EP:18 Are Interactive Ads Taking Over the Advertising Industry?

Transcript

Are Interactive Ads Taking Over the Advertising Industry?

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Alex Ivanoff  

Welcome to Mission Control, where we give you step by step instructions on how to take your eCommerce store to levels only a rocket can reach each episode, we'll be interviewing an expert in the eCommerce industry that is going to give you simple actionable advice on how to attract new customers, retain them and build a brand that you are proud of. This show is brought to you by the makers of RocketCart, an eCommerce services and solutions company. Alright, welcome to the next episode of Mission Control. I am your host, Alex Ivanoff. And today I have a good friend of ours as our guest, CJ Oltman from BannerWave, thank you so much for joining CJ, super excited to have you. It's great to be here. Awesome, man. So tell us a little bit about you know where you're from, where you're calling in from, and what do you do?

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CJ Oltman  

Sure. So I'm calling in from Chicago, I live actually right outside of Chicago on the border of Forest Park, Oak Park area. So it's about 15, 20 minutes west of the city. And I focus on doing interactive advertising and interactive experiences for brands. So that's essentially creating experiences that are intelligent, personalize, and allow the user to engage with them to create a result that's specific and unique to them.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, it's very intuitive and unique, to say the least, just from seeing your work, we've definitely seen the the very creative and unique nature of the work that you guys have done for pretty large brands. And we'll definitely get into that. So I think a lot of people listening are going to see some value in the kind of new ways of thinking in terms of advertising that you guys have done for DTC brands. So just tell us a little bit about before we get into that, like, tell us about your background, you've been in design for I think, almost 15 years, right?

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, so I graduated with a design degree is called Visual Communications from Northern Illinois University, out here in Illinois, so the DeKalb area, and from there after graduating, you know, they teach you everything that you can go into when it comes to design, such as, you know, branding, print, all those things, obviously, during that time, you know, web and digital was getting bigger, and that's obviously where a lot of the value and you know, the investment was for the industry. So that's where I kind of went to and found, you know, my passion, and absolutely loved, you know, bring things to life, you know, having them come to life almost instantly, you know, when you're building and coding things rather than, you know, for something like print or you're doing some type of, you know, production type of work or environmental work, it's, you know, it takes a little bit longer to actually see your, your beautiful work come to life. So that's what found what got me so interested in doing digital and starting to create those experiences.

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Alex Ivanoff  

It's funny, they use the term bring to life, because typically people think of bring to life, it's like, oh, I have an idea. And now it's on paper. But literally in the literal sense, you know, your ideas come to life in that a lot of the ads you guys run are very interactive, and animated and feel lively, right? It feels like a different experience than a typical just seeing a static image or even a video. It's a it's a unique, innovative mixture of everything, and it has life behind it. So I'm sure when people you know, check out your site and check out the work you guys have done, they'll know what we're talking about. But let's get to the basics here. So you know, for those listening, obviously, there's a wide variety of mediums and channels to advertise on and variety of campaign types and types, whatever you want to call it. What does BannerWave specialize in? We talked about a little bit and just tell everyone, what exactly is a banner ad because I think that's, from my perspective, always been thrown around as this very vague term and people have never really understood it. It's easy to say, oh, there's a Facebook ad, or an Instagram ad or YouTube ad, or Google or email marketing, ad whatever. But banner ad can be used, I think interchangeably, is that correct?

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CJ Oltman  

Somewhat to a degree, I mean, really, their display banner ads are display ads. And so when you hear about programmatic display or programmatic advertising, you know that usually talks about display advertising, those are the actual banners that you'll see on websites while you're browsing, things like that. So, you know, that's kind of what we focused in to start and, you know, I'll tell you, it's, you know, the banner and display advertising space has been plagued since the beginning because no one knew how to use it, right. And they abused it and, you know, the market and the channel still hasn't recovered from that. So, you know, even today and me as a designer, you know, someone's just like when we started thinking about or seeing the opportunity in this market. You know, me as a designer, I was like, banner ads, you know, display ads like this is beneath my skill level. This has been like anything that I would do on to be creating these beautiful websites and apps and things like that. But as we got more and more into the space, we saw, you know, how much failure there was you throughout the years in this channel, and then also the opportunities to bring a lot more value to the channel, and how many brands and businesses were under utilizing their media, both their media buy, and they're also their creative that they put into market for it. So hopefully that answers that a little bit.

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Alex Ivanoff  

No, it's perfect actually leads right into my next question, because you're talking about how, you know, things used to be, and you know, how things are now. And I had a similar experience from a user and consumer perspective, with banner ads, I remember, I was 8, 9, 10 years old going on, like, you know, AddictingGames.com, or just seeing banner ads for like, the most random things, right? Everyone knows the early internet days, tabloids products, like games, I mean, we still have some of it, you know, spam stuff, but just remembering that ad experience to be genuinely awful. And, you know, a lot, a lot hasn't changed, but a lot has changed. You know, that was 20 years ago. So I guess, aside from BannerWave, you know, you know, putting their best foot forward to do some innovation here. What do you think has changed in the past 20 years with with the level of innovation and creativity among banner ads?

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, so you know, banner ads started out in Flash, the Flash ads, yeah. And so, you know, that's actually where BannerWave started, we saw the opportunity in 2015, all the browser's stopped supporting Flash. And we knew that the industry and brands, advertisers were going to be scrambling to translate their Flash ads into HTML5. So BannerWave was essentially just like, oh, we see this opportunity, let's corner the market and generate some business. And it turns out that company ended up outperforming our current agency by 3X the revenue in its first year. So very, very lucky timing and things like that. But what that led us into is we, we, like I was saying, we saw how broken it was, you know, people didn't like banner advertising, because it slowed down websites, it, you know, was distracting from what they were focused on, whether it was you know, doing an action or finding information. You know, that's why banner or ad blockers came out so that people can block these experiences. So because of the abuse, and the poor practices that we're used to creating these experiences are these banner ads, they just became a nuisance to the advertising industry and consumers. And, and we're still dealing with that. And that's kind of what BannerWave is doing is that we're trying to, you're utilizing banners to start because we're ahead of the technology right now. banners and display ads are the only channel that we can provide an interactive or playable experience in the first step of the funnel. And so what's great about the that is that you're able to provide that memorable experience something more personal, interactive, and fun, right in that first step, to get them to converting, you know, by that second step, so you're not going down a larger funnel or taking, you know, different types of communications to find what they like. So with that, that's something that is changing today, you'll see rich media ads now that are more, you know, interactive, more. Actually, I'm sorry, can we go back to that question?

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, I was just asking, essentially, if you want I can repeat.

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CJ Oltman

No, I was gonna say just phrase the whole question again. And then we'll come back to it. I went on a tangent.

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Alex Ivanoff

So I guess, looking back at how awful of an experience that was, you know, 20 years ago, in the days of early internet, can you talk about what has changed with banner ads in the past, you know, 20 years?

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CJ Oltman  

Sure. So banner ads had started out in Flash programming. And that's kind of where BannerWave has started. In 2015, all the browser's started, stopped supporting flash. And we knew that the market was going to be scrambling to get their Flash ads into HTML5. And so through that process, we ended up seeing, you know, how underserved the market was, and all the opportunities there. And that's where we started creating these more in depth and unique experiences that enabled brands to connect with their consumers in a meaningful way.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, that's, that's really awesome. It's exciting to hear. We've talked a lot, you know, before today, offline, and it sounds like just from talking to you, it sounds like it's really important to take that context of the platform and the placement, where that banner is going, where that ad is going into consideration when creating that idea, or designing it and making that playable experience. And I've seen this, especially with some of the bigger brands, you know, that you've worked on, GameStop comes to mind. Can you talk about that? Like, what what goes into that process?

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CJ Oltman  

So yeah, normally, when we work with a client, they come to us and we try to figure out, you know, we want to figure out what their goals and KPIs are for the campaign so we can make sure that we're going to create an experience that's going to support that. And then on top of that, too, normally will ask if there's any type of market, you know, information that they're looking to get. So for example, we had a client that was offering training and they had three different ways they could do it, you know, in person. They could do it on demand, or they could do it, you know, online live and So with that, they want to figure out what types of learning or which way of learning that their customers were most interested in or their clients. And so we created an experience that allowed people to look at the different options and then go through that call to action to decide which type of learning they wanted to move forward with. And so by creating that experience, we're bringing that additional value to them by getting these insights that they can use across other marketing efforts. Now, for a company like GameStop, you know, it was it was a little bit unique for them, where they wanted to create an ad that they can show the current products and sales based on the geolocation of the user. So it will be an ad experience that can be used across all their different locations across the US. And so it's a single ad that uses dynamic content that pulls in different products, information and pricing based on the Gamestop that you are nearest to. So you know, providing people with value relevant products and getting them to go in store buy online,

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Alex Ivanoff  

is fascinating. So it seems like it's just the the mindset here is, let's provide as much value in terms of like a learning experience or an interactive experience. So that that ad that you see on the side of you know, Yahoo.com, or wherever you're going is not so much distracting as it is valuable and interesting and worth clicking on and playing with. Is that right?

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CJ Oltman  

Sure. Absolutely. And it's something to the degree where like, you know, the banner ads that you see today, they're either a static ad, or what we call storytelling animation in which the banner animates, it's a passive experience. And you know, then it just ends on the end frame. And the issue with those is that users aren't seeing the whole experience of the whole communication of the banner, they're only gonna see a little bit of it, or you know, what's shown at the end frame, so what we do is by providing interactive ads, they will play on their own if no one engages with them, to show them the mechanics of the ad. But once they engage with the ad, they're actually able to, you know, experience it and make it unique to their own needs. And so, you know, an example of that would be, you know, say, if you booked a, say, if you booked a trip to Napa Valley or something like that, and instead of just getting random ads for different wineries that you might like to go to, maybe this ad comes up, and it says, Hey, we noticed you're going into Napa Valley, let's figure it out if you're a Napa traveler type or something like that, where you choose the different types of wines, you like different regions, things like that, within the ad, and when you get to the landing page, it's already built you a tour guide for your Napa trip based on the information that you provided. So you get like a purely valuable experience and resource based out of almost a two step interaction.

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That's awesome. So there's really, this is a very creative thing that requires a lot of like end to end brainstorming here, it seems like creativity generally doesn't really have that limit. So it seems like there's no limit to you know, the things that you can do in terms of how to provide that value.

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Right? Well, right now, our creativity is limited by the file size of display ad. So if we have a file size of 200k. And, you know, standard and so that's essentially, you know, what we have to work within and that's the struggle and the bouncing that file weight is almost an art within itself. And that's what's made us so dangerous in the advertising industry, because we, you know, have hand coded these experiences to start and then built our own internal applications to streamline and make the building of these experiences more efficient. So now we're able to kind of build these at a much faster pace, at a lower file size and get a lot more value of the ad. And so a lot of people right now are using third party ad builders like Adobe Animate Google Web Designer, you know, whatever that may be. They're creating these ads, but they're again, just static, or they're animated storytelling ads, because there's so bloated with file weight, there's nothing that you can do with them.

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Yeah, it I'm happy you brought this up. Because let's say I'm a I'm a brand and I'm looking to run like some creative thing. I already have some success in advertising my brand starting to really take off but I want to, I want to get creative with you know how people see me, I'm really careful with my brand. You guys have done some really creative stuff for really big brands, Coca Cola, Nintendo, PetSmart, all these, we've mentioned GameStop. And maybe I go to, you know, an ad designer and they say, you know, your idea is not going to work. Like if you're trying to do display ad and the file size is too small for that. Then they come to you and you say oh, you know, we can make it work. Like we've done this in the past. What would you say to them? Like how do you how do you get them to see like, oh, you can press this? You know?

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It's interesting because it really there is a balance between the creative and development of this experience. As a creative you have to know what you can create that will be within 200k So when we're using things like, we want to use less imagery, maybe more SPGs, or illustrations, because they're a little bit less in file weight, looking at different ways that we can optimize to, you know, so if someone has an experience, and they say, Hey, that's, and that's a lot of the time that happens, these brands will come to us, they're like, Hey, we designed this ad, can you guys build it, and we're like, well, that's not gonna fit in 200k. And it's just not a valuable ad, because you're just animating, you know, it's a passive animation, and you're telling them one thing, rather than allowing them to, you know, make the banner about the user put the user at the center of the experience. And so that's where I think it differentiates us a little bit, because we do, it's almost like bringing humanity back in the advertising, you know, just pushing products or services, you know, blatantly, it's doing it in a way that's putting the customer at the forefront and the ads being a servant to the consumer. So by doing that, we're able to create, and think of unique experiences that fit within that file size that are still valuable, beyond what can be produced in the market. That seems that

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Alex Ivanoff  

I am a sports business guy and this reminds me a lot of like, general managers of sports teams trying to play within the cap space of the limits, and then find people that are like, you know, you can pay them and get more value than what you're paying them, right? And, you know, put together the best team possible. Sounds like a lot like what you're doing with the file size space and trying to make something super innovative and valuable. Funny.

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CJ Oltman  

Now, that's right, that's just right now, because you know, that's display ads. Again, no, I think I've mentioned we're, you know, we're ahead of the technology. So right now, the display ad space, banner ads are the only space that we could, or only channel that we can make paid channel that we can make these experiences happen. No, social media advertising does not have that yet, none of the social platforms provide any type of interactivity within their ad experiences, you know, it's images, videos, or text. So as we move into next year, in the coming years, we're likely going to be seeing these social media companies. And I mean, for sure going to be seeing these social media companies coming out with playable or interactive ad experiences, that you'll be able to experience it the right way within social advertising. And maybe that that, you know, recent resurgence of interactive and have that experience in a social media platform can help benefit, you know, display advertising and banner advertising, because it's been so poorly managed and maintained.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, change the standard, almost. Why now though? Like, why you Facebook, for example, have been around since 2004, and has been really running ads for probably 12, 15 years? Why? Why would, for example, Facebook just now be catching up to changing the experience.

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CJ Oltman  

So I'd say for a social media platform, a lot of it has to do with privacy, especially when you're collecting this information or making it interactive, certain brands, depending on what you're doing, I mean, that people are a lot more, you know, their private about what they want to share. And so because of that, and they could see what you know, obviously, yeah, you know, IOS updates and things like that.

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Alex Ivanoff  

The GDPR, yeah.

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CJ Oltman  

Right. So we're seeing a lot of, of, you know, loss in third party data and looking at how we can bring that back by creating first party data that we can utilize, and through the interactions of an ad. So I think, you know, for Facebook, or you know, any of those large social media platforms, they had to get the advertising platform set first in the ad units, and just to get that going the algorithms and stuff, it's a lot to do. So doing passive experiences was probably, you know, phase one, enhancing how they are managed, how their traffic, all that stuff. But I think now that they've kind of reached the point where they need to push the creative, they need to push the value of the ads themselves within their platform, or it's going to get, much like the banner ad industry was it's just passive advertising annoying. And people don't want that in there, especially when they're going to a social media site where they want to maybe, you know, it's their escape from, you know, work or life for a second where they get to catch up on friends see what's going on, and all that good stuff.

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Alex Ivanoff  

So do you say this with certainty, like, Okay, this is definitely happening, and they're already working on this? And, you know, we just kind of have to make that assumption, or is it kind of like a maybe still, like, I'm trying to No, they're,

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CJ Oltman  

they're definitely, I am positive that they are working on that, that they have plans in place to launch, you know, some initiatives as we move into 2023, 2024. It's just a matter of when that happens. And you know, who's going to be, who are going to be the first brands that actually start investing in this new type of social media advertising?

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Alex Ivanoff  

Sure. So in other words, As back to your point about privacy and data, what you're saying in layman's terms is that, in recent times, these platforms have had less data than they historically have. And so in order in an attempt to kind of have more access at that first party data, just getting more data on their users, you know, for like, we'll take your Gamestop ad, I, for example, again, there was that slider of looking through the different games. Is it like, are you seeing a future where if you go through a banner ad, and you're taking that slider, and going through the different games, Facebook can collect data on like, which game you stopped on, in which game, like you ended up clicking on, you know, I mean, like, more interaction data.

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CJ Oltman  

Right. And I think that interaction and engagement data is what's going to be the most valuable because we're able, instead of trying to, like, track where people have come from, like, oh, okay, they went from Facebook to your website, and we can attribute it back to this or they didn't buy and so we're gonna annoy them again, over here with the same ad or, you know, whatever that may be, it actually allows them to provide collect information a valuable way that allows the users to provide that information based on their interactions and engagements, that they are doing themselves, not just something like you're watching someone what they do, and then doing something based on their interactions. It's like, you know, I am I have interacted with this, I provided you my, my interests, you know, information, whatever that may be. And I'm expecting some sort of result based on that. And it's an it's kind of an expectation type of thing. It's putting you in control of your information, how you engage rather than taking.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, makes sense. Interesting. I'm looking forward to it. I mean, as a user and an advertiser, I think it's it's super important that, you know, we're always innovating on the experience. I want to I want to talk about the market a little bit. You know, a lot of brands, I would assume most of the brands listening in the masses probably don't think about banner ads as their first means of advertising, it seems as if, especially lately, it's just let's go to Google search, and just overall, Facebook or meta ads. Why do you think that is?

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CJ Oltman  

I think, because the banner ad space and display advertising has been so plagued, you know, since the beginning, because people use so many ad blockers, because, you know, the trafficking of these ads, and the way that you know, even websites, and publishers implement them into their website, it's, there's so many factors that can cause you know, display advertising to kind of fall apart. And it starts with, you know, the creative and media teams, the traffic is teams right in the beginning of the project not being aligned or being siloed into their own departments. So, you know, all the way to, you know, how the ad is served. And then you know, how it shows up on the actual publishers website, you know, there are so many intricacies to each of those moments that if one thing slips, the experience is bad. And I think because of that there's a lot more consistency by using these social media ads, and standardization. That is keeping the integrity of the ads on the platform. And also making sure to a degree that they are manageable. So you can see if you don't want to see this ad again, or less, or post like this. So the trying to bring that value and control to the user. So it's just, it's not there with display advertising.

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Alex Ivanoff  

The standardization.

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, the whole channel is a rehaul.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Sure, sure. And is, are we only talking about Google, because I know there's plenty of ways to run a display ad. But

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CJ Oltman  

you know, anytime display programmatic display is basically, you know, Google, you can run them the Google display ad network. And that's just running through Google. Or you can do more programmatic, which is, you know, it's Google display, and all of these other publishers, all these other networks that you can be interacting with, essentially. So that's, that allows you to basically have a lot more value in a lot more eyes, and publishers that you can engage with.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah. Okay. And you're saying that, that lack of standardization is kind of all across the board.

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CJ Oltman  

It's all across the board the way you know, publishers and websites implement the ads to the different ad types and requirements for each.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Now, going back to the question about why more brands aren't doing this, do you also believe that there's some sense of there's a factor of false beliefs that you know, based on all these common discussions around ad blockers and spam ads and stuff that they they think like assignment worth my time I don't want to get into that, you know, and then turns out like, you know, a conversation with CJ and like, Oh, you know, this is we got something special here. We can actually do something with this.

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CJ Oltman  

I think it's when we start showing it how we approach these different you know, advertised and how we approach these different challenges that brands are having in terms of how to reach their markets. And then coming up with the solutions that are more unique, you know, interactive, personalized, they start, it opens up a little bit more, because though now they start realizing, oh, we can't do that in Google Search, you know, paid search, advertising, paid social advertising, display ad space, the only space that we can do it. And, you know, it's also making sure that you're trafficking, trafficking those experiences correctly to make sure that they're valuable, and also getting the engagement that you that you want. So an example of that Cruzan Rum came to us, they had like a banner, like find Cruzan Rum. And so they're basically trying to get people to purchase their different lines of rum, or different rums in their in their line. So we built a campaign that allowed people to see not only what they could create with it, like what type of cocktails can you create with the different lines of Cruzan rums, but also kind of made into a fun game. So it was a Plinko game. And basically, they dropped the coin down and go to a cocktail and tell you how to make it. Play it again. Or you can go to the website for more recipes. And then the cocktails would switch out every time. So instead of just saying hey, buy some cruise and rum. You know, this is one of the run right before summer. So it kind of nodding their head or head to summer buys being outside with your friends.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Playing playing a game. So

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, so it's really getting that whole experience in there and getting people excited about summer like, Oh, I'm going to be planning this party. I look at this cocktail, it's great. I'm gonna write this down in my book, I'm gonna go grab some, you know, Cruzan rum, so I can make this this weekend with my friends.

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Alex Ivanoff  

That's awesome. Next summer, you might want to create a version with cornhole just like you hit a cornhole and get a certain cocktail. It feels great.

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CJ Oltman  

I'd love to be angry bird style with the on the phone, but we're gonna need those social networks to, you know, get on their game and start releasing those. Those new ad units.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, hey, man, I mean, I'm sure we'll be having a, we'll definitely have you back when that change happens. And we'll we'll talk about what's possible on the other platforms, and other placements. Speaking of which, so as brands look at this whole decision of what to do in terms of getting their name out there. We've talked about a few of them. But what are some of the other ones that we haven't mentioned in terms of advantages, disadvantages, pros and cons of Banners versus other places?

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CJ Oltman  

Well, I would say, you know, paid advertising is one thing, but I think when you're starting brand, a starting brand, you have to focus on organic too. And so I think content generation, in parallel with paid advertising is critical for any brand to start, you have to start creating content, putting it out there to get people interested in your brand product service, and then get them to want to buy allow you to be kind of a leader in the space and providing that information, resources value on whatever you're selling. And then while you're doing that, using paid media to be able, because organic, you know, that takes time to be able to get up and get in front of people's eyes. So you want to get that started, so that you can make headway on that. But paid media advertising allows you a way to get in front of some eyeballs much more easily and faster than you would you know, focusing on organic and kind of taking that slower route. So having, you know, both of those, those pillars in your campaign are going to be really, really important. And, you know, obviously, starting starting out with something like search, because search is where people go to, you know, they're there, they're searching with intent, so they want to find information, they want to buy something. So search is always great from that perspective. And then utilizing, you know, social media, you know, display and, you know, other third party data that you can use based on interests, you know, where people work, their job titles, things like that, to be able to or even geolocation, you know, whether like, say we've done things where, you know, an event is happening somewhere, one weekend, and it's around a similar, you know, industry of our client, and we mucked around that event for those three, two or three days and, you know, bringing up a nice group of new clients for them. So, it just depends on the way that you target and your way of thinking about, you know, you don't just always go the standard route of just okay, my campaigns up I'm going to do display Social Search. That's it, you know, find your way to engage with people, you know, more uniquely, and even we were just talking, we know that you guys, you know, have some gym clients and things like that. And so, now we're talking about ways where we can get one of our clients products out into your gyms hands and get people engaged. So, you know, think about guerilla marketing and things like that in ways that may be, you know, not as mainstream but could be very effective based on how you do it.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Sure. Are ya? So let's, I mean, to piggyback on that follow up, let's, let's do like a small simulation, let's play like a game of life for a DTC brand. Pretend you're relatively new, maybe you just started within the past, I don't know, 12 months, you have some you had some organic sales and word of mouth, whatever. And you're looking to scale you have some money, you maybe have an investor to start advertising with? Where do you get like, how do you get started? Knowing what you know.

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CJ Oltman  

So normally, what I would do is, you know, you, you, you have an advertiser that you want to start with actually some sorry, can you repeat that question? One more time?

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, no worries. So So let's, let's pretend you know the in the game of life and do it simulation here. If you're, if you're a direct to consumer brand, you just got started in the past year. So you have some traction, some organic sales, word of mouth, maybe a couple 1000 social media followers, but you're really looking to scale it and you have some money to spend maybe an investor, you know, knowing what, you know, where do you get started with advertising and paid spend?

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CJ Oltman  

So I guess it'd be figuring out again, you know, we always start with goals and KPI we normally do like a comment or a campaign brief to start, we ask them a little bit about their business, about their goals and KPIs for the campaign who the market market is like, what are the actions we want these users to take? After they click the ads? You know, what are the pains and challenges of these users? What are, you know, factual or emotional reasons that will make them want to buy or we want to engage. So getting a download of all that information, and then, you know, looking based on that, creating, basically a tactical plan based on what they provided us to figure out what channels are going to be the best specifically for that brand. So will depend on the brand, what they're selling the industry, things like that. But essentially, what we'll do is, you know, we suggest doing a digital campaign brief, getting that tactical plan put together, that also comes with projections on what you'll see in terms of estimated impressions, you know, cost per click, clicks, things like that. So you can get a general idea of what you should expect, you know, based on the market value right now, and then putting that into market actually creating the assets and the creatives, and then putting that into, into the media.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Okay, and and you're you're looking at specific channels, specific strategies, or looking to test everything, you know, what's the direction there?

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CJ Oltman  

So yeah, specific channels, obviously, if you're starting, and you need to generate awareness, outside of your organic content generation, I would start with awareness campaigns and search campaigns. So for people searching, you know, obviously, you know, the intent there. And then also when they're on different platforms, say like social media, YouTube, things like that. And maybe they're more for fun, or, you know, whatever that may be having that retargeting or remarketing about that, and another different ad for you know, this is, you've already engaged with an ad once or seeing the ad one. So what should that second ad be in that that, you know, consumer journey? And how can we engage with them at that point? So making sure that you have kind of steps into where your consumers are at that point, what they know about the brand, and how we can we? How can we engage them even further at that point?

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Alex Ivanoff  

Okay. Now, let's say you're at one to 3 million a year, and you're starting to get a lot of traction, and it's time to start brand building, getting unique and really finding that, that creative, that unique creative differentiator between competition, you know, other products in the market, whatever. What's the strategy now.

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CJ Oltman  

So, you know, Norling, something like that, that's when you start having more money to be able to do more interactive ads, like what we're talking about, and interactive experiences overall. And that goes from the ad experience all the way to the landing page. So really having that immersive, you know, an engaging experience that allows you to create an ad that, you know, has value, whether that's, you know, a gamified experience, it's personalized, intelligent, that brings you to a landing page or a web experience that allows you to collect more information so that you can start doing this, you know, better segmentation, you can start doing more personalized ads, different things like that.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Okay, makes sense. Yeah. If it's, you're really digging deep here, you're going very narrow with your brand ideas and, you know, educating the consumer, does anything change when you get to 10 million a year, eight figures a year?

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CJ Oltman  

Well, that's when you can start being more of the visionary or innovator and, you know, at that point, I would suggest in some, what we do with a lot of our clients is, you know, look what's being done in the market right now. Where are the gaps? How can we engage with consumers in a different way that makes them feel important and valued and you know, all of that so we're really doing a deep dive into the market, what's been done and how we can engage those consumers, or target market in a way that's valuable and meaningful.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Fair enough, it's super helpful for you know, anyone in regardless of their status.

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CJ Oltman  

It's easy to talk about a high level, obviously, once you sure have a brand and have a market, then you start getting more into the nitty gritty on, you know, where the gaps, lie, challenges, opportunities, things like that.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, I want to talk about you specifically, and as well as your team, from a, you know, from a creative standpoint, and you guys are so good at what you do. What's the secret sauce? Like, do you? Do you guys use certain tools? Do you have a certain way of coming up with coming up with ideas and then building them? You know, what are the things that are indispensable to your job?

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CJ Oltman  

We do have a process for coming up with ideas and putting them together in terms of how we approach a product, look at the market come up with these, you know, more interactive type of, of ideas. But a lot of the things too, and I think I've mentioned this before, is we've actually built a lot of our own internal tools. So outside of doing, you know, advertising, interactive experiences, when things like that we actually built our own apps and all that. So we built them for ourselves, we will be you know, eventually releasing some of these to the market to be able to help advertisers and marketers.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Sign me up for the beta.

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, absolutely. We sure will.

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But you know, outside of that, it's just the general stuff. And the project management systems obviously indispensable. We personally use Monday.com. You know, anything that helps you streamline what you want to do, you know, CRMs that can send out, you know, drip campaigns and, you know, keep your prospects aligned, so that you can stay on top of everything, easily proposal software for digital signatures, you know, the standard stuff, but anything that's more unique that we need, that doesn't have a quality product out there a product that's priced in a way that's valuable for what we need them, we'll just build it on our own.

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Really? That's awesome.

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Yeah, it's, it's nice to have that ability. And it just kind of goes hand in hand and, you know, building products and apps for, you know, the services that we provide, and then, you know, seeing the bigger picture of how it can help advance the market and the industry as a whole.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, so you're the one of the few companies that are not bullshitting when you say, Hey, we have our own proprietary system or software or, you know, you're actually genuinely telling the truth.

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CJ Oltman  

You're damn right.

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Alex Ivanoff  

That's awesome. So what's the biggest challenge with BannerWave right now? I know, we talked about the changing landscape of the market and the, you know, the market at the ad tech, right, but what's what are you guys facing now?

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CJ Oltman  

I mean, the history, you know, like, we were talking about the history of Yeah, of display advertising, you know, the just played channel, getting changing the perception of that changing, you know, essentially how that entire channel is going to work and grow and engage. But also, you know, not being, you know, being ahead of the technology, not having those opportunities on social platforms, you know, connected TV, other things like that, which we are seeing those come more into market. And then to just the, the education as a whole, a lot of people just don't know about this stuff. And so, as soon as we go on calls, you know, when people hear display ads and things like that, initially, they're just say, I know what the market is, I know what we can do in that space and aren't really impressed. And I don't blame him because, you know, like I said, when I got into this, I was like, banners are beneath my, the quality of work that I want to do, but sure, once we get on the phone, and once we show them what we can do in their market and with their product or service, you know, you see the light, the eyes wide and the lights goes off. And it's you know, it changes the game for them.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, man, send them this podcast. I'm sure they're gonna have more education. Now. There will be way more educated after listening to this. I'm already learning a ton. Without giving too much away and respecting confidentiality. Could you talk about your big biggest success with a banner campaign for a brand or like one of your biggest successes?

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, so for? Yeah, so what we'll do is we'll say was for a beverage company, a larger beverage company with different brands and things under it, we did a campaign for them. That helped them personalize labels for a create your own bottle, essentially. Okay, so you'd be able to create your own personalized label. And that was by far one of our most successful campaigns, you know, rate rose, the Engagement Rate by over, I think was like 400, 500% and Click Through Rate, probably by over 1300%. So, incredibly valuable campaign. And again, it's just showing that and providing that experience right within the ad. So they don't have to leave where they're going or what they're doing to get that value. Because then you're missing an opportunity.

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Alex Ivanoff  

So the experience was literally you see the you see the ad, and you're, you've maybe a water bottle, and it's like, has the paper on it and what you could like, type in your name and kind of like dynamically place it or how did that work?

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CJ Oltman  

So it would be something that, it was a more complex label, but you can start it within the ad, and then you continue it on the website. Okay, so it was actually something that they would be printed out and put on your own bottle. So you have like your own personalized special, you know.

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Alex Ivanoff  

I got you. Cool. Okay, cool. That's interesting. Nice.

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CJ Oltman  

Another one was a campaign we did for Spalding in the NBA, it was a it was actually called the Nickname Generator where we served up 3 of 16 questions. So 3 random questions out of 16 that they choose. Yeah, and each of those 3 questions, it'll generate them a random nickname. So this is where the True Believers campaign, talking about just how you know, you know, coming down, being coming from nothing, and being one of the greats and, you know, all the inspiration kind of behind that. And so what you do is you answer these three questions, and that generates 1 of 2100 different nicknames, allows you to share it across social media, things like that. So it was a campaign that just kind of compounded and, you know, really expanded with that social integration,

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Alex Ivanoff  

I'm sure very, you know, something like that, like, some of my good, I'd say, like, it was kind of cheesy, but you obviously, to get the returns that you did, it must have aligned very well with the community of the NBA and the fandom, right to say like, Oh, I'm so proud that I'm gonna share this and it goes viral, like, that's, you guys must have done an amazing job that sounds like it's, it was really cool.

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CJ Oltman  

It's just fun to like, generate your own nickname and share it on social media. And, you know, it's, you know, if people can easily go through it multiple times, and it really got people excited and engaged, and got them into all the other resources, you know, all the all the different products that they can buy. And then also, they had different video training modules and things like that to dig into. So it was a much larger, complex project.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, that's awesome. So, honestly, when you've been in the game longer than most people listening to this, and it obviously shows him how well you carry yourself. What do you wish that you knew when you first started?

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CJ Oltman  

Well, definitely, I'd say it took me a longer time to actually find and get, you know, an advisor or a mentor. And I think for me, you know, I worked for an agency for a year out of college and then went off on my own, I think that I maybe would have stayed in house at agencies for a little bit longer just to be able to get more connections, be able to understand some of the processes better things like that, because going off on my own so early, it was, you know, while it was good, in some ways, because I was doing things a little bit differently, and, you know, non conventional, that worked. But it also there's a lot of things, a lot of nuances within the agency, workplace and life that would have been helpful to experience and know that, you know, I would have to, you know, learn along the way, those types of things and then from a an advisor perspective, or mentor perspective, it's being able to have someone who's been in the field and gone through these experience and be able to, you know, someone you can go to, and can help, you know, bring other ideas to the table and help you kind of, you know, brainstorm and it'll be your backboard for different things, you know, that you want to do with your self, you know, personal development, professional development, all that good stuff. So, I think having a mentor, having some sort of advisor is is a critical piece to growing both personally and professionally.

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Alex Ivanoff  

And not only really agree with that, I totally relate to it. I, I have mainly worked in small companies before I was on my own until now. And and it's hard to from a management perspective, and from a knowledge perspective, know what it takes to be great and to be successful. And the best way to learn is to kind of get your feet wet with those that have already done it. And you know, whether it's through mentor or I tell people all the time, I've been saying this since I was probably in junior year of college doing internships, that Oh, I really wish I could work at Google for a day, just just a day or I wish that I can work at like a big, you know, successful like GE or whatever, Apple of the world for literally a day and I know I would be retained so much that I just don't know about how a big successful company works. And it's not just like, oh, you know, what is the work? Like? It's, you know, what are the tools that they using? What is the systems? How are they built? What is the culture like how do people conduct themselves in certain conversations and hold each other accountable? Like, that's the stuff that is very hard to learn unless you like see it yourself? or you make the mistakes and then learn from that. So, yeah, just going back to the original point, I definitely relate to that. I think that getting a mentor that has done that we're seeing that can advance you so much quicker, in my opinion.

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CJ Oltman  

Absolutely. Yeah. I should have done it years and years ago, but you know, to all those, those young advertising and marketing professionals out there, get yourself a mentor, or advisor, you will, you will thank yourself.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, if you're a brand, like find advice from a bigger brand, maybe not a competitor, but you know, someone that's, you know, able to shed light.

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CJ Oltman  

Join the CEO and pure, you know, CMO groups and all those things, you know, just sharing, you know, any type of, you know, opportunity or group, organization like that is always valuable to just to share, and, you know, have people within your own, you know, field within your own space or position and be able to talk about the challenges in wins opportunities and, and how you can help each other.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, I totally agree. And it's funny, this leads into our final question, that we always do with everyone on the show as a guest. If you could sit in a room with any mentor dead or alive every every morning to start your day, and give you advice as you go through life's challenges. Who would they be?

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CJ Oltman  

Oh, that's a tough question. You know, the first person that comes to mind is my grandfather, just because, you know, he, you know, he kind of was one of the people that came from nothing, he was, he lived on Taylor Street, and in Little Italy, here in Chicago, you know, met my grandma up there, and my grandma's parents didn't even want her to marry him, because his family was so poor. And you know, and so, I mean, they used to have like animals and corn stalks in their yard, and like, their whole garden, basically, to feed themselves. And, you know, over time, he became a very successful Carpenter, manage teams and, you know, retired, you know, with a lot of love and, you know, a great life. And so I just look at him and his success, and just that balance and quality of life that he had along the way, the happiness and quality of life. And I think that's something that can be lost today with how stressful and all the demand of things. So he's taught me a lot to outline out my life. And then I'd love to look, I mean, I know we're working with big corporate brands and things like that now, but you know, my main goal in the future is to figure out, you know, what can we do, you know, for more social type of impact. And so, you know, maybe putting getting in a room with someone like Bill Gates, or people who have kind of moved from more of a corporate type of mentality to looking at or how you can take that, you know, the success of what you've done with the corporate and reinvest it into doing social good. So I'm really interested in learning from that transition, and, you know, ways that we can kind of build, but every business I think should be doing is, is really giving back and, and, you know, getting back to what you're bringing in to society and to humanity.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, I love that answer. I'm sure that's I don't think we've gotten that answer yet. I'm sure you could probably go to that one pledge that a bunch of those billionaires signed, like the Warren Buffett and Bill Gates saying that they're going to donate I think it's 90% or 9% of their wealth or whatever. I mean, that's, a lot of those names are going to fit in that category that you described. So awesome. I love it. I love that answer. So, CJ, it's been a it's been a pleasure to have you and you know, I've learned so much and I'm sure people listening have where can they learn more from you? How can they follow you and follow up anyway?

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, so you can reach out to me at CJ@BannerWave.com. I'm also happy to offer you know if there's any brands or businesses out there that are interested in and you know, wants to talk to BannerWave about, you know, maybe an audit and opportunities based on what they're currently doing. We are happy to offer, you know, a free audit opportunity service to the first three people that contact us or email me and you mention this podcast name in the subject line.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Nice, awesome. I'm excited for them. Do you have any social pages for you or BannerWave that you want people to follow?

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CJ Oltman  

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just @BannerWave on all the different platforms if you go on Twitter, Instagram, things like that. And then, you know, Facebook as well, you just find our Facebook page. But yeah, just look for BannerWave on the typical platforms and you'll find us.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Awesome, cool. Yeah, we'll put the links in as well. CJ, it's been a pleasure, man. I've learned so much today. I know that you guys are well equipped to handle the changing landscape of ad tech and banner media and it's gonna be really exciting. Like I said, I can't wait to have you back in however long it takes to see the you know, real change start to happen among the main platforms and talk about it again because it's it's this is always fun. It's ever changing games why people work with marketers that are dedicated to this.

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CJ Oltman  

Hopefully sooner than later.

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Alex Ivanoff  

Yeah, hopefully. Well, I appreciate you and yeah, thanks for thanks for everyone for listening. Go check out CJ, go check out us as well at goRocketCar.com. You can listen to this podcast if you go to our podcast page, and all the other episodes. And thanks for tuning in. See you next time.

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