This is a repost of the executive interview written for Voyage LA.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
BrillMedia.co started because we saw an opportunity to give businesses access to the same tools, capabilities and expertise that are usually reserved for large advertisers with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend. In 2010, advertising took a turn towards mass automation with behavioral data and algorithms decisioning. Both create powerful ways to reach consumers. I was there helping transition my agency employer into the age of programmatic ad buying and I was an early adopter of this new age of digital advertising. So, we began in 2013 to offer marketing and advertising solutions to small and mid-size businesses so that they could benefit from these massive opportunities. Since then, we’ve taken on multiple agency clients and advertisers who want to leverage data and automation in their advertising practice.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road is never smooth if you are forging your own path. There were two early struggles that we had to overcome: earning clients and defining positioning. The first was clients. We started from scratch and I leveraged my network of associates, business partners and mentors, from there, I landed our first agency client. I am forever grateful to my network. To scale, I was working on creating more agency and advertiser relationships, so I was refining our value offering, business model and 30-second pitch. It took hundreds of conversations to hone in on that key point of insight and feel comfortable about our positioning. For ad agencies, we are a white label ad buying solution and for advertisers, we are a hyperlocal advertising agency. The term “programmatic media” remains too confusing, so we couldn’t lead with that. Being described as a digital marketer is too broad. Being a digital advertiser is too undifferentiated. People the world over can access Facebook and Google Adwords. Not many have logins to the best in class demand-side platforms. We have over 200k audience data sets, hyperlocal advertising tied to latitude/longitude signals cultivated from mobile devices and multiple best in class algorithmic decisioning engines. So, we settled on hyperlocal advertising as a lead into a whole world of data infused ad buying.
BrillMedia.co – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I’m proud of our business because we make lots of great functionality available to businesses that would otherwise not be able to access data and automation. For agencies, we make productization of our ad platforms straightforward. If you’re an agency focusing on restaurant marketing then it’s really easy to identify a 2-3 mile radius around an address and reach people who should be eating at your restaurant. For a marketer who has a lot of email addresses, it’s straightforward to turn that email list into a targeting dataset and reach people who maybe have requested information, but who haven’t yet made a purchase. For video production houses, we take commercials and target them to the precise audiences based on purchase data from Mastercard. Recently bought Oreos at Ralphs? Here’s an ad. Data segments range from travel data from Oracle, shopping habits from Crosswise and data from one of over 50 different providers. This means that video production businesses can now offer full-service media buying which retains client relationships. Even more interesting, yet, is the ability to push that 15-second spot to people watching Internet-connected TV in the 5 miles around an address while the user is on Hulu, Crackle or DirectTV Now. Finally, for advertisers who have locations they want to drive foot traffic to we target people who are most likely to be interested in the retailer and then show attribution that confirms that our ads drove people into the store. What I’m most proud of is the wow factor. I’m proud every time I walk into a meeting and share a marketing tactic that the client hasn’t considered or maybe didn’t even know could be done. This point of education is powerful because knowing what can be done with digital advertising fundamentally changes how business owners think of their business and that knowledge impacts the entire business from that moment on.
What’s your favorite memory from childhood?
I loved going to Disneyland with my family. Also, I recall one time, my dad got me a game I really wanted and it felt so great
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