Apply New Models To Old Businesses And Do What Works - Episode 095 Recap of Jess Fitzpatrick

Welcome to OOH Insider, the first podcast made just for media and marketing executives to help simplify the conversation about how offline attention drives online conversion. My name is Tim Rowe and for the past three years, I’ve been interviewing industry experts for their unique insight into understanding this connection and the unique nuance required to create alchemy in the real world - the blending of marketing art and science to create memorable brand experiences that drive impact you can measure.

Today’s recap is of episode 95 with Jess Fitzpatrick, Senior Media Trader at Buyers and Sellers, a UK-based shop that is upending the way brands and celebrities build their brands using a model more similar to Costco than the traditional ad agency to create incredible leverage for their clients and in a way that adds value for media owners and publishers allike.

OOH does seem to have this magnetism of people who love to explore. It’s like this industry is the ultimate playground for the person who loves sales and marketing and has an entrepreneurial itch to scratch. Jess came to OOH by way of the magazine industry and her timing couldn’t have been better, starting just 6 months before covid locked the world down, especially in the UK, where Jess is based, for the next 2 years.

What’s interesting though about the business model of buyers and sellers, the shop Jess is Senior Media Trader at is that they’re more similar to an inventory wholesaler than they are a traditional ad agency that might be putting together a campaign and layering in multiple elements, overseeing the creative, that sort of thing. Instead, buyers and sellers sticks to one core competency - buying at wholesale and selling in bulk. They essentially go to media owners and say “hey, we’ll buy this 10% of all of your space, guaranteed, at this discounted rate” and media owners love it because it gives them a floor to their revenue for the year. They know they’re starting out with some amount of guaranteed sold space and revenue on the books even if it is at a discount because it is reducing their overall risk to go make all of the money they can selling the rest of their inventory.

What’s so interesting about this business model is that the same consumer mindset we all exhibit at some point, the bulk-buying phenomena of just buying even more of the stuff you’re buying because you’re getting such a good deal…even if you don’t need 15 jars of mayonnaise right now. It’s the Costco model. What Jess and her team started to find was that the big celebrities and social media influencers who were signing up for big budgets were totally into buying even more of these amazing digital billboards because they were such a great buy.

And the majority of Jess’s clients are buying strictly for brand marketing. They’re not tying it to any specific performance metric, purely for vanity. In fact, when Jess helped her international mega-client Gymshark get launched in Times Square, the picture of the founding team and their billboard trended #2 on Twitter. And that’s really their whole pitch to clients - we make it easy.

Which is a recurring theme that I don’t think gets talked about enough and that’s the simplicity of doing what works. We tend to get wrapped up in what could be or having to always evolve, rather than finding one that works and getting great at that.

For Jess and Buyers and Sellers, that is making it really easy for you to do brand marketing on the best digital spectacular billboards in top global cities around the world.

Jess said this “Real world campaigns are Part of your memorable brand story” Jeremie Watkins, CEO of Spotlight Media on guest spotlight episode 110 said something similar, talking about how seeing a 3D billboard on the Las Vegas strip isn’t an ad experience, it’s a brand experience. Yes, the creative medium itself is designed to be an ad but in the mind of the consumer it’s something entirely different and we’ll be talking more about this is an upcoming series but the value of that brand experience can be quantified and it’s up to 2-4X more valuable than the standard rate of return on ad spend. Super interesting stuff. 

I saw a post the other day that had these three quotes in it on the conversation between brand and performance marketing and I thought I’d share them here…

Simon Peel, Global Media Director at Adidas

"Adidas thought only performance drove e-commerce sales, in fact, it was BRAND activity driving 65% of sales.”

Jose Antonio, CEO at ASOS (holding co of 17 top UK fashion brands)

“ASOS’s profits plunged 105% last quarter, the result of putting more than 80% of its spend on performance marketing.”

Dave Stephenson, CFO at Airbnb 

"In 2019, before the pandemic, we shifted our marketing strategy to be more brand-driven and even less dependent on search engine marketing. We made that shift and it has proven to have been the right shift, not only in 2019 but in 2020 and 2021.”

@oohwithjess