Targeting Multicultural Audiences | Lasana Smith

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Lasana Smith, founder of GAROI Media, a full service advertising agency designed to offer local, regional, and national clients customized marketing solutions. Lasana has more than 15 years of marketing, sales, and digital media experience from companies, including Columbia Records, MTV Networks, Ogilvy & Mather, Groupon, YP, Accelerate Digital, and the Miami Herald. She also holds a degree in marketing and international business from Florida State University, as well as a master's in Communication management from the University of Southern California. Her mission is to help clients grow by leveraging the latest technologies and techniques to smartly engage the right audiences. Lasana, thanks for joining us on Simpli.fi TV. Lasana Smith: Thank you for having me, David. I appreciate being here. David McBee: Well, I'm probably feeling a little more grateful than you because I've been chasing you for over a month now. You're an incredibly busy woman, so thank you very much for taking time to be on our show. Lasana Smith: Yes, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. David McBee: All right. So in preparation for today, I did some research and I discovered that you embrace one of my favorite core values, and that is the importance of a positive return on investment from advertising campaigns. And that's actually what your business name stands for, right? Tell me about that. Lasana Smith: Yes, so GAROI Media, the GAROI is an acronym for Get A Return On Investment, and that is exactly what you said. One of the principle tenants of our agency is that we want to make sure that when clients work with us that they get a return on their investment. So that return isn't always financial, sometimes it could just be in awareness, it could be in traffic. There's so many different ways that clients look for a return on their investment. But at the end of the day, whatever it is that is their goal and their objective for their campaign, we want to make sure that they meet and exceed it. David McBee: I love that. And a lot of businesses say that they want to get ROI for their clients, but you have kind of a secret sauce, don't you? What is it that you do that's kind of unique? Lasana Smith: One of the main things that our agency does that's really unique is research, to be honest with you. Because a lot of different agencies, they just go off of what other agencies have done before or what sounds good or what they think just makes sense and it's very intuitive. We do have some of that intuition as well, but we're extremely research-based and data-driven, which is one of the reasons why we love working with Simpli.fi as well, because we're able to connect with your team and your team is able to help bring us in and give a status so that we can get in front of the main target audiences that we need to get in front of for our particular clients. David McBee: And specifically, you guys go after multicultural audiences quite a bit, don't you? Lasana Smith: We do. So a lot of our clients tend to go after different multicultural audiences. We live primarily in Florida, but our agency is national and here a lot of our clients go after the Black and Hispanic market. And so we definitely specialize in that area. I think it's important to note that Black in particular is not a monolith, neither is Hispanic. So in the Black diaspora you have African-American, you have African-Caribbean, you have actual African, so there's a lot of different areas in that. And here in Florida, in the African-Caribbean space, that also even breaks down further into the Caribbean market, but then there's a Latino-Caribbean market, and then there's also the Haitian-Caribbean market, and they are separated out because they speak Creole and French, which most of the other Caribbean islands do not. And so that's a major breakdown. The same when it comes to the Hispanic market. They may all speak Spanish, but the dialects are completely different. And so there are times where we've done campaigns in different dialects of Spanish just to make sure that we're able to relate and resonate with the audience that our particular client wants to get their message in front of. So, for example, in South Florida it might be more Cuban and Venezuelan and Argentinian Spanish. However, in Orlando and Central Florida, it might be more Puerto Rican and Mexican Spanish. So you don't want to have a advertisement, let's say you're doing CTV and the person speaking in the advertisement is speaking in a Cuban dialect Spanish, but you are targeting people who live in a space that are mostly Mexican and they are mostly Puerto Rican. That's not going to work, that's not going to resonate with that audience. So it really is very important, I would say crucial, to get as granular as possible with the advertising. And that's one of our other secret sauces actually. David McBee: Is the granularity just on the creative side or also on the targeting side? Lasana Smith: Absolutely on the targeting side as well. Because again, if we're able to specifically pinpoint our message to that particular audience, that's what you want. So one of the reasons why we love working with Simpli.fi so much is that we have the ability to do that in that way. We literally can say, I want to go after Mexicans in all of Florida with this particular type of income level. And between what you have with the addressable Geo-Fencing, you're able able to put together those sorts of audiences and get our message exactly in front of our ideal client. Or not even our ideal client, but our ideal customer or the audience that we're looking to get in front of. David McBee: That's super cool. That's really cool that you're taking so much of, it's almost like a surgeon's approach. Lasana Smith: Yes. Well, that's what it needs to be these days. I mean, if you look at advertising across the board, it's highly customized. I mean, whenever now we are seeing ads, especially programmatically because of what we're researching, whether it's contextual or search, they're always pulling information from our IP addresses, and they're serving us ads that they know is most customized for what we are looking for, what is specific to our needs. And essentially, I think it's great because I don't necessarily have any pets, so if someone is serving me ads that's about dogs and cats, that's not going to make any sense because I'm not going to be buying any pet products anytime soon. So it's important that people receive ads that really resonate with what's important to them. David McBee: I feel the same way about shampoo commercials. Lasana Smith: Yes. I'm sure you still do some shampoo on your hair, I hope you're not just using soap. David McBee: All right. Well, this has been awesome. But before I let you go, do you have a book that you'd like to recommend to our viewers? Lasana Smith: You know what? My favorite book actually is, a very old school book, but it literally is a book that I constantly reference and it is How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. That book absolutely changed my life, and it is something that I always go back to some of the principles in that book when I do my advertising, because it's hard to persuade people if you don't understand what it is that motivates them or what it is that gets them excited, what it is to get them to be your friend. You have to win them over first before you can persuade them. And so that's a book that I use very often, and the tenets of that book has become part of my own personal principles. David McBee: I love that you recommended that one. It's one of my all-time favorites, and the older I get and the older the book gets, I notice fewer and fewer people reading it. So I'm so grateful you chose that one. Lasana Smith: I love it. It's literally one of my most favorite books ever. David McBee: Awesome. Awesome. Well, this has been one of my most favorite interviews ever. So thank you very much for being on Simpli.fi TV. Lasana Smith: Thank you for having me. Again, it's such a pleasure. I really appreciate being here, and I appreciate our partnership with Simpli.fi. So thank you for having me. David McBee: And thank you all for joining us on Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee, be awesome. And we'll see you next time.