Don’t Call it Programmatic | Robert Brill

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 Robert Brill, CEO of Brill Media, a media buying agency that focuses on precision advertising for business growth. The company has been honored 10 times across Inc. 5,000 and Financial Times 500. Robert is a member of the Forbes Business Council and Fast Company Executive Board where he writes about improving user experience, business growth strategies, data targeting, local advertising, and white label media buying. I love that those keywords are going to be on our website helping our SEO. Thank you for that. Additionally, he speaks about advertising, marketing, AI, and entrepreneurship to business owners across the country. Robert, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Robert Brill: Thank you, David. It's an honor to be here. David McBee: All right, let's jump right in. I have some prepared questions for you, but right before we started recording you said something really interesting. You said ... Well tell everyone what you said about your number one rule of selling programmatic. Robert Brill: Yeah. The first rule of programmatic is don't call it programmatic because everyone has a different perspective. A lot of people have different perspectives on what it is from the highest levels to the lowest levels. And if I'm selling, which I'm in the business of selling, I don't want to confuse people with terms that I think of one way, and you might think of another way away. And the moment in my business that was really important is when I realized I have to stop talking about jargon. I have to stop talking about things that I think will impress people. Because business owners, they want business growth. They don't care about programmatic or hyperlocal or CTV. What they care about is what does my accountancy and how much more money am I making? So moving away from jargon was very important for us. David McBee: So is that your advice to other agency owners is to dial back on the jargon? Robert Brill: It depends on who you sell to. A lot of what we do, we're a white label media buying firm for other agencies. So agencies across the country trust us to run advertising. Everything from making sure people don't get tuberculosis, to healthcare leads, to ticket sales, to consumer packaged goods and a home services, real estate, movies, a wide variety of things. And the commonality across those agencies and the people who work at those agencies is make the language accessible to everyone and that's what we do. David McBee: So not to put you on the spot, but how would you describe programmatic without using the word programmatic then? Robert Brill: I just call it display and connected TV and it tells me are ads on local sites because a lot of my time I'm on Zoom calls talking to people about how we can help them grow. And there are moments when people are like, "Yeah, I know what programmatic is." I'm like, "Okay, now I can talk to you in a different way." But even then, I'm never really sure what they think about programmatic and what they think it actually is. It's a complex thing and when you break something down to its constituent parts, it makes it a little easier for people to be on board with what you're talking about. David McBee: No, I agree. There's an education piece to it that's beyond when you sell SEO or SEM or social media, people just know what those are. And when it comes to programmatic, there's all sorts of intricacies that you have to dive into. So I like that advice though. Keep it simple. Remove the jargon. All right, so generally speaking, in this evolving world of programmatic, what are the strategies that your firm is using to stay ahead of the curve? Robert Brill: Yeah, so the structure of our team is we have a really talented chief operating officer and we have a really talented director of media. So the vast majority of our media buying ... When I started the firm, by the way, it was that old saying, "The architect and the janitor." I was doing everything from client services to running campaigns in the trade desk to collecting on invoices and all the things that were important to run a business when I was a one-man shop. We grow to a 25 person team and now we have people far smarter and far better than me at doing what they're doing, which is a bit of a hit to my ego, but that's okay. It's for the good of the business. So I checked with them, I was like, "What are the most interesting things that we're doing?" Because I like to talk about hyperlocal. I'm really passionate about hyperlocal. That's old tech. It's like eight years old and everyone understands that. I think the things that we do routinely is we're always meeting with new DSP vendors and data vendors. I think everyone probably does that. We're always testing new data sets. We're looking at QR codes and running QR codes in connected TV. That's good. It's a good way to connect across household data and devices. We're really interested in shoppable television. Like I recently heard from Roku, the idea that you're going to see an ad, you're going to click the okay button and it adds to your shopping cart on Walmart Plus or Instacart or something like that. That's fascinating. What's interesting to me is what's going to be actually accessible to both mid-size businesses. The IPGs and WPPs of the world, they're going to have things maybe six to 18 months before a lot of other people do. What I'm interested in is what can I go to my clients and say, "Look, you're spending $10,000, $100,000, $500,000 a month. Here are the interesting things that are relevant for you." And one of the challenges for us is always these really high minimum spends that clients may not feel comfortable testing because the vast majority of dollars still go to Meta and Google. David McBee: So do you have some good programmatic success stories where you were able to show the clients the ROI and really get those larger budgets out of them? Robert Brill: A hundred percent. So I think the most thrilling thing that we've done is we have this long-term ongoing ticket sales campaign where we're selling tickets to everything from Cardi B to Hugh Jackman and Kiss and everything in between, Cirque du Soleil is I'm sure in there. And the way we're approaching it is with dynamic ad creative. So if you've been to a page on Ticketmaster or Axis or one of those pages and you're interested in Cardi B for let's say the Crypto.com Arena, your ads are going to follow you and they're going to be dynamically retargeted to you for Cardi B. Another person's going to get the ad for Hugh Jackman. And the reason this is valuable is, number one, these are exceptionally low budgets. You're spending low thousands of dollars a month on advertising for any one of these venues, and you have to cycle through 10 or 20 or 50 different shows that are coming and going routinely. The value of programmatic is the operational efficiencies that we get. And so we use dynamic creative and we've been showing anywhere from 10 to 40 return on ad spend. And the 10 return on ad spend is when you have local shows for not a big venue and they're B and C acts like comedians that are good but not nationally known. But when you have nationally known artists, you're getting 20 to 40 return on ad spend. David McBee: No, I think that's so funny to hear that the classic, it's basically site retargeting at the show level, which is like you said, that's kind of old tech, but I always remind people when the cool stuff comes along, site retargeting really still has the best bank for the buck sometimes, would you agree? Robert Brill: But the dynamic component is what makes it so valuable because remarketing we can do all day, but how do you remarket for 50 shows? You don't want to turn out 50 different ads a month. That's ridiculous. But using a data feed, it's far stronger. David McBee: Gotcha, okay. Yeah, so that's the same kind of thing that a car dealership would use to promote specific cars on their lots and things like that. Yeah, I love that. Robert Brill: Based on inventory. And once you get the system down, it flows like a hot knife through butter. It's glorious. David McBee: Dynamic ad creative, something we haven't talked very much about on Simpli.fi TV so thanks for bringing that up. All right, so what would you say, Robert, is your superpower? Robert Brill: We take standard operating procedure very importantly. Look, when businesses go into the marketplace, there's a few commonalities about our business. Our business is going to make up terms that don't actually exist and we're going to call it proprietary. And that's one thing that agencies do that I think is fine. Some random term for a process for developing keyword lists or developing ... For example, we were talking to someone and it was like, what's our brand safety protocol for MFA, made for advertising publishers? And it's like, Brill Media Brand Safety Protocol, the MSP or the BSP, the Brill BSP. Okay, just made that up. It's an acronym, but if I really wanted to be that person, I would put the BSP everywhere. And it's just a name for a protocol that we deploy that are best practices for our business. And that's what I mean by operational excellence and really relying on the standard operating procedure. The other thing is we are so focused on ... We are very reflective on how we work. When we make a small mistake, when I say a small mistake, we thought we were going to deliver 60,000 impressions a day on remarketing, but we're only delivering 24,000. It's not going to make or break anything. It's not a big deal, but why didn't we know that? And we elevate that problem as if it were going to break our business because we want to have that operational excellence that any question you have, we already have the answer prior to you even asking the question. And we want to be able to do that from the highest levels of the organization to the lowest levels of the organization. We want everyone to be that smart. No gatekeepers here. Operational excellence is the other important factor that allowed our business to scale. And I think when businesses have challenges, it's when you take the easy things and you don't do it well. So you've got to grow with that operate. It's the discipline, it's the pain of discipline or the pain of failure. So we choose the pain of discipline. David McBee: Yeah, it's that real attention to detail that makes a big difference in the long run, doesn't it? Robert Brill: A hundred percent. David McBee: All right. Well, we're almost out of time. So I'd like to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have a podcast or a book that you feel has been instrumental in your success? Robert Brill: There was a period of time where I was listening to Grant Cardone and he has his book 10X, like 10X ... Something about 10X. I don't remember the title of it, but I remember I listened to it twice on audiobooks. And I really like that because as entrepreneurs and as executives with a lot of responsibility, we are pulled in a lot of different ways. And our spouses might say, "Well, you need more balance in your life." And other people, your friends might say, "Just get the bag, create success for yourself." And what's the right way to do it? And I thought it was really interesting to have someone like Grant Cardone who's done really interesting in real estate, talk about this sort of 10X velocity movement. To do things without balance so that you create massive opportunity for yourself. And I come across that because I have a five-year-old, he's amazing. I'm married to my wife, who love of my life, and there's this constant struggle of, okay, every minute that I'm spending after 6:00 PM is a minute that I'm away from my family. But then I think about the reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing, and I do want balance. And what I learned from that book is you don't actually get balance. You get a weighted scale. So I'm putting a ton of effort into my business so that we can grow dramatically so that maybe in the next five or six years, I can spend a lot more time with my family. David McBee: And what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Robert Brill: Yeah, so reach out to us, brillmedia.co. There's a contact us form at the top, or you could email me robert@brillmedia.co. Always happy to have a conversation and help out wherever I can. David McBee: Thank you, Robert so much for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Robert Brill: Thanks, David. 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.