Travel, Tourism, and Gaming Strategies | Chad Hallert

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Chad Hallert, Chief Marketing Officer at Good Giant. Chad is a 20 year digital marketing veteran and one of the country's leading gaming and tourism focused creative agencies with a global portfolio spanning gaming, entertainment, hospitality education and more. Chad has led digital strategy for multiple Fortune 500 companies, recognized as one of Direct Marketing News, 40 under 40. Chad currently spearheads marketing strategy for over 25 resort casinos across the US. Beyond driving digital transformation for clients, Chad educates aspiring marketers as an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Welcome to Simpli.fi TV professor. Chad Hallert: Thanks for having me, David. I feel like I need a British accent or something after the- David McBee: I know it's just the word professor, you feel like professor. Chad Hallert: That's awesome. Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. David McBee: I'm happy to have you here, and I'm excited to have this conversation about tourism and the gaming industry. So let's just jump right into it. Why don't you share what you think is the greatest opportunity for marketers within the travel and tourism industry? Chad Hallert: Sure. Yeah, it's a great question. I'm super passionate about it. Number one, travel in and of itself is a complicated endeavor, right? The customer journey for travel is fairly complex. Hotels, resorts, casinos, they often see the very tail end of that, which could be a room booking or ticket sales two to three days before somebody gets there. But the reality is somebody's been doing research for weeks and months, looking at a lot of different sites, getting a lot of different information. So the idea of omnichannel or customer journey focused campaign planning is essential. We find in reality, clients understand it, but they don't actually do it. And so where this comes to fruition with us, with clients, prospects, people we speak to, they get the idea. They've done the work of making sure brand standards are set, but what we see is there's actually a direct response team at the very bottom of the funnel doing paid search, maybe some website remarketing, focusing on sales, return on ad spend, return on investment, and the brand team is still kind of reporting that they used to in the 1980s. I mean, it's looking at eyeballs on a freeway driving by a billboard, which are they even looking at your billboard or are they on their phone if they're in the passenger seat? What is the actual value there? So there's this huge gap in almost different methodology in play where we think number one, that's inefficient, keeping even more money from shifting. Number two, it skips this kind of middle ground, which is really CTV and streaming audio, which kind of blends the best of both worlds. So it's a really strange environment in that there's this omnichannel acknowledgement, but when it comes time to do the work of how are we going to execute the campaign, how do we measure success at each point, and then how do we message across those channels? There's still a lot to be done. David McBee: So what is the trick to accomplishing that? What's missing? Chad Hallert: Yeah. I mean, part of it is culture, right? Part of it is culture. It is helping the clients, the prospects, their leadership, understand there is a buyer's journey. It's not a quick decision oftentimes to come to Las Vegas or come to a market. There's an exploratory period you can influence and gain market share. The other part of it is for us as an agency, we have to come with ideas. We have to come with this idea of, "Hey, an ad isn't an ad isn't an ad, it's part of a story." So we're going to come to you with three or four parts of that ad that tell a narrative from how great... Vegas is a great example from how great the destination is to how much fun the resort is and the brand experience to the amenities offered to a promotional element. And then we need to actually go further to explain how these different channels, Facebook, streaming audio, connected TV, give you the opportunity to kind of mix these advertisements and tell a story. So a big part of it for us is to culturally get some buy-in into this and then come prepared with an actual plan that could be implemented that the client agrees with and understands. And along with that is a measurement plan, how do we know if it's going to work? What's success look like? Are we going to measure foot traffic attribution? Are we going to measure ad engagement? What's the measurement for that ad and that position in the customer journey? David McBee: So let's role play just a little bit, if you wouldn't mind. Assume I'm one of your clients and I'm having a hard time making that connection between traditional media, omnichannel and digital. What does that conversation sound like if you could even have it in less than a few minutes? Chad Hallert: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to have in less than a few minutes, but I think we can tell it through analogies. We can also tell it through some of our experience. So an example is actually a recent campaign we ran for a casino in Las Vegas is a great example. I can't give any names away, but it's an independent resort in Las Vegas. We call it a boutique property. There's 2000 hotel rooms in a showroom, but for Vegas, that is boutique. There's many with 7,000, 5,000 rooms, fairly large budget. But again, for Vegas small budget. And they really were launching a new brand. They had three goals that were running in parallel, increase brand exposure and get more brand sentiment, drive revenue during the actual campaign period, and lift the average daily rate in the long term, influence kind of the ranking in all the casinos in Las Vegas. So part of the conversation with them was helping them understand that there is this idea that you've got to create some awareness, generate demand, and then capitalize onto that demand, and that there's different ways to do that on platforms. Google gives you a lot of copy to do it. Facebook is a blend of copy and imagery, YouTube, some of these video channels can create more emotion, right? You're not going to create emotion through a Google ad. It's really, really tough, right? Linear TV gives you a broadcast kind of a wide net, but not super targeted. So part of it for us was laying out a map where people are at, what they're thinking in that moment. Do they have any intent yet? When you see a TV commercial during a football game, there's no intent. You're just observing, right? When you go to Facebook, not a lot of intent unless you're part of a remarketing audience or something. But when you go to Google or one of those more user-driven campaigns, there's intent. So laying out the map of that journey, laying out the mind frame of the user during that period, and then lining up what messaging can look like, and so showing how somebody that's never seen that property before, heard of that property gets this first exposure and how they path through that over the course of weeks and months to conversion, they start getting it. The other part is we explain how we can test it, and I think that's where most CEOs, CMOs get excited because they hear a lot of agencies and marketers come in with all the sizzle, but they want to hear how we can do it. So what we do is we talk about, hey, there's ways we can place traditional media in certain zips in certain markets and not in other zips in other markets. And AB test it. David McBee: [inaudible 00:07:23]. Chad Hallert: Yeah. See if running this actually does a lift on everything else further down the funnel. So a lot of times the proofs in the pudding, so getting them to buy into it is one thing, but getting this idea of, yeah, we can actually test it over the course of 90 days and prove it or disprove it, give us that opportunity. David McBee: I love that. And do you feel like most of the clients are up for a 90 day test? Is that too long for them to spend their money on something that may or may not work? Chad Hallert: That's part of the conversation too, right? A lot of them will agree to a two week test or a three week test. David McBee: That's what I was thinking. Chad Hallert: Well, it is funny because you read a lot of case studies about campaigns promoting freemium app downloads where you download the app for free and then you may upgrade it, and they make money that way. Well, that's a knee-jerk reaction investment, right? But telling your wife to take time off work, packing up the kids, book an airfare, this is a pretty considered purchase. So we always ask for 90 days, six months is even better, and really even a test if it were to not go perfectly in 90 days, there's going to be a ton of lugging to iterate. Very rarely do you do these things and not have them work at all, right? It's a degree. So I don't think we've ever had a 90 day test where we walked away from and said, "Ah," sometimes it's 80% we expected, 20% new findings that we iterate on. David McBee: I think those are great stories. Do you have any just solid advice for other agencies who are working in the travel, tourism, and gaming industry? Chad Hallert: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of... Gaming is a little more direct response driven. I think hotels can be direct response driven, destinations that we've worked with in the past like the islands of Tahiti, Newport Beach, Lake Tahoe, where I'm at, they're a little more shiny object driven. So I think the one thing we always battle is, and I think we battle it internally ourselves, this desire to chase shiny objects all the time. I went and Googled before this just to get some knowledge going here. I Googled top media trends 2024, all this focus on AI. And we're using AI every day for copy editing, for research. But the challenge we see is most people in this space are leaving. They're not squeezing the orange full and getting all the juice out. An example I always give is every client we talk to, a prospect we talk to, we talk about geofencing, this idea that you can go online and tell an ad platform, "I want people with this intent," or you can geofence competitors that they're going to frequently and get in front of them. So we talk to the client, we say, "How are you geofencing?" "Yeah, we are." "Or are you geofencing like this? Are you geofencing with a third party platform that you could download device IDs as first party data and then bring them up into walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube?" "Oh no, we're just doing it programmatically." "Okay. Well, when you geofence programmatically, are you addressing those audiences and CTV when they get back home?" "Oh, we're not doing that." It's like anything. You can do it and check the list off. We will acquire new clients and we'll look at a Facebook campaign, and if there's a show they have, they're selling tickets to an entertainment interest group in Facebook. When we do it, we do that plus we match a CRM list of lookalikes like their best customers. Plus, we pull people that bought tickets to similar events previously. Plus, we're going to pull geofence people to go to other entertainment menus. So you can be on Facebook check or you can be on Facebook with four or five different audiences in parallel kind of throughout that customer journey. So again, it's this thing of Facebook check, move to the next shiny object or Facebook, "Okay, let's be a little more boring. Let's just squeeze every ounce of opportunity out of that channel before we move on to the next thing." So I think that's the biggest thing I see in travel and probably other industries too. David McBee: It just occurred to me while you were talking that there's probably a geofence around every single casino in Vegas. Would you agree? Chad Hallert: I'd be amazed if there wasn't. I mean, we're seeing geofencing on casinos. We're seeing geofencing where I live. There's a lot of warehouses and data centers, and they're looking for employees always. So we're now having HR departments geofence those other locations and putting parameters like they go in five days a week to get audiences to target for employment ads. So yeah, everywhere you go in Vegas, I would bet on that that it's geofenced. David McBee: Yeah. I always tell people, if you're going to do anything nefarious, don't take your phone with you. Chad Hallert: The kids have figured that out. My teenage daughter figured that out, but we're still learning. David McBee: You come home and her phone was in the drawer and she's out doing something she shouldn't be. Chad Hallert: I just left it, dad. David McBee: Okay. Yeah, that's pretty smart. All right, before we go, I love to ask all my guests, what is your favorite podcast? Or do you have a book that you feel has influenced your success? Chad Hallert: Yeah, so podcast... It's interesting. It'll probably be different than what you would expect, but I kind of moved away from super business focused and tactical focused podcast a while ago and really been now focused on optimizing things like motivation, how to switch between tasks, how to optimize the day or get the most out of the day. Because what you'd find at some point, it's not the technical skills, it's your inability to have a really productive day where you're not just grinding away. So for me right now, there's a podcast called Huberman Labs. Andrew Huberman is the podcast lead on it, but he's like a professor of neuroscience and ophthalmology at Stanford or a university like that. And it really varies from optimizing your day, like I mentioned how to switch tasks with an effective break in between to energy optimization, nutrition. It's really broad spectrum, but those things get me excited because there's only so much time in the day, and if you're a parent and you have a life, you're trying to balance that and you always get little nuggets from that podcast that let you be more effective and a little more productive. David McBee: Okay. Honestly, the whole reason I put this question in is selfishly, it helps me find amazing things, and that one is right up my alley. I'll be listening into that this afternoon. Thank you for that. Chad Hallert: It's awesome. It's on Spotify. It's good stuff. David McBee: Awesome. All right, well, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Chad Hallert: Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn, of course. I'm probably not as social as maybe I could be, but LinkedIn is always good. And then shoot me an email, chad@goodgiant.com. David McBee: All right, perfect. Thank you so much for being my guest today, Chad. Chad Hallert: My pleasure. Thank you. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.