Chris Seminatore: 11:41
Thanks a lot, Jim. Can everybody hear me? Okay. We’re good. Good, good, good. Currently, I’m. I’m down here in Mexico City visiting clients, and it’s also my wife’s birthday, so I apologize. The studio isn’t very optimal. My name is Christopher Seminatore. I own GetGeofencing. I truly appreciate this opportunity. And thank you, Brian. It’s a real pleasure meeting with you. What I want to do today is I want to tell a couple of stories and then hopefully bring everything together and discuss the different capabilities associated with geofence marketing. I just finished Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. It’s a really good book, and the first story I want to tell, I’m going to talk about, is from that book. If you’ve read it, please indulge me. It’s a cool story and it really touched my heart. If you take anything away from the talk today, it’s take this. It’s the most important. A stranger was walking down the street, and a beggar held out his hat and asked for change. And the stranger replied, I’ve got really nothing to give you. And the stranger asked, what are you sitting on? And the beggar replies, a box. The stranger asked, how long have you been sitting on that box? And the beggar replies, for as long as I can remember. The stranger asked the beggar to open up the box, and inside the box were several nuggets of gold. I found in marketing, you have to tell stories. That’s our job. That’s what we do. As Jim had stated, we work on the Smipli.fi platform. It’s a $1.9 billion platform. It’s owned by Blackrock. It uses the same technology that’s currently used by the military and police. If you want to do something you shouldn’t be doing, don’t bring your cell phone. I attended intelligence training at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Naval intelligence. Kind of like jumbo shrimp. Two words that shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. I was stationed at NSGA, Misawa, Japan, and then at Torii Station, special forces base in Okinawa. At Torii station, there were only about 30 of us sailors, and the rest were Army Special Forces. There were a lot of shenanigans. The Army and the Navy have a very, for lack of better term, a tenuous relationship. We had jokes. What are the best four years of a Ranger’s life? The third grade. In my Navy days, we wore headphones on our ears and we called them cans. And our job was to listen in and provide intelligence. From 1990 to 1992, I spent a lot of time in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. It started out as Desert Shield. Then it went to Desert Storm, and then when it went to Operation Hammer. I went over on the USS Long Beach, and I came back on the Lincoln. A couple of things about the Navy. Number one, recruiters lie. I never once made it to Australia, and there were no beautiful Australian girls waiting for me at the dock. Second, don’t be good at your job. You’re someplace you don’t want to be. I could be a weatherman in the Persian Gulf. It’s going to be hot and bad today and tomorrow it’s going to be hot and bad. It’s like somebody constantly blowing a hairdryer in your face over there. And did I mention they don’t sell beer? Between the room service, the food, and especially the staff’s attitude, I give the Navy about two stars and that’s being generous. Let’s get back to talking about technology, though. We used a very similar version of today’s technology to identify and locate people and platforms that we wanted to go and talk to. Once you can identify an active radio frequency, you can determine what kind of device it’s coming from and then triangulate the signal and locate that person or platform. It’s the same thing now with cell phones, except now you have cell phone towers, you have satellites, you have Wi-Fi networks making it much more precise, I believe. BlackRock’s technology is accurate within about 13in back in the military. It wasn’t too precise. You would have in a general direction, hoping the signals would get stronger the closer you came to the source. Sometimes you will find a skinny guy with a bag of rice and a jammed up M14. Other times you walk into a storm and then other times till there was nothing there. Here’s a little story. When I was in Misawa, Japan, we listened to common Russian military frequencies in Vladivostok. The collections division encountered two Russian sailors that were pushed to talk comms. We had world class rulings by a Russian linguist who would provide translation. One of the linguists, his name was William Maltby, but we all called him Buddha. Buddha was a very large and heavyset man, hence the name. I don’t think he could pass a physical to save his life, but he graduated top of his class at Doi or the Defense Language Institute. It seemed every ship had one guy of Buddha stature, and the reason for that was shellback ceremonies. During Shellback ceremonies, he is the guy that they would smear Crisco on. And then you have to go and eat the cherry out of his belly button. If you’re not familiar with what a shellback ceremony is, this is where the ship’s crew saves up rotting food and feces for several weeks in anticipation of crossing the equator. They then pour the contents into a gauntlet. If you’re not a shellback, if you’re a pollywog and you’ve never crossed the equator, they tie your hands behind your back and you have to run through this gauntlet full of rotting food and excavate. Did I mention that they beat you with shoelaces while you’re running the gauntlet. Anyway, at the end of the gauntlet, you had to get on your knees and eat a cherry out of a large man’s belly button. Buddha would be that man. But I digress. Getting back to the two very drunk Russian sailors who were apparently at a lighthouse, one of the sailors starts ramming the lighthouse with a bulldozer, screaming and cursing at the other sailor. I think they got into a fist fight. To make a long story short, we could triangulate the signal and figure out exactly where they were. It turned out that the Russian Special forces had a base there that had never been identified as Spetsnaz. We gleaned a lot of intelligence from that. And from operations to weapons to communications platforms. Where people go is the strongest indicator of their buying intent. If someone goes to a car dealership, chances are they’re looking to buy a car. If someone goes to a shoe store. Chances are they’re looking to buy some shoes. Now, if someone goes to a Nickelback concert, chances are they don’t have very good taste in music. The point is, the places that people go. Identify the people’s needs, their tastes, their living proximity in most cases, and a host of other variables associated with those people. And this is pure gold for a marketer. Geofencing has several tactics, but the underlying capability is drafting a digital perimeter around a physical location and collecting an audience of people attending that location. We do this through the location reader on people’s cell phones. If you’ve ever ordered an Uber or used Google Maps for directions, you’re using the location reader on your cell phone. Approximately 94% of the people have this turned on for convenience. On your iPhone, if you go to settings, then you go into privacy and security, you will see the location services at the top. Please don’t delude yourself by thinking that if you turn off your location reader affords you any kind of privacy. We are so much further down the path of George Orwell’s 1984 than anyone realizes. Let’s talk a little bit about geofencing tactics. Tactic number one is geofencing. We can put a digital perimeter around a physical location and capture the audience that’s attending that physical location. Once we’ve captured the audience, we can start serving them ads on websites or apps that the target user is accessing. This is accomplished by what they call programmatic distribution. Programmatic distribution allows us to cover approximately 90% of the internet. The only thing we don’t cover is social. As previously mentioned by Jim, if you want to run Facebook ads, you have to go to Facebook. Social media is what’s called walled gardens because they have their own advertising ecosystem. But we cover everything else from FoxNews.com all the way over to that meditation app that you use on a daily basis. The way programmatic distribution works is that whenever you access a website or an app, there’s an approximate 100 millisecond delay. And in that 100 millisecond delay, we have algorithms that bid on the available advertising inventory of that website or app. That’s how we get ads in front of targeted audiences. And additionally, when somebody goes home and docks their cell phone on a Wi-Fi network, we can now run ads on any device that’s connected to that Wi-Fi network. One of the questions you might ask is that if someone logs in from different places, how do we identify the Wi-Fi network that may be considered their home? This is addressed by cross platform analysis. Basically, if you’re logging into the internet every night from the same location and accessing websites and apps, we had an AI that could determine that this is most likely your home. This is also why the smokescreen of a cookieless future protecting your privacy is a sham. It’s created to increase the belief that you have privacy and protection. There’s too much money and too much control at stake for that. The advertising industry understands how important location is in delivering relevant ads to an audience that is likely to act on these ads. It’s a win-win situation. The audience gets ads promoting products and services that may interest them, and the advertisers optimize ad spending on people interested in their products and services. This is the least nefarious use of the technology. We can discuss things like a project MKUltra later if you want. If you don’t know what MKUltra is, please, I know I use it in a present tense. Look it up. MKUltra. Remember, advertising is the currency of the internet. It’s what keeps the internet free. It’s the same with television through connected TV. Television is just now an extension of the internet. Television is still king for everything from direct response to brand awareness. Now, tactic number two is addressable geofencing. This is for all the direct mail people out there. We can upload up to a million addresses on the platform. They’re put on an Excel spreadsheet and have four columns: address, city, state, and zip. What this does is it distributes impressions to those people at those physical addresses on websites and apps that they’re accessing. Imagine drawing little geofences around each address corresponding to county level plot lines, adjustable geofencing and direct mail have shown up to a 30% lift in response rates. It’s also incredibly useful for political campaigns. Another tactic of addressable geofencing is a curated audience. Say you want to find people within a specific area to make $100,000 a year female, speak Chinese and have a garage. We can do that. We have over 600 different parameters to work with that we can develop a profile in an area for targeted marketing. Now tactic number three is event geofencing. This is a great opportunity to reach audiences with a common interest. When people attend an event like a trade show or a concert, they show their preferences, commonalities, and basically what they like enough for support to get out of their houses and attend the event. A Trump rally will have a lot different of a crowd than a pride event over in West Hollywood. It’s best to use event geofencing to increase brand awareness among like minded individuals that may already have a predisposition toward your brand. One thing I can see from clients is that they underestimate the importance of brand awareness. I often get clients who want to skip steps and go straight to the sale. Let me ask you a question. If you have a choice and you’re buying either a Coca-Cola or an off brand fizzy brown soda like a Bob’s Brown Sugar water, which would you choose? Every major company, from Nike to Apple understands the importance of brand awareness. If you offer a service or a product, you have a brand. Getting back to event geofencing, we deploy a two pronged approach. We run a live geofence at the event, distributing impressions to attendees while they are there. The next time you’re at a trade show or a ball game, look at how many people are looking at their phones. The second prong involves capturing the audience, attending the event, and serving ads for up to 30 days after the event. Because of privacy compliance, we can only run ads to this captured audience for up to 30 days. I don’t know why, but those are the rules. We usually employ several tactics when working to increase attendance at an event. Take for instance the just recently worked with Golden Cage Warriors, which is a feeder organization for the UFC. They were putting on a San Diego show near the event with all the different military bases, gyms, especially jiu jitsu gyms and bars. We also geofence hard rock concerts in the area, you can get creative by applying different tactics to target audiences. Graham ended up selling out that show. Last but not least, tactic number four search. We can serve as the people in specific areas who are searched for key terms. This is a powerful tactic because there is an intent you will get good results whenever you marry an ad campaign with an intent. When we deploy search campaigns, we use search terms with similar interests. We just finished up with an Aaron Tippin concert in Nashville gym. We distributed ads to people that were searching for country artists like Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Jr, and we also used search terms for outdoor festivals. What to do this weekend? Similar things. I want to address an important point. If a client has a physical location like a store or an event, we can track people receiving ads who visit the client’s physical location. This provides our clients with a very precise ROI. We can also place a pixel or conversion pixel on a client’s website, specifying the desired action, and track conversions that way as well. The last tactic I want to talk about is retargeting. This is where we capture website visitors through a retargeting pixel. We don’t use cookies which are being phased out. We use a cross platform matching technology that I referred to earlier. Simply put, it uses scripts that run whenever a user visits a website to track them without using cookies. I spend a lot of hours talking about the different technologies that are replacing cookies, but they’re definitely already in place. What retargeting does is it distributes ads to people who surf away from the website to bring them back to the website. It’s a powerful conversion tool. And additionally, if we offer live chat and exit pop up windows to increase the conversion of website visitors. That’s about it for me. Hopefully you got what you paid for. If there’s any refund requests, please direct them to Jim. And if there are any questions, let me know.
Outro: 28:37
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.