Is audience-targeting just for digital… and TV? In a privacy-conscious world, are there better, safer ways to reach your customers?
Joining us today is Jeremy Flynn, Senior Vice President of Data Products & Strategy at Clear Channel Outdoor. Jeremy is at the forefront of innovating out-of-home (OOH) advertising, helping brands navigate modern marketing challenges by enhancing the value of their media investments. With a deep understanding of privacy-conscious solutions, audience targeting, and brand safety, Jeremy’s insights are vital for brands looking to thrive in today’s evolving ad environment.
About Jeremy Flynn
Jeremy Flynn is Senior Vice President of Data Products & Strategy at Clear Channel Outdoor. In his role, Jeremy, works closely with Clear Channel Outdoor’s sales leadership and marketing teams to develop innovative solutions and data products that help brands and advertisers plan, measure, and amplify their media investments.
Jeremy is an integral part of Clear Channel’s RADAR Data Solutions team and can speak to how Clear Channel is solving modern marketing challenges by innovating OOH in an evolving environment so brands can understand and enhance the value of their media investment.
Resources
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom: Is audience targeting just for digital and TV? In a privacy-conscious world, are there better, safer ways to reach your customers? Joining us today is Jeremy Flynn, Senior Vice President of Data Products and Strategy at Clear Channel Outdoor. Jeremy is at the forefront of innovating out-of-home advertising, helping brands navigate modern marketing challenges by enhancing the value of their media investments. With a deep understanding of privacy conscious solutions, audience targeting and brand safety, Jeremy is going to share some insights that are vital for brands looking to thrive in today’s evolving ad environment. Welcome to the show, Jeremy. Thank you, Greg. Thanks for having me. Yeah, looking forward to this. Before we dive in, though, why don’t we get started with you telling a little more about your background and your role at Clear Channel Outdoor.
Jeremy Flynn: Sure, so Jeremy Flynn, I’m the Senior Vice President of Data Products and Strategy at Clear Channel. I’ve been here for about eight years and prior to that I was actually working in digital advertising. I was at a startup company called Share This. We were headquartered in Palo Alto and There I was focused on building out a really good publisher network. We were on about 4 million websites. We had that little share this code that let you share to different social channels, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter at the time. And we had a publishing business, a media business, and a data business about eight years ago. Data was the new oil. Looking to build a data business that typically involved strong exit opportunities. And so I was excited to work in Silicon Valley at a startup doing that. And then I got a call saying, do you want to build audience and measurement solutions in Atipoem? And that just really felt like the next area to disrupt. I think the biggest challenge in Atipoem has been kind of the measurement question and the opportunity to kind of roll up your sleeves and build solutions for that seemed too compelling to pass. And that was eight years ago and the work is still underway. And it definitely is shifting our industry in a really strong direction. I’m really happy to be a part of that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. Well, yeah, and that’s a that’s a great, great segue to what we’re going to talk about here. And we’re going to talk about it in a few different ways. But I want to start with that, that idea of disruption and innovation and out of home advertising, you know, not necessarily the first place you think about for innovation and measurement and all those things. So let’s let’s start by talking about audience targeting, which has traditionally been associated with digital TV, some other things. How does out of home integrate audience targeting?
Jeremy Flynn: Sure. So at Clear Channel, I oversee an analytics suite called Radar. And within Radar, what we do is we productize mobile location data and identity data to understand consumers and how they move throughout their day and the different behaviors that they exhibit. And so with that, you can start to do some really interesting things with exposure to out-of-home inventory. So whether it is a roadside bulletin or a bus shelter or even at an airport, you could start to understand how consumers are traveling throughout the day and the behaviors that we can then observe them doing after they have been exposed to our advertising. So whether that be a visit to a retail location or going online to a website or even downloading an app, we do have the ability to work with data to understand, all right, someone has seen this campaign. This is the action that they have taken. With respect to audience targeting, we have the ability to look back at that data. So the way that we’ve set up our products is to look backwards and start to say, all right, over the last certain period of time, what were the repeat behaviors that we’ve actually observed in market offline? And with that, we’ve been able to actually assign audience attributes to all of our billboards. We’ve got about 4,500 audience attributes for every single out-of-home unit that we actually have in market today. And they’re the same behaviors that digital marketers use to plan their online advertising. So part of what I’m trying to do here at Clear Channel is just to make out of them as analogous and plannable and addressable as if you were a digital marketer. And that not only means using audiences that you use online, but also custom audiences based on a brand’s preferred data set, right? It could be their first party audience, their second party audience, their third party audience. So setting up the pipes to be able to do that. is really kind of put in the power back in the brands and advertisers hands to say, hey, if I’m seeing success with this audience target on my CTV campaign or my digital campaign, or I’ve reached a point of diminished returns on CTV, whether it’s measuring or audience scale, let me find that incremental offline audience without a home. So that was a long answer to your question, but it’s an area of fashion.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, yeah, definitely. And yeah, I mean, I was looking forward to this conversation today because for the very reason, you know, I talk with a lot of digital marketers. I talk with a lot of marketers that, you know, they talk about omnichannel marketing. And, you know, most of the time when they talk about personalization and targeting and measurement, they talk, they say omnichannel, but they really are kind of referring to a few channels that are mostly digital and stuff. So, you know, I was looking forward to talk about this because You know, I think there’s a lot of misconceptions that brands have. You touched on on some of those things, but I’d love for you to just dive in a little deeper of like, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that you run into from brands?
Jeremy Flynn: Yeah, I think I think the number one is. Is out-of-home even measurable? And the answer is emphatically yes. Can out-of-home deliver outcomes beyond why I just purchased it, which is usually for a product launch or a top of the funnel awareness play? The answer is yes. And so talking to brand marketers who are, frankly, exhausted by the lack of performance of the traditional channels that they’re invested in, looking to find additional ways of reaching their customers in an environment that is ripe with fraud, and just now practice when it comes to offering solutions to advertisers out of home is kind of become this really nice medium that is finally getting a chance to shine in kind of the true army channel plan. But that only happens if simplicity is there right if it’s simple to measure and if it’s simple to plan and target and so that’s why. I think the work has been really on out of home product people, technologists to make those solutions available for brand marketers because they will spend where it’s easy to spend and they will continue to spend and grow where they see outcomes for their business.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and to go back to the omnichannel concept, I mean, most brands are going to be advertising across, you know, not just a set, not just out of home or not just, you know, digital display or something like that. So, you know, how do you recommend that brands think about integrating out of home with some of the other channels to create this like cohesive multichannel strategy?
Jeremy Flynn: Great, great question. One, I would think about it as a mass media. It is one of the true remaining mass medias that exist and it doesn’t encounter the general challenges that this fragmented media landscape now has, right? It has the ability to be always on. has the ability to be a part of a community. And then at least from a measurement perspective, which is another view I have into how well Adafoam does, it has the ability to deliver two aspects of the marketing funnel, right? It could deliver top of the funnel outcomes, or it could literally drive brand awareness better than a lot of traditional media can today with the loss of their audiences. And because it’s now more measurable, it actually can be proven to be just as cost effective at driving acquisition goals, driving not necessarily direct response goals because you can’t click on a billboard. but it can assist in conversions. And so it is a velocity channel where if you wanna amplify the work that you’re doing, and in fact, there’s a lot that speaks to how out of home drives the success in other investments that you are making, right? So it’s an accelerator. So that’s how I would say how you should consider out of home like in the media mix.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and then from a measurement approach, you mentioned incremental, is some kind of like media mix modeling or what’s the best way to tell the effectiveness? Because to your point, I mean, there could be a QR code perhaps, but you’re not clicking on a billboard, but to your other points, it’s measurable, right?
Jeremy Flynn: Yeah, well, let’s talk first about incrementality, right? You set up a digital ad buy, you set up a CTD buy, you’re typically given the reach frequency of that media plan and then you run that plan and then you hit full delivery, right? As a brand marketer, you’re always looking to hit newer audiences beyond the ones that you are targeting. When you’re doing digital media, right, that’s one-to-one target. When you’re running out of phone, that’s a one-to-many target. So by definition, you’re actually gonna add incremental reach to whatever plan because you’re leveraging a mass media. With respect to measurability, this is where there’s a lot of really great work being done in our industry. At Clear Channel, we’re proud to be able to use radar to participate in MTA models as well as MMM models. And in fact, the best measurement work, in my opinion, is kind of a hybrid of the two. You want MTA to really show how record level data is showing how out-of-home drives assisted conversions deterministically and how it plugs into other maybe more individual record level measurement solutions that other media channels could provide. So now you can see the consumer across the various touch points of being exposed to multiple media channels. And that’s really great work that highlights how well out-of-home drives assisted conversions, but also unattributed conversions, right? Out-of-home never gets credit for driving unattributed visits or unattributed conversions. But consider this, like if you’re on the highway and you’re hungry and the last billboard that you see is a billboard for McDonald’s or a burger or Wendy’s or an In-N-Out burger and you take that next exit, that’s literally the last impression that as a consumer you are seeing before going to that store. Do you get that credit? I don’t know. How do we get better at doing that? So I think we absolutely participate in MTA in that way. In terms of MMM, that’s where the jury is still out. There’s a lot of work in terms of how out-of-home data can plug into omni-channel media mix planning. And we’re starting to do some research and development on how that best participates. And that’s where we really look with partners as a media owner on the buy side to test data that is being developed right now for our industry.
Greg Kihlstrom: So, you know, with all the tracking and audience targeting, you know, there’s in the digital world with third-party cookies and, you know, whether or not, you know, the cookie-pocalypse was happening and then it got delayed and delayed. And, you know, it’s a little up in the air exactly what’s going to happen perhaps. Consumer data privacy is a big concern and it hinders the way that marketers can reach out in some ways. It’s that certainly I’m in favor of good data privacy practices. But, you know, with all of this and with privacy conscious consumers and brands needing to be more privacy conscious, you know, how does out of home play in this mix?
Jeremy Flynn: One thing that I think Adafoam uniquely does is it participates in the community in which it lives. So in a very unique way, it establishes trust in the community, and not as aggressively as some other media tries to do. We are a part of people’s commutes. We are a part of like the repeated journeys that they take throughout their day. And as such, in order for our media to survive, we actually have to have very close relationships with local governments and local municipalities. And I’m really proud of the work that when there are times of natural disaster, People look at the billboards in their community to guide them to safety. And I think that the other way to think about privacy is trust, right? And so I think Atipom does a really good job of establishing trust within the community where it exists. And as a business, that is like a pillar that we have in terms of being good corporate social responsible actors. So I think that that’s part one. I think part two, can you, cause you kind of alluded at the cookie question. I think that’s in part a strategy. When, when you, when you say things are coming and you say things are going away, like Google’s competition is developing business plans to like adapt to whatever ecosystem to come next. And when, when, when that changes, that, that change is intentionally disruptive and slows down competitors for, for digital investments. I think because we don’t need to play in that world, we’ve been able to be focused on. on solutions. And I think that like if all data went away, is the most contextually relevant media channel. It exists in a physical location that reaches a certain type of population in that location. And I like to think that if we had the most stringent privacy laws, which we should have, then Adafoam actually even gets a fairer shot at showing how well it can perform in brand campaigns. I think the last thing I’ll say on it is what the question of privacy is also doing is it’s not only about consumer trust, it’s also about just ownership of data and where it resides. And I think what we’re starting to see now in our industry is brands and advertisers saying, hey, I actually need to take more Control ownership of the data that like i am generating for my business and they are also equally focused on leveraging that data to collaborate with marketers for better performing campaigns and so. Cookies were effectively like a lazy solve for that and a technique where people in our industry work together to drive really good campaigns. I think that that’s still going to happen, but it’s going to happen in a slightly different way with different techniques. And what’s cool about that, at least for Out of Home, is will be a part of whatever those new techniques are, right? And so, as an example, we’re the only out-of-home media owner at Clear Channel that’s integrated with the data clean rooms because we believe that brands are going to take ownership of their data, but they’re still going to want to work with other media owners to help better plan and and target their own campaigns in a privacy-safe way, and we want to enable that. At the same time, by definition, we are a brand-safe, fraud-free, community-based, local-first media. When did it answer to your very important question?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, no, I mean, there’s there’s definitely a lot to a lot to consider there. And, you know, all the talk about data and privacy. There’s also a creative component to this as well. Right. So, you know, balancing all of those things that, you know, it’s got to be the right at the right place at the right time, of course. But we’re also talking about a fundamentally creative medium. And, you know, where does the power of creativity come into, you know, all of this?
Jeremy Flynn: I mean, I think at the end of the day, you could have as well of a planned campaign as possible. And if it has the right creative, it takes that campaign to the next level and it has the wrong creative, it could really kind of fall down. And so it’s absolutely an integral part. There’s definitely an arts and sciences approach. I’m on the data side, so I’m not a creative expert, to be clear. But I like that there’s this quote that I kind of came across, which talks about data doesn’t always give you the right answer, but it does tell you what to do next. And I like thinking about how that applies to creative in the sense of like understanding how creative resonates with certain customers, how it plays on like their, their behaviors, their long-term decision-making, right. Their brand affinity. And, and when you can start to consider those, those kind of emotional factors, right. That’s, that’s where, where creative can actually drive outcomes, business outcomes, because We obviously are in a period of economic uncertainty. People will return to the brands that they trust, but then how do you actually run campaigns to establish that trust, right? You see Apple running like their campaigns that are just almost solely based on privacy, but there are other brands that are doing, I think, really interesting things with creative and having like banner years focusing On a creative first strategy right so there’s definitely a play in that in terms of how we’re trying to incorporate data on on our side. We are constantly issuing measurement programs that test for awareness, whether it’s aided or unaided, and really kind of aligning that with the really rigorous exposure data that we also can use to say, all right, does aided awareness to this creative actually drive like a sale, right? And so I’m trying to marry the two, but sometimes creative could stand by itself, and sometimes data could stand by itself, and I like being able to operate with those competing thoughts separately sometimes.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree that, you know, they work together and sometimes the kind of to what you’re saying, sometimes the the ratio is a little more weighted on one side or the other, perhaps. So I agree in those in those cases of the creative, you know, another thing that you had mentioned briefly is the concept of brand safety. And, you know, certainly that’s a significant concern for marketers and brand folks. How does out of home help address some of these concerns? And how does this maybe compare with some other channels?
Jeremy Flynn: Yeah, no, it’s a great, great question. I just Taking it from an economic lens for a second, tens of billions of dollars a year, if not a hundred billion dollars in the US alone are fraudulent impressions that otherwise be put in a medium that could reach real people in the real world to help get your message out there. And so from just purely an economic and financial lens, it is like malfeasance. to allow for that fraud and waste to occur when you have a responsibility to take those dollars and put them into places that could actually reach real customers? I would answer that first and foremost. I would say like I came from the digital world where viewability and VC PMs were the thing that we had to like solve for technically. And I’m like happy to be working in an industry where our only viewability issue is like if a tree sometimes grows in front of like our billboard and how we actually have to pare back the branches so that our ad can be seen. Like that’s actually just like such a pleasant experience when it comes to that. Maybe not for the tree, but you know. No, we work with the local community to make sure that we’re doing that in the right way. But yeah, it’s a big reason why I think a lot of people who I end up bringing into the organization who come from digital backgrounds are like, wow! I actually see the campaign that I worked on. And like, I would challenge a lot of people maybe listening to this podcast, like when they think about like a campaign that they spent a lot of hours on, like if it’s run on another media channel, do they actually see it? Like, and I, I talk time and time again to folks on my team, they’re like, yeah, I was out for a drive and I saw the thing that we’re actually measuring, or this was the audience that we used to get this campaign live. And like, I don’t know, there’s that, there’s that like, very fulfilling aspect that drives people’s satisfaction with working in and out of home and, and for, and, and away from like serious issues that exist in other other media.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, agreed. Yeah, it’s the, you know, it’s, it’s, there’s transparency and there’s accountability, right? You know, what, what’s your recommendation for brands to get the most out of their, their partnerships in terms of transparency and accountability?
Jeremy Flynn: just data and trust and setting up the right measurement and testing apparatus and like being nimble and flexible to test other media where you start to see kind of things flatlining or falling short. I’ll tie it into like topical news, which is the TikTok ban, right? Is it coming? Is it staying? Is it going? And I saw a marketer post online saying, guys, there was a time where none of the social media networks even existed. And marketers still were able to do their jobs. And this is a reminder of how you kind of have to remain agile and nimble and be able to test many different channels. And so I think the thing that I would recommend is like, you got to set up the right accountability framework, but the right accounting for that to like actually say, all right, this is successful up until this point. And, and you have to find partners that you, that you trust. Right. And that, that also really matters. And that’s why I think making sure you’re asking the right questions of any partner, making sure that you’re getting referrals about working with any partner also matters. And then making sure that you are not doing any work unless you have a good definition of what success is and implementing those practices.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, Jeremy, thanks so much for joining. One last question for you before we wrap up. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently? Oh, good question.
Jeremy Flynn: I think always be learning. I really like to read a lot of fiction books, but also nonfiction. And I think it’s important to find things to read that you want to apply in the moment. And so, finding books that you may not necessarily relate to your day-to-day job, but are of an interesting topic, you’d be surprised to find the passages that you read in those books, you’re like, oh, okay, I’m just gonna try all this. one that my team, if they actually listen to this, will might laugh at me on. But there’s, in the 1950s, a guy wrote a book about strategy where he talks about the foxes and the hedgehogs and how like hedgehogs are myopic in their focus and they need to like move ahead towards a single goal and a single vision. And foxes are kind of tinkering and tailoring and trying different strategies. And it’s really the combination of the two that actually drive towards like the best success. that’s product development in 2025, right? It’s like, how do you actually know what’s going to drive like long term enterprise value, but short term, like immediate revenue returns, right? And so like, I don’t know, to answer your question, like I would say, reading, and then applying what you’re reading to like the context of your day to day is like, it’s the top thing I’d say.
