Customer Story – Bock & Associates

Video Transcript

If it winds up on the internet, my mom’s gonna find it. So thanks, man. And thanks for having me here today, I want to thank Kinect data team for putting together Kynapse started using Kynapse, about six months ago, and it’s been transformative to our business.

I also want to give a shout out to an HR Amy. She’s been working on our project, she’s been awesome. As Matt mentioned, I own three businesses. And they’re all in the media advertising space.

When I got acquainted with Kynapse, I immediately realized the power that it could add to our process. Today, we’ve rolled out kenapa Kynapse, on two of the three companies with great success. And I’m sure the third one is coming as well.

So a little background, my legacy business is a company called back and Associates. This company was started by my grandfather in 1957. Run by my dad and in ICBO that mutate mutated gene as well. We sell advertising space on a contractual basis for media companies.

So what does that mean? Friend, we have contracts with publications typically coming out of the print environment. And their publications that I’m sure you’re reading at home things like Iowa farmer today and genome magazine and my fourth favorite pork network. And in most of these relationships, we are the exclusive sales arm of the publication within that given territory.

So for instance, the back and associate sales team goes out and calling on companies like John Deere and convincing John Deere to spend their money with their advertising money with Iowa farmer today versus ifds competitor, the Farm Bureau spokesman.

Now as you probably have noticed, over the last 10 years, media consumption habits have changed just a little bit. This digital transformation in the publishing industry has impacted our business of course, we’ve watched large portions of advertising budgets go from print advertising budgets to digital advertising budgets, publishers have been forced to reinvent themselves in the way they push data or excuse me push content. They’re coming up with brand extensions in the form of video content, in newsletters and websites. Digital Advertising is just exploded.

Last year, digital advertising even surpassed television advertising and total dollars. Publishers say they’ve they’re you know, despite trying to compete in this environment, they’re turning digital or excuse me, they’re turning print advertising dollars into digital dime advertising the return on their their content just as significantly lower.

These changes have obviously affected our commission checks as well. But with big change, you can oftentimes find opportunity.

Three years ago, I started a business called Big Reach network, we saw an opportunity to combine programmatic advertising with a best in class database of 4.2 million farmers from a company called Farm Market ID, a data onboarding partner called Live ramp spectrum reach which is at that point, the digital advertising arm of a company that you’re probably familiar with Carter Charter Communications, the cable company, and then our sales team made up of salespeople with extensive experience in selling advertising opportunities in the agricultural space.

Those of you who are who are not familiar with programmatic advertising, it’s the sale and purchase of develop digital advertising through an exchange, much like a snack exchange where buyers and sellers come together and a price is discovered instantaneously.

So in this case, our sales team is going out and calling on the John dears of the world and saying big O through Big Reach network, we can put your digital advertising on over 80,000 websites. So basically, wherever a farmer is in on the web, we can put an ad in front of them.

So once that happens once the sales team gets into place, and they make that sale, that’s when the fun starts. And that’s where Kynapse comes into play. There are many steps in the process of successfully serving the advertising. And any misstep along the way is going to cost us extra in costs associated with it. We’re going to lose revenue and we’re going to injure or damage our relationships with our advertising partners.

This is something that we find that you can do all three of those things at the same time with a poor execution.

So just to give you a sense of what that means we need to send work order to the spectrum reach, team and inform them of the buy, we need to provide access to that farmer database I mentioned, to spectrum to DSP, that’s a demand side platform. And that the DSP uses that data to find the farmers on the internet and buy the ad impressions at the exchange.

We needed the sales rep, get in contact with the clients advertising agency, to get their creative and get that creative, to creative meeting the digital ad. Get that to the spectrum reach team, we need to set up the advertiser themselves with a dashboard so that they can see their campaign as it executes real time in progress.

We need to inform our accounting team, we need to inform our accounting team about the about the sale my favorite part, and invoice, let them know our cost structure that is involved so that they can reconcile with their invoices, we need to turn that turn the data off at the end of the campaign so that we don’t continue to get charged by Library. Again, learn that through experience.

And of course, all these tasks have subtasks. And they have a tendency to change with each campaign just a little bit. And so we’ve got to be able to execute this process over and over and over again flawlessly. When we started, we were doing this by email. And as you can imagine, this quickly became totally unmanageable.

I love the fact now that with Kynapse, we have an automated system in place, it greatly reduces any chance that will fall that anything will fall through the cracks along the way, what a team member gets their assignment, everyone understands their responsibility. Even if there is a slight modification to the campaign, we’ve got that figured into the process.

And what I really love is that we’re able to coordinate this across not only our company, but our three partner companies in executing this campaign. Now, it’s working out pretty well. But as we rolled this out, we’ve learned some things along the way. For example, in an ideal world, we would send the work order to spectrum when we first get it and let them sign off on the work order.

Before we start to execute the other trees, the other task trees, what we found out is that that it’s really more efficient to start all the trees at the same time. So we changed our process to manage those few exceptions when spectrum rejected the order for some reason.

Can apps give us the agility to make these things happen quickly and easily? Well, I should say Kynapse. And, and gave us so this is important. This agility is really important in our space as well, because big rich network is working in a very dynamic environment.

There’s new technology coming onto the field all the time. And we’re able to take the best of that technology and integrate it into our business change our process quickly and easily without missing a beat. So that’s a little bit about how we’re using Kynapse with big rich network. Like to transition now to big deals, media.

Big deals, media provides radio station owners and operators we call them affiliates with a tool that provides them an additional revenue stream. Big deals, teaches the affiliate how to design and sell a radio advertising package to their potential advertisers of the radio station. And then pay for that with a combination of cash and gift certificates for the entity that that they’re talking to.

So if they go into let me just give you an example. So an advertising sales representative from a local radio station. We’ll call them herb goes into a diner. We’ll call the diner owner Mel. Mel says to her you know herb I like your your couple of people are old enough to get that joke. I don’t want to do Mel says to her, I don’t want to do advertising. I’m not sure it works. It’s just too expensive. And that’s really true for a lot of radios.

Excuse me for a lot of restaurants. You don’t hear a lot of restaurant advertising on the radio. But Herb says to Mel look, Mel’s Diner is likely to going to get new customers who will try the diner because they have a gift certificate. And that customer who comes in with a gift certificate will likely spend more getting the appetizer the dessert because they feel like they’ve got free money. Once Mel buys the advertising package, and herb executes the ads, Mel starts to see the gift certificates coming back into the restaurant. So he knows the advertising is working. And best of all, Mel knows that he’s paying infers advertising with only as food costs, because other expenses don’t increase just because there’s an extra person coming through the door.

This becomes this becomes a win win win, I get myself out of order apologize, this becomes a win win win in that the customer who bought the gift certificate online, comes in and they get their, their discounted meal, the business gets a new customer that comes to the door. And they know that they’re spending more money and they’re able to buy their advertising at a discount. And the station receives incremental business that they wouldn’t get otherwise.

Big deals mean he receives a portion of the sale of the gift certificates that are sold through our software. So big deals, media is growing. And it’s been fun to work in this environment, we now have a footprint, you might have seen on the poster that have about 65 affiliates.

In the primarily in the Midwest, we’ve got some outliers as well. But we’ve created a footprint now of of customers. And with a footprint of customers, we’re now able to put those customers together and make them appealing to a regional advertiser, like a travel and tourism destination.

So an individual radio station might not be calling on that travel and tourism destination themselves. But as a group, we can go in and be appealing to that, that that, that Wisconsin Dells of the world or the Giants Ridge of the world, those kinds of advertisers typically will draw their customers from a two to 300 mile radius. So we started to do that on behalf of the radio stations.

It’s a business model somewhat like Bach and Associates business model where we’re hired guns, so to speak. And that’s working really well. But again, this is where the interesting stuff happens from a canape standpoint, because we’ve they’re just like in the Big Reach network example.

There’s a lot of data that’s got to flow back and forth about the by itself with those radio stations. And they’ve got to provide us the proof that the advertising campaign is running around after the fact you’ve got to move the creative back and forth. But now we’re in the we’re in the situation where we’ve got 65 radio stations that we’re potentially having this same data transfer with. And what Kynapse does is gives us a visibility across what’s going on with a given campaign across multiple radio station that the same time so that we know that this advertising campaign that we sold to the Giants Ridge of the world is actually being executed across all the radio stations that they indeed purchased.

So that’s how we’re using Kynapse with big deals, media. So I gotta tell you that one of the best things I love about Ken ops, is that it gives me a peace of mind with very detailed processes that have to be executed exactly right all the time. And this really reduces our errors. And I’m very thankful for that.

It allows us to work with a large amounts of activity, and pull that activity together to and we can monitor that, which reduces our costs. If CONOPS wasn’t in place, it’d be a much more difficult task to make sure everything was running correctly. And it also allows us to take a look at the process itself, and make tweaks where we see the need to make tweaks in our process.

So that’s a little about how we use Kynapse. I hope that it will give you some ideas as to other ways that you might be able to use some platform. Thanks