[Top Agency Series] Mastering OOH Advertising: Tips and Insights With Amanda Dorenberg of COMMB

Amanda Dorenberg is the President of Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau (COMMB), the national organization for the Canadian out-of-home industry of advertisers, advertising agencies, programmatic tech stacks, and OOH companies/operators. She is a technology and media executive passionate about disrupting traditional industries via new and emerging tech. Amanda’s work has been featured in Forbes Tech and Wired Magazine, among other top national and international media outlets.

As the CEO of Billboard Canada, Amanda is responsible for driving innovative change across the media industry using new and emerging technologies. She also serves as the Global CEO of Arts Help, a not-for-profit organization recognized for its significant contributions to the creative industries.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:25] Amanda Dorenberg talks about Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau (COMMB)
• [06:14] Who are the ideal clients for COMMB?
• [07:35] Out-of-home advertising and its benefits
• [10:35] COMMB’s new data science platform for OOH advertising
• [19:51] How Amanda modernized COMMB’s approach to data and marketing
• [23:09] Techniques for fostering good company culture
• [26:44] Amanda’s journey owning and exiting two companies
• [30:38] The value of having mentors as an entrepreneur
• [34:32] Amanda shares how she came to realize the power of OOH advertising
• [38:05] Amanda’s hemorrhagic stroke experience and lessons learned
• [49:38] On Billboard Canada and Arts Help

In this episode…

Out-of-home advertising is a powerful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. However, executing an effective OOH advertising campaign can be challenging. Many companies lack the experience and know-how to execute it properly.

According to Amanda Dorenberg, a technology and media executive, OOH advertising allows brands to reach a large audience and create a lasting impression through various mediums such as billboards, digital screens, transit advertising, and street furniture. She highlights that it is versatile and practical, providing an interactive experience that engages passersby and can target specific demographics like commuters, tourists, or shoppers. Knowing that many companies don’t know how to do it, she shares her journey of running an organization to help brands effectively utilize OOH advertising.

Listen to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he speaks with the President of Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau (COMMB), Amanda Dorenberg. They discuss COMMB’s ideal clients, OOH advertising and its benefits, their new data science platform, and her hemorrhagic stroke experience and lessons learned.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Amanda Dorenberg on LinkedIn
• COMMB | Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau
• Billboard Canada
• Arts Help

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Michele Erskine on LinkedIn
• Riina Clydesdale on LinkedIn
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Out-of-home is one of the most trusted mediums in advertising.”
• “We learn by making mistakes.”
• “As a leader, you have to recognize and realize that your team will make mistakes, and it’s your job to help them learn from those mistakes.”
• “Never take it personally.”
• “Always be curious.”
• “Don’t judge a book by the cover.”

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com. I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I’ve got Amanda Dorenberg of commb.ca. And she has so many irons on the fire. So it’s not just COMMB. But she does work with Art Help. She does work with billboard.ca, and many more, which we’ll go into the whole timeline. And, you know, she’s been up since 4:30 or earlier, doing calls all over the world, actually. So, Amanda, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes, people should check out of the podcast. And I know COMMB, and the COMMB stands for Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau, you deal with a lot of different companies and some agencies in the space and some billboards, all over the map. This I’m gonna put as part of my top agency series, because I know you deal with a lot of agencies through COMMB. And some good ones were Jason Swenk, he actually built up his agency to over eight figures and sold it. And then as we talked about that journey, and then his new journey of buying up agencies, and he talks about valuation in the landscape and everything in that realm. Also, Todd Taskey of similar sentiment, actually as the Second Bite Podcast where he actually matches agencies and private equity, and help sell agencies and also talks about the valuation the landscape and Second Bite because sometimes the companies, the private equity companies that buy the agencies, the agencies sometimes make more on the second bite than the first when those private equity sells the whole group again. So that was an interesting conversation as well. Many more and inspiredinsider.com On this episode is brought to you by Rise25. And at Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. Amanda we call ourselves magic elves that run around in the background to make it look easy for the hosts in the company to create great content and amazing relationships. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I’ve found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com to learn more. I’m excited to introduce Amanda Dorenberg. She’s president of the Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau commb.ca and Amanda is a technology and marketing executive who’s been featured in Forbes Tech Wired Magazine among other national international media outlets. She’s also an active member of Forbes Tech Council Entrepreneur Fast Company. And as President of COMMB, she’s responsible for driving innovative change using some of the new emerging technology across the out-of-home industry. And she’s responsible for the collective marketing and measurement efforts for the OOH industry across Canada and she’s going to talk about some of the cool things that are horizon other people are taking notice and wanting to implement it themselves as well and she is an amazing I’ll even venture to say Amanda crazy journey. And thanks for joining me.

Amanda Dorenberg  3:49

Thank you for having me. I’m excited. It’s gonna be a good one.

Jeremy Weisz  3:51

Some of the stories when you look at someone you never know all the struggles they’ve gone through. And that’s what I love about these interviews, like people seemingly on the top of their game top of an industry, but hearing the craziest stories and we’re going to talk about some of those because it’s one of the craziest I’ve seen out there and I won’t divulge it yet, but start off with COMMB and what the organization does.

Amanda Dorenberg  4:25

Absolutely. So COMMB, as you mentioned, is the Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau. We are a national not-for-profit association that is membership-based. And we sit in between as sort of a third party non-biased entity to provide both marketing and measurement services to the out-of-home advertising community. When I say measurement services, I really mean how do you attribute the an impression in the offline space in out-of-home so we have data science and understands the amounts of consumers that pass by specific out-of-home asset and for clarity sake out-of-home is basically anything that is outside of your home. So it could be the billboards on a roadside. It could be the transit shelters that you see, as you’re sort of moving throughout your journey, it could be what we call play space. So you’re indoors, you’re dining out at a restaurant and you see an advertisement within that venue, you’re at a hair salon, you see an advertisement within that venue, that’s all classified as out-of-home. And in both cases, whether it be outdoor or place-based, we provide the measurement and attribution to quantify, to the buyers, how many eyes essentially are being captured for that particular advertising campaign. On the marketing side, we provide advocacy for the benefits of out-of-home and why marketers should take advantage of this very powerful medium, so kind of a combination of both marketing and measurement in a nutshell.

Jeremy Weisz  5:54

And if you’re listening to the audio, there’s a video piece and we’re looking here at commb.ca. And you can see, you can poke around and learn more, but from a membership perspective, who are ideal members who should be members of COMMB.

Amanda Dorenberg  6:14

So our membership base is comprised of three different categories, I would classify the first category being publishers or media owners. So these are the companies that own the actual billboards. So like the Outfront the style, the partisan, the UV media’s of the world, they’re the actual out-of-home companies that own assets. And then the second category would be agencies or advertisers, you could be a large agency and independent agency or part of one of the global holding companies like a WPP IPG media brands, or brands direct like a subway FCT, etc. And then the third category we classify as programmatic re-marketers or tech stack. So in our world, there’s an automated delivery of advertising campaigns for digital out-of-home. And that is called programmatic. And the largest tech companies who operate those would also classify as members under those categories.

Jeremy Weisz  7:11

Do you find that what’s under-utilized now with this media? Because I know a lot of people don’t people are big in digital, right, in general, but they may not have this as part of their arsenal. So what do you find brands should be thinking about as far as marketing using the out-of-home?

Amanda Dorenberg  7:35

I do get asked this question quite frequently. And typically, I go back to a couple of core fundamentals. So the perception of out-of-home is that it is a legacy medium, but it’s very trusted, it’s one of the most trusted mediums in the advertising sort of arsenal of various different product types that a publisher, buyer or a brand could leverage. One of the interesting components and one of the areas that has great opportunity within the out-of-home space is the onset of digital out-of-home and the use of data across both like traditional which would be classic static billboards that aren’t 100% share voice one brand on there, one advertiser data is leveraged both within classic as well as in digital out-of-home, obviously a little more enhanced within the Digital out-of-home ecosystem. When I talk about digital out-of-home, and the leveraging of data and analytics within that, if you think about a digital billboard, it’s basically a big computer, whether it be on the side of a road or in some sort of building and venue. So it has all of the same capabilities that your online advertisements have. And one of the great areas of opportunity is from an attribution a targeting demographic lifestyle psychographic component, we have all of the same capabilities that the online space has. It’s just not as widely known that we have that information available. And so that’s one of our core sort of mandates, from a marketing perspective is to really educate on how much information is being leveraged and how much data and data science frankly has been leveraged within the out-of-home space that is very similar to the online space, but in a much more privacy-compliant perspective in online your one to one medium. So of course, the cookieless world that we’re about to embark upon, in the next couple of years, all of the privacy compliance with the legislation coming into effect GDPR CCPA, Bill C11 can go on for days about all of those legislations, we, of course are privacy compliant, but we’re a one to many media format, which means that inherently it’s more compliant, first and foremost, but also you garner larger reach but within a targeted capacity. So, you can still have a campaign at scale where you’re looking to do a mass brand awareness campaign, but you can also have a niche campaign where you’re really looking for a very specific target audience like new Canadian newcomers, from a banking perspective or whatnot. So I would say that that’s a huge area of opportunity that is somewhat underutilized.

Jeremy Weisz  10:14

We’ll talk a little bit about that. But I think, you have some things right now, by the time people listen to this, it’s probably out already. But some things on the horizon, talk about the new data science that you’re launching, or its flavor listening in the future, it’s launched.

Amanda Dorenberg  10:35

Depending on the time of day. So in early 2024, we are launching a new platform, we’re calling it a production and planning platform called Roadmap. And Roadmap is a very sophisticated tool that runs all of the inventory management side of the media owners business. So it’s about 70,000 assets across the country that sit within our database that we need to manage both from a product perspective. So if it’s digital, the structure of the digital has a loop. So, your rotation of advertisers might be a one-minute loop with six, 10-second spots, or it could be a different infrastructure. So each media owner has their own structure that complies with the regional legislation of the minimum amount of time a spot could be played. So our system houses all of that information from a production side of things. And then we also pass along a planning tool, a front-end planning tool with a very robust UX-UI, and our core data. So when you reference sort of the new methodology, and the product, we’re sort of phasing this out in January of 2024, we launch the product with the production side of things, and then a lite version of the planning tool. And then in July, we launched the full robust version of our planning tool, which is an ingestion of over 8 million different road segments of data right across Canada. So every single roadway, whether it’s a side street, and on ramp and off ramp, we have information that is comprised on an hourly basis that gets ingested into our back-end infrastructure, and is leveraged for campaign planning. So you can choose a demographic, you can choose a target audience, you can choose a campaign flooding period, and our system will present a recommendation on how to achieve something whether it’s a region frequency, whether it’s just a total impressions on a campaign, that type of thing. So lots underway, lots coming. It’s been a labor of love over the past three years building this product, as well as the data science behind it.

Jeremy Weisz  12:44

Yeah, it sounds like a beast, actually. So let me see if I have it straight, if you publishers, right, would use your platform and be able to serve up by whatever, certain number of ads, a certain number of timeframes throughout the whole day. And then that they can also collect data that’s being collected so that their companies can target different times of day or different audiences or things like that. Is that accurate?

Amanda Dorenberg  13:15

Generally speaking, so you’re not executing the campaign through Roadmap or platform, you’re doing the preliminary planning, and then you’re taking that and communicating directly with the publisher. So if you’re a buyer, you’re using our tool to plan the campaign, because it has every single out-of-home asset within the country, basically, in our system. And so it’s sort of like a one stop shop where you can actually go and see everybody’s inventory, see what audience and what target you’re looking to achieve, and what KPIs and then take that plan away. And you’ll go directly to the publisher to execute that plan.

Jeremy Weisz  13:52

I have a technical question. I’m not sure how deep we need to get into it. But I’ll let you decide. I have heard with you’re collecting the data and you can retarget you’ll go offline to online, where you can retarget Mobley from some of the data is collected. Is that true? And if so how does that even work?

Amanda Dorenberg  14:19

I’ll just clarify. It’s not a service that COMMB provides, but I can speak to how technically it’s executed. So what happens when you’re looking to do an offline to an online sort of conversion or retargeting? We call it an omni-channel approach. So in the offline space, our data first and foremost, we leverage multiple different data sets. As I mentioned, we’ve got this 8 million road segment data. We also leverage a dataset called SDK — software development kit. It’s a mobile location data source. And that data is leveraged in the same way as these omni-channel campaigns. So what happens is the end user whether it’s the buyer or the publisher, whomever is offering this service up this omni-channel campaign up, will observe mobile devices that pass by the out-of-home asset. And those devices have various different data pings for their location data. Those are date and timestamp. So you know exactly sort of what day and what time that device was in front of Billboard A, for example. And then there is something called an IDFA, which is an identifier for Apple or, or Android ID for Android phones. That’s the advertising ID. And that’s where when you get the popups, if you download an app on your phone, it says do you want to share your location, if you share your location via that it also goes with that advertising ID. And that Id gets passed back to the online space, knowing that at a specific date and time it was exposed to an offline out-of-home advertisement, that device then gets retargeted by the same brand in the online space, whether it be your mobile online, your social search, your interstitials, your general content, it all gets served up sort of programmatically, so the ID gets inserted into your trading desk, and then the ads sort of just go out based on an impression delivery.

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