali from Resourceify. This is our second episode, and we're super pleased to have Charlie from OneScreen where he's the head of marketing.

Great to have you here, Charlie. How are you doing?

Charlie: I'm great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Ivor: So the way I like to kick off is pretty straightforward. I think it would be really helpful for the listeners to understand your background and you know, what's led you to, to where you are today. Yeah.

Charlie: Yeah, I've been a marketing leader. Uh, and I've kind of stepped over the line into sales leadership and a couple of experiences for 20 plus years now. Uh, and that's been from seed stage to series B companies, uh, traditional companies. I've worked for a few agencies. Um, but I've sort of found this niche of, uh, you know, finding some interesting problems to help [00:02:00] solve and tell some stories around.

Um, so that's, that's led me to, uh, one screen. Uh, we are a, a measurable, uh, out of home advertising platform. So we help, uh, bring a, a channel that maybe some marketers, uh, haven't used in the past or considered, uh, but we help them utilize that with the rest of their marketing mix. So, um, you might think of billboards.

Uh, or wrapped cars, for example, but we fit into ABM campaigns, um, product launches, rebrands, all a lot of different options. So yeah, I joined this team, uh, and it's, it's exciting to sell to marketers. We, I've, I've never done that before. So, um, we sell marketing to marketers. So, um, yeah, I'm excited to, to be part of this, the story and help, help tell their story.

Ivor: Awesome. And I think, um, something we talked about before, which I found really interesting was you mentioned around the importance of Internal marketing and internal operations. You know, [00:03:00] how can say aligning marketing sales, customer service and product teams, how can that create like a more seamless customer experience?

And then I'd love to get some more kind of insights on the, the out of home side of things as well.

Charlie: Yeah, internal marketing. I found in my career that that's a really important. Uh, it's, it's an important element sometimes more than more important than the external marketing you do is as a marketing leader, a go to market leader. Um, and that's, it depends on the maturity of the organization or just the appetite of what marketing truly is and where it fits.

But, uh, you have to be in line with, Uh, your leadership, you have to be in line with what the board's thinking. You have to be in line with your sales counterparts and your product counterparts, your customer service counterparts. Um, and it has to, they have to understand how marketing fits into making their jobs easier, better, um, telling their stories.

So it's, it's. [00:04:00] Understanding their learning styles, understanding, uh, you know, marketing is communications at its core. And so how do you help someone from a customer service, uh, perspective understand, um, how to help retention and how marketing aspects or how, you know, communications for certain things or why you want to sit on sales calls.

Um, why picking up, uh, the ways customers talk or things that they're saying, uh, why that's important to help educate your future marketing executions. Um, and it's also good to help, you know, for you to understand the financials of the organization and how to, uh, to market up to your leadership, uh, whoever you're reporting to.

So, yeah, I've always found that that's a very important thing, um, to be able to take a step back a little bit, especially as a marketer. And understand where they're coming from, understand the challenges they have and how you can help support them and how you can collaborate with them.

Ivor: Yeah, it's super, super important. I think earlier this year, we, we actually started working [00:05:00] with a company who like, On the, on the surface, they seem to have everything they needed to succeed. They had no good group of sales guys, um, all the tools to track the leads. But actually what we found was, um, the CRM, you know, the very system that's meant to streamline their sales efforts was actually barely being used and we. We quickly found out why when we started working with them, there was no structured sales process. No one was tracking how leads move through the funnel and without data, they were essentially flying behind. And honestly, it made, it made perfect sense. If you're not. Using data to understand what's happening.

Why actually bother with a CRM at all. And actually it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, which I use probably far too often, which is from Peter Dracula, you can't manage what you can't measure. And that was the key. So you actually. We worked with them and this is something that teams can do internally and do [00:06:00] themselves.

We worked with them to understand the whole go to market process. So that's creating the playbook, understanding each stage from, you know, the marketing side of things to the sales and understanding where they, uh, leads were dropping off. And the real challenge and, and the real kind of change actually happened when they brought that data into weekly and monthly meetings, uh, with sales and marketing folks. know, they had the real insights because of that. And one of the things they noticed was people were dropping off in the middle of the funnel. And as they started using the data more regularly, the sales team actually had the reason to update the CRM that created like a positive feedback loop. So it's super interesting to see that, um, alignment between marketing and sales, but you also touched on that with not understanding, I think it's really important from a marketer's perspective.

Yeah. How, um, leads are closing and why they're closing as well. So there's all these great insights that can [00:07:00] come from, um, aligning different teams. And I wanted to actually understand your perspective on like, I think it's good to understand what are the common pitfalls in, in any scenarios. So like, what are some typical problems that you might expect with aligning teams?

I think I can think of quite a few. Yeah.

Charlie: all probably, uh, we all may have some battle scars. Um, I think those examples you just brought up about, uh, Like, those are all trigger points to help everybody work together towards a common goal. I think marketing would want to know why the drop off is at mid funnel because they should be able to create content.

They should be able to find reasons to focus on that element of the funnel. But if there's not enough data or measurement inside of your CRM or if that feedback loop is not coming back to marketing, they're going to work in a silo and then sales is going to, and then it becomes a blame game.

Ivor: [00:08:00] Silence.

Charlie: and that's where some, you should be able to boil those conversations up in a respectful manner.

Uh, before they become a bigger issue. And I think that that's one of the biggest from a pitfall standpoint, having, having respect, uh, and understanding, you don't have to know the, the, the details and specifics of what everybody else does, but you have to understand their motivation and you have to understand where they're coming from to align how you get to the, to the end of the problem.

Um, and if you don't, then it's, yeah, you're just operating in silos. And I think You know, there, there's a lot of conversation now, uh, about measurement, attribution, and, uh, it's a difficult thing to do there. There's, you can overanalyze everything, but, you know, starting with some basics of here's what good looks like, and here's, here's the reason why we need information.

And here's [00:09:00] why we need, here's why when you update a CRM after a sales call, or even especially things like a close lost, like, why did we lose that deal? We should learn from that. That's not a bad thing. Okay. But how do we use that information to help us reduce the closed loss numbers? And for the future, maybe there's a trend there.

Marketing can take advantage of that. Customer service can look for lookalike customers to say, Hey, there's maybe a flag here. We should address this proactively versus waiting for them to churn. So, um, I think all that just, it comes down to communication. I think it's, it's a simple thing. It's not, you know, it's a simple term.

It's not easy to always execute. But, you know, to, to avoid a lot of those pitfalls, having the right vehicles and the right mechanisms to, to communicate is important. And I think one thing that I've, I've learned is that everyone has different learning styles. And so, you know, someone might need. Uh, some insight before a meeting so that they can [00:10:00] digest it and contribute to that versus maybe some of the things on the spot.

So thinking about learning styles is very important, uh, as you're thinking about those communication loops.

Ivor: Yeah, so, so true. And if you have more of a culture of, of blaming, it's going to be so much harder for you to actually learn from, yeah, those rejections of the, um, the lost deals or every kind of part of the, the go to market process as well, because it's not going to be shared and that's critical in, in a startup for you to adopt those learning. Um, so now one screen, you guys help companies launch and measure out of home advertising. So what kind of trends are you seeing in the paid world in out of home, but also, uh, advertising as, as a whole?

Charlie: Yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing a comeback to what we might, you know, out of home might be considered an old school industry, but it's a, it's a channel [00:11:00] that, uh, we're seeing people come to because there's a lot of digital noise. I think everyone. There's a playbook that's been run for the last several years, if not a dozen years, that, um, it was mostly all digital.

It was just inundating people with, um, ads that, uh, either through paid search, uh, through email, through, uh, programmatic, there's just a lot of noise and we're seeing, um, cost per acquisition go up. We're seeing ROI go down. Uh, we're just seeing people tuning out and that's where. They're looking at other channels.

Marketers are looking at other channels like out of home, um, to compliment, you know, not to completely replace, but to compliment some of the channels they are doing because they need a wider media mix. Um, and, and so it's, it's sort of having a revitalization, even though it never went really went away. I think the trends that we're seeing is you can measure out of home.

And that's where a lot of light bulbs go off when you talk to marketers around. [00:12:00] Um, well, you know, I can't attribute this back to, uh, as we were talking about before. you know, I don't have the data to know if it's working or not. Well, actually, out of home can be measured. Um, and so I think that that's one thing from a standpoint of we're seeing a trend and we're also seeing a trend in in brand becoming, uh, it's, it's, it's one of those kind of categories that, uh, it's a longer tail investment.

But the, you know, the, the proof is there about the companies that invest in brand, in addition to demand gen, um, are seeing better results. They're seeing their cost per acquisition go down. Um, and, and we're seeing that with customers and with just interest around, um, brand type plays and, or, um, you know, performance plays that, uh, that our category can solve.

So yeah, we're seeing revitalization revitalization in that, especially as, um, You know, people have short attention spans and digital spends are just going up and up and up in the [00:13:00] ROI is, is, is slowing that slowing down.

Ivor: Yeah, it's interesting that you talk about brand and it compounding over time, we were just talking about that before in the first episode with Anjali from Resourceify and yeah, the, the impact over time when you kind of invest in it over a period of, you know, decades. a few months, you really see those, the impact if you're doing that properly.

And I think with traditional, some paid channels, it can be hard to actually have that consistent growth. Um, so yeah, brand and all the kind of strategies that you can employ around brand really compounds over time. Um, So what are some outside, you know, out of home and for one screen, what are some key strategies and channels that you've employed that I understand you're, you're quite new actually to the role.

So perhaps it would be good to understand like a [00:14:00] flavor of what you have got planned and what's upcoming.

Charlie: Yeah. I going back to a previous point, marketing and storytelling and brand is storytelling over some time that buyers aren't always in market to, to make a decision. And there's some cyclical in this and what we do. But I think that there's some really interesting stories to tell around.

The mixture of data and creativity. And that's, I think what a channel like out of home offers, because You do have interesting canvases to show, you can do fun things like wrapping an ice cream truck and having that, a very experiential element that sort of ties into field marketing and PR.

So I see our opportunity to tell stories at one screen and really for probably the entire industry there's some stories to tell around maybe misperceptions. And so we've done some really fun campaigns. That are not billboards. We've, like I said, we've had ice cream trucks. We've given [00:15:00] out we've had street teams.

If you really want, if there's a lot of fun creativity there. So I think the channels that, we can talk to marketers and places, they spend time on LinkedIn and such, but I think there's a lot of organic storytelling around. Have you thought of this creative option that you may not have been thinking about for your marketing mix?

We may have already done that for somebody. So I think that there's a big organic storytelling opportunity with what I'm trying to build here at one screen.

Ivor: I think, um, what you touched on with the, um, the trucks in the UK here, we see it's really, really popular with, um, political campaigns. We always see like a bus being branded with whatever the slogan is for whatever the party and that becomes super, super popular. And it's like the, a real big focus of the, the whole campaign.

[00:16:00] I

Charlie: um, there's a lot of money being spent in that industry and, and we see it here in the States. Um, it's, it, it, it gets cyclical, but, um, yeah, I think, I think what we see is the ability to compliment, um, the places that, you know, everyone has a phone and they're probably spending a lot of time on their phone, but your attention spans are getting shorter and shorter for, for email, for everything.

And so when you can compliment your messaging on your digital channels, With something that sort of stands out, you're not expecting to walk by a bus and just have that, like, it's like an aha moment that people that people see. So, um, yeah, when you can have fun with creative, uh, you know, marketing shot, not every brand is going to have a fun story.

They're not going to do crazy ads. You have a canvas to, to, to get a little different or to just reinforce that subconsciousness that, [00:17:00] um, uh, that is what marketing is. It's psychology, it's. repeating the same thing over and over again. So when somebody is ready to buy, uh, they're like, Oh, I remember that brand.

Cause they've seen it and they may not even remember where they saw it, but it all comes together. And, uh, it's like, it's these, all these little deposits towards this final transaction of, Oh, I, I finally need a solution like that. Here's who I remember because I've seen them in multiple places. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting to see sort of that revitalization of that.

And, and, and. You know, no marketer is going to just focus all their efforts or budget on one channel. They should be, they should be looking at, at like, Multiple, uh, multiple options or touch points and experimenting with it. So, um, yeah, we've, we've, we've been able to have some fun with that, with, um, political ads and for just, you know, brands in general.

Ivor: feel often creativity comes from being quite scrappy and often [00:18:00] with limited budgets as well. Smaller budgets. You're kind of forced to, um, maybe look at things from a different perspective, from a new perspective. And that's something that you talked about when we first met was the importance of being, you know, scrappy and, uh, understanding how we can like bring that into our marketing channels and, and plays.

And so I wanted to, to understand that a bit more as like, how can we use that scrappiness and become creative to, to get our message out there? What, uh, have you seen them? Um, what kind of tips have you got to share in that respect?

Charlie: Yeah. There's some great examples of that. I, and it's, it's where you have to put on maybe a little bit of a PR hat or a field marketing hat. Um, but marketers should be creative and we should think of different ways. We, I just came from a conference where we had a client who was not an official sponsor.

But they, they brought a mobile [00:19:00] ad truck, um, that stood out. Um, like it was there on site. Uh, it, it was playing music. The visuals were just like, they popped, um, that was a way for them to do guerrilla marketing or just ambush marketing around, like they couldn't maybe afford the sponsorship. So they found a way to, to still be there and present.

Um, that's a unique way to do that. I think. You see, you know, like you think like a good example is the Masters, uh, in, you know, like the, the golf, uh, tournament, um, you can't advertise on that. That's just they're, they are like, they have that program locked in, but you know, the things you could do without a home, for example, people have to fly into that airport and there's billboards on the way to, to where that, that location is.

So can you advertise there? Do you have the budget to do that? Probably not. It's a huge event. Could you maybe have something on the way? [00:20:00] Cause you know, the traffic is going to be there, uh, going towards that event. You could do something like that and like ambush market there a little bit. So I think it's, that's where you just have to think creatively around where are people, where are they spending time?

Um, how can I make a quick hit impact that, uh, could be, you know, a fraction of the cost. Um, those are things that, uh, you know, it's just, you know, It's, it's going back and forth until you come up with some fun ideas. And that's what, you know, and marketers don't always come up with that. It, you know, they're not sitting at their desk coming up with that.

They might be going for a walk and say, Oh, that'd be a really cool idea. And then you just go in a rabbit hole of looking for different ways to do that. But. Um, you know, out of home offers, some channels to do that and some, some blank canvases and creativity to do that. There's other PR, uh, ways to kind of, uh, circumvent or like latch on to, uh, some trending stories that you can find a way to, to tap into.

That's always been effective for, for brands I've seen. So you know, it's just, [00:21:00] it's, it's thinking out of the box a little bit as cliche as that that term is. But I think the other thing to think about for marketers is you don't have to be the person to come up with the idea. Utilize your team. There might be someone in accounting who just has a unique idea that maybe you could run with that, and they just have a different opinion on it.

Um, your customers, your prospects might just come up with something different or say something that you're like, Hey, maybe there's maybe there's something fun there to do with that. So, um, yeah, I think You just have to have to think a little differently about ways to execute. Um, and you know what, we, we get to do some of that every day, which is fun, but there's other ways to do that in marketing that, um, can stand out and not be a massive budget or not have to be the official sponsor of something to still make an impact.

Ivor: Yeah, and that's where the alignment of teams as well has a real advantage, right? If the guy from the count is giving you some great ideas, then you're going to reap the benefits of that. Um, so changing gears slightly, how, [00:22:00] and speaking about perhaps the elephant in the room. So how are you looking at AI in your strategy at one screen?

Charlie: Yeah. I mean, we use AI for part of our planning. So from a product standpoint, we use that, uh, to help, uh, identify options. I mean, that's sort of what, you know, there's, Millions of out of home options. We use that to help, uh, accentuate the right placement from a marketing standpoint, um, it's a great tool to automate some processes.

Um, it's a great way to maybe reduce some time with, um, like some element of just some consistency there. You know, it's still, I think it's still in a place where, um, I'm never going to trust, uh, an AI. Uh, generated blog post or, or maybe, um, content. Cause I still think. People can read through that now, now in two years and two months, that might completely change and [00:23:00] large, large language models might be able to completely replicate, uh, a really quirky or funny post or something like that, but I don't think it's there yet, but I think it's, it's a great tool that I've been playing around with from like a, uh, a framework standpoint, or maybe even some research.

But I do still think writing and telling stories from a human perspective, um, it can be a, a, a, a tool or a guide there. Um, but it, it's, it's easy for people to read through that. So, Uh, it's, it's, you know, changing the industry and there's a new AI tool coming out every day that it's like, that seems interesting.

How do I maybe take advantage of that? Um, but it's, For me, it's probably been a little bit more of a crawl, walk, run of, um, how do I understand this better? How can I utilize this tool? I think there's some element there. Like I said, process. efficiency and maybe some, uh, content framework. But I do think that, um, writing from the [00:24:00] human perspective and telling those stories from the human perspective, isn't going to change anytime soon.

Ivor: Yeah, it, it needs a lot of data and a lot of context to supplement it and to get the good results back, I think. Um, if you, with that example you gave, if you just ask it to say, create a content or a piece of an article, perhaps, it would just come back with so much generic rubbish and everyone will understand that it's been written by generative AI, but then if you supplement it with your unique perspective and your unique context and point of view and view point of view.

Message you want to get across. It can just be super, super powerful in terms of streamlining that whole process and creating that content, but it does need a lot of handholding. Um, now, uh, lastly, so how are you, what are you focused on? Um, as we close out quarter three, uh, with one screen [00:25:00] and, and the rest of the year, what's, what's the main focus for you?

Charlie: Yeah, it's been a lot of learning. Um, I've, I've been trying to talk to as many marketers and customers as we have just to understand their, their understanding of, of, of out of home advertising, um, the breadth of what we can do. I mean, there's dozens of options and I've covered a few of them on this, on this conversation, but there's just so many ways to be creative around, um, how to stand out.

And especially if, you know, your competitors aren't doing certain things, it's like, how do you be different from them? And we have opportunities to do that. So it's been a, it's been a really great opportunity to learn. And to build some foundational pieces, uh, from a go to market standpoint. And then in Q4, it's going to be a lot of, a lot of experimentation and testing around, like, do these channels work?

Do these messages work? Um, but I've identified that there's a lot of content for us to build around, around the stories and the use cases, um, for someone to, uh, and again, going back to learning styles [00:26:00] for a marketer to sit there and see maybe in, in a visual format in a written format for them to say.

That looks like me and that's, that's a similar problem that I have. And that sounds like an interesting way to maybe solve that. I should talk to them. So there's a lot of content that we can develop around. Some of these fun executions are just different stories around how does out of home tie into ABM campaigns.

Well, it actually can. We could put, we could help you research and track and put a mobile truck outside of your top 25 customer or their customer headquarters, for example, like that's going to move the needle. So it's telling those types of stories that I think, uh, marketers who maybe haven't executed out of home yet.

Uh, they just, They need, they need to hear that and see that and visualize that and understand that looks like me. We could do something similar that way. So yeah, it'll, it'll be a lot of content development and, um, and just working with sales as we build, um, build up a partnership and referral network. I[00:27:00]

Ivor: Something we do to close every episode is we ask each guest to recommend a book for the next guest with a short reason why. Our last guest was Angelie from Sify and she recommended The Alchemist by Paolo Colo, and the reason she gave was leaders need to understand themselves. and understand their journeys of growth so they can teach and also inspire others.

The more you learn and grow and improve yourself, the better leader you become. So this book really taps into that. So what's your recommendation for our next guest here, Charlie?

Charlie: have my book, but first of all, that's an excellent choice. I love that book. Uh, it's one that I always try to go back to and reread. So that's a good trigger for me to go back to that one. So great choice on that book. Uh, I actually have mine here. It's. If you could see it, [00:28:00] it's called the power of habit by Charles Duhigg.

Um, and it is a marketing book, but I just, I, I always, I found it to be really insightful because the, the examples it gives, uh, is really, it's more psychological around how people buy and how you can, how over time there are certain points in someone's, um, there's certain things that happen in certain people's lives where you have an opportunity to change or build a habit.

And so, um, it's a great read. It gives some really good examples around, um, you know, how you can help someone build, build habits that hopefully either align with your brand or what your, you know, your offering or selling is. But, um, it gave some good insight into, um, the psychology around how people buy.

And how you can maybe change, uh, change their processes. So, uh, highly recommend it. Uh, it's, it's been out for a little while, but I always kind of go back to some of those examples in it.

Ivor: That's another one that I haven't actually read. So [00:29:00] my book list is, is really growing now. Um, so amazing. I love it. Thanks a lot, Charlie. Um, what an absolute pleasure. Some really, really good insights. And yeah, super interesting perspective with all the out of home side of things. And really, really glad to have you on for this recording.

Charlie: Yeah. Thanks for having me. This has been fun. Um, yeah, thanks. Thanks for, uh, the insightful questions and glad I could add another book to your bookshelf.

Ivor: Guys, thank you for tuning in to Go To Market Tales. If you're interested in the topics or want to be a guest, then please reach out to us. Speak next time.

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