Episode 99 - Chris Seminatore

Erik Martinez:Welcome back to the Digital velocity Podcast. Today we're talking about precision and marketing, what it really means and why so many companies still struggle to achieve it. Joining us is Chris Seminatore, Navy veteran and founder of Getgeofencing.com. Chris brings a disciplined no- nonsense approach to targeting and advertising. He's helped hundreds of businesses move away from guesswork and towards data-driven clarity. Chris has a straightforward, practical perspective that I think you'll appreciate.

Erik Martinez: Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Seminatore: Hey, thanks a lot, Erik. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's a real pleasure to meet you.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, this [00:01:00] should be a lot of fun. Geofencing, is a misunderstood advertising platform, so I'm really interested to get your perspective. But before we jump into that, why don't you give us the 4 1 1 on who Chris is and are you really Italian?

Chris Seminatore: My father was Italian. He served in the Marines. He was a real great guy. That's where I got the last name. It took me the fifth grade, learn how to spell it correctly.

Chris Seminatore: I went in the Navy for five years, that's where I became, familiar with the technology we're using today. Graduated from Miami of Ohio with a psychology degree. Currently I'm living down here in Puerto Vallarta Mexico. I go back and forth between here and Los Angeles about every other week or so.

Erik Martinez: That's awesome, man. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Chris Seminatore: What part of the country, Erik?

Erik Martinez: Just south of Kansas City. A couple years ago, just before pandemic prices went through the roof we bought 28 acres out in the country. Never lived out in the country before. It has been a learning experience and every snowstorm I realized, oh shoot, I really do need to get a snow [00:02:00] plow on one of my vehicles because we got like four inches the other day and my wife got stuck and we was sitting there like trying to manually shovel a 400 foot driveway. My neighbor had to come across with his little ATV and pull us out. Like, I've been here four years and I don't even have those tools yet.

Chris Seminatore: Did he give you that look when he had to pull you out with that?

Erik Martinez: No, he was super cool.

Chris Seminatore: People in the Midwest are good people though. Like I said, I'm from Ohio and there's a big difference between Ohio and California. I've lived in California for the last 35 years or so.

Erik Martinez: There is a difference. I lived in San Diego at one point and I thought those were some of the happiest people in the world. It's beautiful, it's sunny. It's it is a little, California ish, but it's not a hundred percent California ish.

Chris Seminatore: We used to be down to Chargers games down there. Right now the Chargers was in San Diego and it was like going to a Jimmy Buffett concert. It was a bunch of fun down in San Diego. I loved it down there. And I lived in Huntington Beach for probably about 12 years too. So Orange County.

Chris Seminatore: I did a lot of screaming and drowning off the 17th Street Pier, trying to surf. [00:03:00] I tried surfing and I never got good at it. I just don't have the coordination or skill that you need to surf. I don't have that. So I figured that out after several years.

Erik Martinez: Skateboards, roller skates, I can ski ish, but don't even try to get me on water skis or a surfboard. That would be a disaster.

Chris Seminatore: Erik, it sounds like me and you got a lot in common. I'm terrible with skiing too. Water skis, never could figure that out. Wind surfing, that's not up there. I'm still looking for my natural talents and hopefully one day I'll find them.

Erik Martinez: Let's talk about the thing we do know you have a talent in. Let's talk about this geofencing thing. One of the things I know you've been talking about is moving away from this broad, wasteful marketing towards real precision and bringing that military precision concept. You're not the first one I've talked to that has that background. One of my other, guests earlier this year, his name was Bill Rice, also was a military veteran also in intelligence. There's something there.

Chris Seminatore: Did he say where he was stationed at?

Erik Martinez: I honestly don't remember. I have to go back. [00:04:00] That was earlier this year, maybe six months ago. But a Great guy, great ideas. Definitely somebody you'd might be interested in following. He's got a good, great podcast too.

Chris Seminatore: I was stationed down in Okinawa, special Forces on Tory Station, and then I was stationed in Misawa, Japan 57th division direct support. I spent a long time trying to learn Japanese when I lived in Misawa and back in those days you had to have these little cassettes that you put on and that's how you would learn languages. I spent, two years every day trying to learn Japanese. And then when I got transferred down to Okinawa, they speak a dialect of Japanese that you can't even understand. It's called Hogan. And it's completely different from Japanese. It's completely different words, different everything. So, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't break out my Japanese down in Okinawa.

Erik Martinez: You know, it's funny 'cause we all think that, whatever country, because they're smaller countries, they're more cohesive than they are, right? There's all these little sub ethnicities and sub languages. It's really, really interesting. Chris, how did you go from [00:05:00] military career to geofencing? Just tell me about that story.

Chris Seminatore: Well, I attended Fort Devons, Massachusetts, to learn about, how to locate, platforms and personnel through, frequencies in the air.

Chris Seminatore: And, essentially what we would do is we use that technology to, go find people that we wanted to talk to. We used it extensively during the Gulf War. I did about two, three tours in the Gulf War. And, so then when I first got outta the Navy in 94, geofencing was illegal in the United States, you weren't allowed to do it.

Chris Seminatore: And then it became legal probably about 10 to 15 years ago, to use in the private sector for marketing. That's when I got hold of, simplify, which, they're owned by, BlackRock. It's a $1.9 billion, platform. I went through all the different platforms, ground truth, all these guys, and I looked at 'em and none of 'em made sense with the, technology that I was familiar with, but simplify did.

Chris Seminatore: I looked under the hood. I saw what they did. I saw exactly where they got the technology from being owned by [00:06:00] BlackRock. That's what makes that platform. It really does what it says it's going to do, and it's been improving dramatically in the last couple of years. That's how I made the transition from, going from the military to finding out that this new technology was currently available in the civilian markets and how it can be used to target and market to people.

Chris Seminatore: And what it does, it just creates relevant advertising. Like, say somebody's on a car lot, they're there to look at cars. Why not send them ads? If they're on a competitor car lot, why not send them an ad showing the different options available, offers that are available with, your competing car lot.

Erik Martinez: One of the things I find interesting about geofencing is that you can do that, but the ad distribution leaves something to be desired what I mean by that is, we've run campaigns over the years for some clients, so maybe we were doing it wrong.

Erik Martinez: So this'll be really interesting to learn, but, we could see that 90% of the ad distribution was on mobile. A lot of that ad distribution was showing up in gaming apps [00:07:00] and every time I asked a question of the platform providers, 'cause we weren't executing ourselves and we weren't working directly with Simplify, we were working with some other firms and say, can we control where that ad is delivered?

Erik Martinez: If I have a client that sells, cookies direct to consumer, right. Holiday time great little festive treat. And if I'm trying to geofence and I'm interested in cookies and then I go to my favorite cycling website and I see their ad, you could make an argument that it should be there because I have, I have an interest, but it's out of context for me.

Erik Martinez: And Maybe I'm just weird but I feel that isn't necessarily relevant because that's not what I'm looking for at that moment how does that work? What are your thoughts on that,

Chris Seminatore: Eric? That's a great point. Let me back up a little bit.

Chris Seminatore: If people don't understand what geofencing is, I'll start there and then get into the programmatic distribution of ads. Essentially [00:08:00] geofencing is putting a digital parameter around a physical location. We pick up information from the location reader on people's cell phones.

Chris Seminatore: It works the exact, we work on the exact same backbone that, Uber. does. So when you call it Uber, they know where to come pick you up. Once we have that information, we can start distributing ads to that person across any website or app that they visit. It's called programmatic distribution.

Chris Seminatore: We've got access to about 94% of the internet. The only thing that we don't have access to is like Facebook, Instagram, things like that. We call those guys wall gardens, if you wanna buy an ad from Facebook, you gotta go to Facebook to buy that ad. But we do cover the other 94% of, the internet.

Chris Seminatore: Everything from Fox news.com to Bob's house@baseballcards.com. And you brought up a great point about gaming apps. What we do for our clients, we block all the gaming apps. Because it it takes a while to figure out how to do that, but I figured it out. So what programmatic distribution does is whenever somebody brings up a website in an app, there's about a hundred millisecond delay.

Chris Seminatore: In that delay, we have, algorithms that bid on the available advertising inventory of that website [00:09:00] or app. It puts ads on websites or apps being accessed by the targeted user.

Chris Seminatore: Like I said before, I know what you ran into. And another point I wanna bring up is that when somebody takes their, cell phone home and a docket on their wifi network, now we can distribute ads to any device that's connected to that wifi network that includes laptops desktops, even television so, I think with a couple of tweaks, you would probably had a little bit more success with the campaigns. Some of the stuff we're seeing right now, we're seeing four times, industry standard as far as interaction with the ads.

Erik Martinez: When you're talking four times interaction, what metrics are you looking at specifically to assess the performance of the campaign?

Chris Seminatore: Well, industry average is usually about 0.1% click through rates and stuff like that. When we get enough data we can clear out locations that aren't working, websites and domains where we're not seeing any, interaction.

Chris Seminatore: We focus on the ones that are working and we allocate resources toward the websites, the domains, and the locations that are working. [00:10:00] Usually what you want to do with a geofence campaign, you wanna run it at least three months if you can, because the first month it's gonna be information gathering.

Chris Seminatore: We're gonna find out what websites, what apps are delivering results, what locations are delivering results. Once we get that data, then we can start allocating resources toward websites, apps, locations that are delivering results. And that's when you're gonna see the campaign start to rise. So yeah, what it does is it takes data because there's so many websites, so many apps, and, it just takes a lot to be able to figure out what's working and what's not.

Chris Seminatore: And what's wild about campaigns is something could work great for one campaign and it won't work at all for another campaign. And so there's a lot of different, variables associated with each campaign. Geography, websites, apps, types of service. If the company is any good or the business is any good, that, that's got a lot to do with it right there.

Chris Seminatore: So the, there's all these different variables you have to take into account with a brand new campaign. And then you just gotta start weeding out, weeding out what works, what doesn't, [00:11:00] and then go from there. By month three, you should be starting to see fireworks, to be honest with you.

Erik Martinez: So your first month, your, your information gathering.

Erik Martinez: Second month you're kind of like starting the optimizations and by the third month, you're start, you're really, really got those optimizations down because you have enough data. How much budget do you need in order for those campaigns to work?

Chris Seminatore: If you wanna do a small campaign like, say I don't know, you got a dog grooming service or something like that, you wanna do at least a hundred thousand impressions over a 30 day period that's gonna run you at 850 bucks for targeted display. If you wanna do video, you wanna start with about 1600 bucks a month.

Chris Seminatore: That's the minimums right there. And that's for small campaigns I mean, we work with some big hitters like Ashley Holmes that are doing 10, $20,000 a month. We work with everybody. One of the biggest things with our business is that we know how we like to be treated, and that's how we treat our clients. We want our clients to be successful. That's why we've currently got about almost 1300 clients we form relationships with them. We're very transparent with them. We show 'em what's working and what's not.

Chris Seminatore: [00:12:00] Then we make the changes, and hopefully the changes increase, performance. If they don't, we make more changes. We're very transparent, very honest to a fault almost.

Erik Martinez: I'm assuming from the materials I've read in prep for this discussion was that you kind of feel like people are wasting a lot of money in Facebook and traditional search.

Erik Martinez: Why do you think that, and why is geofencing a better option for them?

Chris Seminatore: Location is the strongest indicator of buying intent. When somebody goes to a car lot, they're looking to buy a car. When somebody goes to a restaurant, they're looking to eat, and that really shows their intent.

Chris Seminatore: So essentially what you're doing is you're losing using location to define intent of that user. And then if you can align your services with the intent of that user, you're gonna have a lot stronger impact on your advertising dollar. Like somebody's sitting there searching for a motorcycle, you know, Hey, I wonder what a, new Harley soft tail does.

Chris Seminatore: That doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna be in the market to buy a motorcycle. But now if you get a guy that's down at a [00:13:00] motorcycle dealership looking at motorcycles, he's got a lot more clear intent of what he wants to do. And so those are the big differences right there.

Chris Seminatore: With Facebook it's great for brand awareness but if you wanna get in front of an audience that has, you know, established a very strong intent where they're actually going to a location to buy something, that's who you wanna get your business in front of if you're in that product or service.

Erik Martinez: I've got two different questions. One is, when you start running these campaigns and you're starting your optimization process, gathered some data, what are you looking for?

Erik Martinez: Eric was standing in the middle of a micro warehouse and you serve him up a, a Nebraska Furniture Mart Midwest.

Erik Martinez: So, Nebraska Furniture Mart is for everybody's, it's like a, it's a mega store. It's got furniture, electronics, Home. It's a Berkshire Hathaway company and it's just this massive like 1 million square foot showroom with [00:14:00] furniture and appliances and tile and flooring and every kind of TV known to man and every kind of electronic device known to man.

Erik Martinez: Sometimes I get very overwhelmed. And excited 'cause I'm like, oh, cool toys. maybe Nebraska Furniture Mart is using a geofencing campaign to reach anybody going to a micro Warehouse to get 'em over their, their electronic section. What are you looking for?

Erik Martinez: You look and see that this device. Whoever's device it is, made it from Micro Warehouse and then subsequently walked into a Nebraska Furniture Mart how does that work?

Chris Seminatore: That's another thing other advertising cannot do. We can track people that were receiving ads, using Nebraska, warehouse as an example again, what was the competitor name?

Chris Seminatore: What was that? Micro Warehouse. We can tell if we picked 'em up in Micro Warehouse and that they physically went to Nebraska warehouse. We could do that. We can track it and tell exactly where they're coming from, where they were picked up in that targeted audience, [00:15:00] and if they showed up at our client's, brick and mortar location.

Chris Seminatore: Not, I don't believe any other type of, digital marketing can do that. We can also tell, like if we ran television commercials, say we picked up people at Nebraska Warehouse or whatever, and we started running television commercials, we can track when people from Micro that got picked up at Nebraska Warehouse went over to micro warehouse.

Chris Seminatore: We can track that too. So we can give you a very precise ROI if you have a brick and mortar store. Now, if you've got a website, we can also track conversions on it. Just put a conversion tag on there that's a big differentiator between what we do and what other people do.

Erik Martinez: What are the big goals that your clients are looking for? I imagine some are, intent based marketing, and you want to get in front of people who are in consideration phase, right? Right. Their shopping journey. But I also feel like there's probably just just awareness factor too.

Erik Martinez: Absolutely. You're in, Ashley Holmes community and a competitor, and then you walk across the street to a [00:16:00] competitor and Ashley's like, Hey, no, you were here. I'm gonna send you some ads. So you come back.

Chris Seminatore: Yeah, 100%.

Erik Martinez: What are the different types of Goals that people are shooting for?

Chris Seminatore: The objective ultimately is to get in front of the targeted audience. Let's use motorcycles for instance. Like you're a motorcycle dealership. And what you want to do is get in front of people that are actually physically going to other motorcycle dealerships you're not just sitting back searching about motorcycles, you're actually going out and look at 'em. And that right there is a prime set of eyes you wouldn't get in front of. That can be with any industry. We've got a campaign going on for eczema trials.

Chris Seminatore: We've got a demographic of people within a certain location that if they had children from six to 11 would be good candidates for these trials. We can target those parents and let 'em know that this trial exists and it's right in their neighborhood

Chris Seminatore: so that'd be an example of an awareness campaign that can really help people out. We've got a huge client that does, blood donation. There's certain, areas of the country like colleges specifically [00:17:00] that get paid for their blood. So we're able to, get. Ads in front of these people that would be very good candidates for blood donation.

Chris Seminatore: Funeral services is another one. We can get in front of people that, are looking at, making end of life decisions and things like that, and offer 'em information and options that they may not have been aware of by the different locations that they go to, including hospice centers, nursing homes, things of that nature.

Chris Seminatore: So I mean, there's a lot of different practical applications for this technology and, I'll tell you a weird story this was in Texas. There was a guy that, represented human traffickers he was an attorney I was like, how do you even make an ad for that?

Chris Seminatore: It was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. And the guy did gimme the creeps a little bit. I'm not gonna lie to you. But one of the weird things that we saw was that there was a lot of clicks on the ads out at this, truck stop way out in the middle of nowhere in Texas.

Chris Seminatore: And then we were track people going from this truck stop out in the middle of, I didn't even know how you knew how to geofence it, but we would track him going from there to his offices. This is in [00:18:00] Texas, and I was like, I don't really know what's going on. I don't know the people's name or anything like that, but there's a lot of activity going from this truck stop out in the middle of nowhere to this, attorney's offices, you know?

Chris Seminatore: So it's only bound by your imagination, which you can do. I mean, it really depends upon how well you know your business and if you know where your clients are at. If you do, we can get your eyes in front of them.

Erik Martinez: Let's pivot to two different specific use cases.

Erik Martinez: A lot of people in the audience that we serve don't necessarily have physical locations. They may have one or two, but they are, a lot of 'em are direct to consumer brands. Okay. National presence. No not necessarily a physical office. How does geofencing help somebody like that?

Erik Martinez: What are the options?

Chris Seminatore: That's a great question. Let me use the example of, we had, we current, we, we just had ended a campaign with this, client that makes, eco-friendly containers for fruits and vegetables. We, geofenced the Global Food and Produce trade show in Anaheim, California.

Chris Seminatore: We got [00:19:00] their brand and product in front of this trade show. And what it did was, in a very targeted fashion, put their brand in front of all these people that were attending this trade show and that they never, they never knew that these guys existed before, but we saw a lot of clicks on those ads.

Chris Seminatore: I mean, they were running 0.4, 0.5. Click-through rates because people were interested in these, eco-friendly, biodegradable, containers that they could put their fruit and produce in. That would be an example right there of somebody that doesn't have a physical location. But by geo-fencing this trade show, knowing that the attendees would have an interest in something like this, it really helped 'em out.

Chris Seminatore: It gave 'em a lot of awareness to a very targeted audience.

Erik Martinez: Trade shows are always an interesting one. I feel like that falls out of your, Hey, we need 30 days to get this to work. This is a three or four or five day event in a very specific location where, you know there's gonna be a bunch of people.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. In your market in that spot. How does that work?

Chris Seminatore: So What we do, Eric, is that we capture the audience attending that trade [00:20:00] show, and then we serve ads to 'em for up to 30 days after the trade show. And then we have to let 'em go, for privacy regulations.

Chris Seminatore: If you attend a trade show, we can send you an ad for up to 30 days after that trade show, no matter where you go in the world.

Erik Martinez: What is an ideal budget for something like that if it's a trade show? I used to go to the International Home Builder show in Vegas.

Chris Seminatore: Oh yeah, absolutely, man.

Erik Martinez: IBS and KBIS, right?

Chris Seminatore: Yep.

Erik Martinez: Combined is, about a hundred thousand people attending. So that's a very big show versus, a show I did, last year in Boston called namoa, which was, three or 400 people. How do you approach, budgeting for those different types of events?

Chris Seminatore: What you wanna do is look at an estimated attendance of the trade show, like the NAHP in, Vegas. That trade show is huge you're gonna have, about a hundred thousand people attend just a ballpark figure. How much you wanna saturate that market of a hundred thousand people is ultimately gonna determine your budget.

Chris Seminatore: When you're looking at a hundred thousand ads, you're looking at about a thousand people at any given moment accessing an ad or [00:21:00] not. Over a 30 day period, we do have AI that operates in the background and depending upon the person's behavior, is going to determine whether they receive an ad or not.

Chris Seminatore: Once the AI identifies a profile of somebody that has a positive behavioral response, like they click on an ad, then it's gonna go throughout the entire audience and try to find profiles that are similar to that one to increase behavioral response. So that's, that's the one way I know that you're gonna get to AI later on in the, show.

Chris Seminatore: But that's one way that we're using AI right now to increase behavioral responses. Getting back to your point, say, you got a thousand people, that's a hundred thousand impressions. How much saturation do you want to go, into a trade show? Do you want to go 30,000 people?

Chris Seminatore: Do you want to go 50,000 people? Then we can just expound budget through there. A lot of trade shows are smaller though. Say you've got 5,000 people attending a smaller trade show like the one you mentioned in Boston. That would run you probably about four Gs and you can capture all 5,000 people attending that trade show.

Erik Martinez: Gotcha. I think it helps to understand there are no [00:22:00] hard or fast rules. There's recommendations that get you, the best opportunity.

Erik Martinez: One of the geofencing tools that I know some people, promote is, addressable geofencing. Do you guys do any of that tell us a little bit about how that works. 'cause I think for a direct to consumer business, that's a real opportunity, right? They have a list of people that they want to reach.

Chris Seminatore: We've seen like a, say you got a direct mail list that you're sending direct mail to.

Chris Seminatore: We've seen about a 30 to 40% increase in behavioral response rates by taking the direct mail list and then putting a, adjustable geofence campaign with it as well. Essentially what that consists of is that you just get a, an Excel spreadsheet. It's got four columns on it, address, city, state, zip, and then I go ahead and I upload that onto the, platform.

Chris Seminatore: And what that does is it draws little geofences around each address that correspond with county level plot lines. Those people on that addressable list are gonna know who you are.

Chris Seminatore: And we can also run television commercials like that as well.

Erik Martinez: So [00:23:00] let's talk about that television commercial. 'cause that to me is kind of one of the newer, it's not new, but it's newer in the arsenal. You know, connected tv.

Chris Seminatore: We just now kind of got it right.

Erik Martinez: Well, I'll give you a great example.

Erik Martinez: I have a cell phone plan where my dad's on it. My dad's a Spanish speaker. He's bilingual, but he programs his voicemail in Spanish and I'd be sitting here watching something and an ad come up and it starts talking to me in Spanish.

Erik Martinez: I'm like, okay, either A, you're just going based on my last name, Martinez, or in the Verizon account, they know that he's got Spanish on his voicemail. We're linked, and it's probable that connection got made and you start serving me ads . We still get it once in a while

Erik Martinez: It definitely has gotten better, but I'm sitting here going as a marketer, I'm like, look, man, my parents didn't teach me Spanish, so I speak enough to, get me by and order a hamburger. But I don't speak conversational Spanish. I don't want to get my [00:24:00] ads in Spanish. And no device in my house is ever tuned to a Spanish speaking station.

Erik Martinez: I think there's still some challenges in terms of that connected TV experience. How does geofence activate, how do you activate all these different channels?

Chris Seminatore: Are you talking about CTV television advertising?

Erik Martinez: Yeah.

Chris Seminatore: Well, that's coming from the, advertiser to be honest somewhere along the line, somebody, probably, marked Spanish speaking on something that they filled out. And, the advertiser got that, corresponded that with the address. And then, that's why sometimes you're going to, one thing about CTV is that you can have two people sitting right next to each other, like neighbors, watching the exact same, television show at the exact same time.

Chris Seminatore: And they're gonna receive different commercials dependent upon whatever the advertiser was looking for. So all that really equates to is more relevant advertising. Like you're gonna have different tastes and different, wants and needs than your neighbor will. So what the, advertiser wants to do is match your [00:25:00] interest and taste with a product or service that you would find relevant.

Chris Seminatore: And that's all targeted advertising is, it's not this big spy privacy game or anything like that. The numbers come over. They're 247, letters and numbers. That's all we know about it. I don't know who Eric is, or I'm not spying on Eric, everybody's got these privacy concerns. They're not well founded. The objective of the advertiser is to get you relevant advertising. Something that you would find interesting or useful, or, something that you may want or need, and they want to get that brand in front of you.

Chris Seminatore: It's not being used for any nefarious purposes whatsoever. That's a whole nother discussion.

Erik Martinez: I grew up in the direct marketing industry and I remember this experience when I was young. I was like two, three years outta college. I was, the circulation manager for this catalog company. And I had a person call me.

Erik Martinez: I need to speak to the person who's in charge of the mailing list. Okay. That was me. She was down in San Diego. She had gotten one of our catalogs, and of course we were doing list acquisition and like you, we don't get [00:26:00] any of that information, right.

Erik Martinez: We contract with a broker who gets us a mailing list. We never see that address that goes straight to the data processor. They put it in the mail. And she was all over me about, invading her privacy in her mailbox i'm like, okay, we'll take you off the list that's all I can do.

Erik Martinez: But she read me this riot act the privacy concerns, as if you start thinking about. All the data that's out there. Could somebody track you individually if they knew where to look? I think the answer is yes. But at the scale we're doing this and how fast we're doing it, it's not realistic.

Erik Martinez: We don't have that level of information. I don't know where Chris lives. I could probably figure it out. Good. Today's day and age, right? I could probably figure out, well, you told me too. So now everybody knows where you live but we're not after that.

Erik Martinez: Right. We're after serving relevant ads or relevant products to an audience of people. So I guess the question [00:27:00] then is what do we need to do to educate our advertisers on how to approach their marketing programs. One so they can deliver with precision, which is one of the things you talk about a lot, but also to make sure it's relevant because I think one of the challenges with geofencing, like that scenario of, Hey, I'm in a car dealership and the competitive dealership, that's a clear cut. Yeah, I'm getting that ad because of this. But there are a fair number of advertisers that still take that spray and pray approach.

Erik Martinez: How do you address that with your clients?

Chris Seminatore: Targeted advertising is a lot better than non-targeted advertising. We've come so far in such a short time. Remember back in the days when they had just three, network television stations, you know, ABC CBS and NBC, and then, so the, the Dallas spray and pray at its best right there.

Chris Seminatore: They would just put the message out and, now it's become so much more, segmented audiences, with so many different, choices and [00:28:00] whatnot specifically with tv, I don't think people really understand the influence that advertising and TV has. I mean, the reason that you know all the brands that you know is because of advertising.

Chris Seminatore: Another point you can have the business that's the best at their product or service in the world, and then you can have a very bad business that has great advertising. Guess who's gonna win that race?

Erik Martinez: The bad business.

Chris Seminatore: There's a reason for that. People really underestimate the influence and impact that advertising has. Even when you don't think you're seeing the ads, you're seeing the ads, you're just registering subconsciously and you're gonna become more and more familiar with them as you see that brand more and more.

Chris Seminatore: And people like to do business with things that they're familiar with, and that's what makes, advertising so influential. It is probably one of the most important pillars of business. If you're not advertising and you have a business you're not gonna be around for very long, and that's the honest truth.

Chris Seminatore: So what we want to do is take that advertising dollar that the business has and get the maximum impact out of it by getting in front of groups and individuals that it's relevant to, [00:29:00] honestly, I don't wanna see a commercial on feminine hygiene products.

Chris Seminatore: But, you know, if you give me a commercial on, a motorcycle exhaust system, I'm like, ooh. I start perking up, I start paying attention a little bit more. If you can remember, 'cause I'm probably a little bit older than you, Eric, but if you can remember back in the day, some of the commercials that you would watch, you're like, why am I even watching this?

Chris Seminatore: It just has no relevance to me whatsoever. And then you turn off your brain to it, this at least gives that opportunity to the business or service, to get in front of an audience that is relevant to them. That's the name of the game right there, is relevancy

Chris Seminatore: It really is. You know, I hope I answered your question.

Erik Martinez: I think you did. And I think you've made a really good case for. Why geofencing is more precise than spending money on Facebook. And yet, I think if you have, an advertiser who is gonna come in and they've got, three buck, three buckets of advertising paid search, Facebook, and geofencing, I think they're gonna go in that order.

Erik Martinez: It depends on a brand. I do see some brands that, spent a heck of a [00:30:00] lot of money on Facebook versus paid search. We eventually see them switch because, paid search to a certain extent can be a lot more precise as well than the Facebook ads.

Erik Martinez: The use of ai, all of these things are getting more precise. So let's pivot into that conversation. How does AI impact, I mean, you mentioned a scenario earlier where it's looking at some intent behavior. Tell us a little bit about how AI is helping in the geofencing advertising industry.

Chris Seminatore: Essentially with ads, I want to differentiate between paid search and ads paid search. You type in a question, it gives you an answer, you click on it, boom, there you go. With advertising, it's a lot more, it can tell a lot more of a story.

Chris Seminatore: The colors you choose, the images you use, the story you put across, you can really bring a lot of awareness to the type of brand your business is represented by. They're in the same sport, but they're two different, games, getting back to ai, AI is getting [00:31:00] stronger and being able to identify through the actions of a targeted group. Like say, we geo-fenced a trade show. And now that AI is taken in to account, that whole audience that's there and what it's going to look at the behaviors of certain individuals in that trade show.

Chris Seminatore: When I say individuals I'm talking, 247, number and letter label, basically. And what it's going to do is watch the behavior of that label, and then if they have a positive behavioral response, they click on an ad, then what it's gonna do, it's gonna start distributing, ads to people that are closer in profile to that person because it's got a bunch of different points on that person.

Chris Seminatore: So as it does that, it's gonna get better and better at being able to take a limited advertising budget and get it in front of those people that have the greatest propensity to have a positive behavioral response. So that's how AI's being used in our fields right now. And it's getting better and better at it, to be honest with you. And the advertising is getting more and more [00:32:00] effective. That's one case use of it as far as AI goes I don't know if I'm correct with this or not, but it seems like to me, like Google just essentially took from keywords, you know, like pay per click and all that. They went from keywords to prompts and now what's a prompt?

Chris Seminatore: Do a prompt's got a lot more words in it. So now they can sell these prompts or these phrases for, and have a lot more of them. I think it's just a genius move by Google.

Erik Martinez: But you know, I go back and forth 'cause I have a love hate relationship with Google, with the long digital digital marketing.

Erik Martinez: You know, using their platform sometimes isn't as straightforward or easy as it should be. There's lots of nuances to how you pull and push the buttons and then pull the levers to make paid search work. And I am not that practitioner, right, that I've got people who do that for me. But we see how things are changing.

Erik Martinez: And one of the things that is concerning to me about AI and advertising in general, I was [00:33:00] just having this conversation this morning, is that I think with this advent of advertising through AI searches or conversations Google has been moving more and more to what we call the zero click search.

Erik Martinez: You know, you're not clicking through to my site, you're just reading stuff on Google and the AI overviews and their AI mode are like that right now. They're serving up links. And eventually you're gonna serve up sponsored links, right? Attribution is going to be really, really difficult because if you're spending money on TV advertising and you're spending money, on some radio advertising and you're spending some money on direct mail, at some point someone's gonna initiate a search or a conversation through their phone or device.

Erik Martinez: But what I actually think is gonna happen, Chris, [00:34:00] is I think that we're gonna be talking to our phones or any device and saying, Hey, I want x, in this price range with these specifications, go find it for me and it, and you're gonna have an agent that's gonna go out and shop on your behalf and return some results.

Erik Martinez: And so when you now disconnected the user from the purchase to a certain extent, and the advertising in between. Right now I see the ad, I have a behavior and I go into, a website or I walk into a store that's pretty clear cut behavior.

Erik Martinez: But when I'm sending out an agent and asking it questions for things I feel like I need, I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing back towards that broader base. Spray and pray advertising to a certain extent, and maybe there are some advertising mediums that [00:35:00] make sense. I feel like direct mail is one of them, and you have convinced me in our conversation, I feel like geofencing might be one of them as well, because you're connecting an actual user to something they're doing, serving up an act, but you still may lose the causality of conversion.

Chris Seminatore: Absolutely. Eric, you bring up a very good point the thing that I think is gonna be the big differentiator is the establishment of brands. Like if I go to Sachs Fifth Avenue and I buy something, it's a lot different than going to Walmart and buying something.

Chris Seminatore: And I think that's what. Businesses are gonna essentially evolve more into is the establishment of brands. Like, like if I say Mo, you know, if I say Harley Davidson, you know, I'm talking about a motorcycle. If I say Ford, you know, I'm talking about, a car or a truck. So I think that's going to cause businesses to be able to differentiate their products and services through the establishment of a brand.

Chris Seminatore: And a brand essentially is how something makes you feel like a Rolex makes you feel a lot different than a Timex does, and I think businesses are gonna have to be very nimble [00:36:00] and utilize that brand differentiator in their favor. And the only way that they can do that is through advertising.

Chris Seminatore: Now, I understand what you're talking about, and I listened to Elon Musk talk about that too. He said that a phone's not gonna be here. Five years from now. But essentially what you're gonna be able to do is just tell it and it can bring any video that you can think of anything that you want. It's gonna be right there on that, phone.

Chris Seminatore: Right now I just found out that there's this huge, thing under the hinx. It, they, they just found it a little bit ago. Have you heard anything about this?

Erik Martinez: No.

Chris Seminatore: It's a huge labyrinth that they found under the sphinx, made out of a metal that they can't identify. And when I say huge, I'm talking, hundreds of thousands of feet.

Chris Seminatore: And it's a huge labyrinth that's got, detailed, columns underneath of it. Nobody knows what it's going there. Nobody knows that. The metals that's on top of it. Some people are thinking that it's in a big TikTok tic-tac shape, and might be a spaceship. So there might be a spaceship underneath the sphinx right now as we talk.

Chris Seminatore: Yeah, you get that information, you know, 10, 20 [00:37:00] years ago. How would you even hear about something like that? It's amazing to me the leaps in technology that I've seen in this lifetime so far. I get excited the more I think about it.

Chris Seminatore: I think it's an incredible, learning curve that we've got right now. We're dealing with technology that is far beyond anything that could be, imagined, we're gonna find out, brother.

Erik Martinez: I'm all in on this technology. I know there's a lot of people who are worried about the nefarious sides of the technology. I tend to choose the optimistic view in time we're gonna be able to do some incredible things hopefully within my lifetime, we're gonna see people on the moon, people on, you know, in the asteroid.

Erik Martinez: Well, we're gonna see people on Mars because the technology's enabling us to do those things. I think that's good for humanity and, and the potential of species. We have a lot of problems to solve before then here's the last question for you before we wrap up.

Erik Martinez: If you're new, maybe you're a seasoned advertiser and you're, looking at your 26 budget. Remember a lot of the people we're talking [00:38:00] to are direct to consumers, they don't necessarily have physical retail stores. Some of 'em do for sure.

Erik Martinez: What's one practical step they could take next week as they're working on their budget to try geofencing?

Chris Seminatore: Call get geofencing. It depends on what their objectives are, what they want to accomplish.

Chris Seminatore: Do they want conversion on the website? That's a whole different animal right there. Who's their target audience? What's their demographic profile? All this has got to be taken into account first and foremost, what are their KPIs?

Chris Seminatore: What objectives do they wanna accomplish? And then with that, we kind of reverse engineer and work backwards from there. Geofencing may be a strong component but I always encourage, our clients to have more than one marketing channel. Maybe Facebook works for you for now.

Chris Seminatore: Whenever somebody works on social media or other types of campaigns, geofencing is a great synergistic marketing channel it's really dependent upon their KPIs geofencing is a good fit for anybody's marketing channels that they want to establish.

Chris Seminatore: 'cause you wanna really get in front of that targeted audience as much as you can. You want 'em getting [00:39:00] familiar with who you are, what your brand is. You wanna drive 'em to your website so they know who you are. And then you want to retarget them too we include retargeting with all of our, campaigns and essentially what we're targeting is when somebody, goes to your website and they surf away from it, we start serving them ads again to bring them back to your website and to keep top of mind.

Erik Martinez: Sounds like great advice.

Erik Martinez: Chris, we're a little bit out of time. Appreciate you coming on the show. I had a lot of fun. You, you've got a great business model and, you've opened my eyes to some things that I didn't even realize were possible with geofencing.

Erik Martinez: So I think thank you very much for sharing knowledge. Is there anything else you'd like to leave the audience before we close?

Chris Seminatore: No, that's pretty much it, Eric. We covered all the bases and I really appreciate the opportunity and the platform to do so. I know that the earlier experience, a lot of people had that same experience with geofencing when it was in its infancy and all the stuff was just going out to gaming apps.

Chris Seminatore: Those days are over for all the campaigns we do, we block all the gaming apps. It goes on to, significant premium, websites and apps. Believe [00:40:00] it or not, I didn't think people really responded to, advertisements on apps, but they do.

Chris Seminatore: A lot of people are like, I play chess just about every day on this little app that I have, and I always look at the ads. I'm like, Ooh, what is that? So. Don't discount them, but the other gaming apps and stuff like that you might wanna discount that would be used to my kids and things of that nature.

Chris Seminatore: It's got a lot more relevance now and it's really starting to come into its own as far as effectiveness. If a geofence campaign is run correctly, try to give it three months. We go month to month with our stuff 'cause we, don't like to be locked into contracts and we don't require our clients to be in a contract, but try to go three months with the geofence campaign if you can, and then you're gonna start seeing results.

Chris Seminatore: When you get a targeted audience and your brand gets familiar with that audience. People are a lot more apt to do business with you, then run video, man, that's a big thing right now.

Chris Seminatore: What we're seeing right now is we've moved into a direction where we're doing video creation for our clients I love it. I love working with people that do it. Essentially our clients can do is give us a script, a little 30 second script, and then we'll bring it to life for em make it happen.

Chris Seminatore: And, we do that [00:41:00] for free right now. We're gonna start charging, probably pretty soon. We've probably ran about 20 to 25 campaigns where we've developed videos for 'em and we're getting a real feel as to what works and what doesn't. And video is so much more effective because you can tell so much more of a story.

Chris Seminatore: And then the way that we run these video campaigns. First we'll feature 'em on CTV in front of that targeted audience. And then we're bringing 'em down to desktops and laptops where it's clickable so people will be able to interact with them. 'cause now they got the brand awareness, now they're bringing it out where there's an interaction.

Chris Seminatore: Now they're familiar with that brand through a video story, and then they go straight to the website. A business is established if they're running video campaigns, you can trust them, for the most part there's a certain, what do you call it, when a business has got to the level of video, they're trustworthy?

Erik Martinez: They've been doing it for a while. They're investing some money.

Chris Seminatore: Absolutely. If there's any way that you can get your business to do video, do it, man. We're seeing results going through the roof, with video.

Erik Martinez: I think that's great advice. Well, Chris, thank you so much for all the fantastic, fuel for [00:42:00] thinking and using this, very unique form of advertising. I know I learned a great deal today. If somebody wants to reach out, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Chris Seminatore: GetGeofencing.com Schedule a free consultation with you. We're sit, we'll show you the platform, we'll show you exactly how it works. We're find, we wanna find out what your KPIs, your objectives are and then go ahead and match a relevant, marketing channel we treat people like we wanna be treated. Very transparent, very honest.

Erik Martinez: Awesome. Well, thanks again. I really appreciate it. That's it for today's episode. Thanks for taking time to listen in and have a fantastic day.

Chris Seminatore: Hey, thanks a lot, Eric. You take it easy, brother.

Narrator: