Hyperlocal Marketing, Geotargeting, and $110M in Exits, with Wayne Reuvers

Hyperlocal marketing is a strategy that targets potential customers who are close to your business location and looking for products and services like yours. The local area is usually very specific, which is awesome, but how does hyperlocal apply to ecommerce?

Let’s find out from LiveRetail’s Wayne Reuvers, a serial entrepreneur who has led 6 exits for a combined $110M!

This episode of Deal Closers is hosted by Izach Porter, brought to you by WebsiteClosers.com, and is produced by Earfluence.

Transcript

Wayne Reuvers – 00:00:05:

 

And it actually aggregates the content of every single store that’s already on that site. And pre-builds an entire matrix of ads. So if someone like Subway is promoting six items this week, they’ve got 28,000 stores, with one person and no major work, we can build every single one of those 150,000 ads for a few cents, and then we distribute it to every Subway to run, and they can click to run it or post it.

 

Izach Porter – 00:00:42:

 

All right, you’re listening to The Deal Closers Podcast brought to you by WebsiteClosers.com, a show about how to build your ecommerce business to be profitable, scalable, and one day even sellable. I’m Izach Porter, and on the show today, Wayne Reuvers from LiveRetail comes to talk hyperlocal marketing, how we can use digital advertising techniques to geo-target customers and scale our businesses. So hyperlocal marketing is a strategy that targets potential customers who are close to your business location and looking for products or services that you have to sell. The local area is usually very specific, maybe even only a few blocks or the streets around your business. So that’s awesome, but how does hyperlocal marketing apply to e-commerce and how are some of these physical retail stores behaving more like e-commerce companies and leveraging the technology that’s available in the marketplace? Let’s find out. Hey, Wayne, how you doing? Thanks for being on the show today.

 

Wayne – 00:01:46:

 

Thank you Izach, good to meet you. I’m very excited to be on the show. I’ve followed you guys for some time, really enjoy your content, thank you.

 

Izach – 00:01:52:

 

Awesome. Yeah. So before we get into LiveRetail and some of the use-cases and cool things you’re doing with your clients, I wanted to talk with you a bit about your background starting at age 14. I think in your bio I read. That you started your first company when you were 14 years old. What did you do there, Wayne?

 

Wayne – 00:02:14:

 

I wrote some technical analysis software for the stock market, sold it to 11 banks and a bunch of stockbroking firms. There were some interesting things that were around in those days. We had two currencies in South Africa. We had a commercial round and a financial round. And so things became a little bit complicated on how you price derivatives. I wrote some good derivative modeling software that worked for those. So it was good.

 

Izach – 00:02:37:

 

You wrote derivative modeling software for banks when you’re 14?

 

Wayne – 00:02:41:

 

What started at 14, the final step I sold was like 17, 18. And then I had to go to the army.

 

Izach – 00:02:46:

 

And I, how did you do that? I mean, seriously, how did, like, did you, were you, were you taking, did you have a technology background? You just.

 

Wayne – 00:02:53:

 

No, I just…. 

 

Izach – 00:02:55:

 

Figured it out or what gave you that idea? How did you even think to work on that at 14?

 

Wayne – 00:03:00:

 

Very, very lucky. My father brought a computer home and the condition to use the computer is that we had to do work for him. And he was playing in the stock market and every single day I had to capture prices from the newspaper and it was happening on weekends and I could either play sport or I could spend two hours capturing numbers. So I wrote a program that made that faster and then expected us to print our charts for him. So then I wrote a program that allowed us to automate the printing of charts because most of the time we spent printing the charts. And then after that we had to calculate, we used a product called VisiTrend/VisiPlot. We had to calculate all the trend graphs that took time. So I figured out how to batch all those different algorithms and it was really not that hard but it was all about just saving myself time so I could go do the stuff I enjoyed. And then as that happened…

 

Izach – 00:03:43:

 

Isn’t that what everything’s about, in short?

 

Wayne – 00:03:46:

 

I’ve always said it’s the best stuff you ever invent is when you’re under pressure to make things happen because you’ve got a reason to do it. When you’re doing it just because you want to get wealthy, it never ever works. You need to love what you’re doing and you need to basically figure out a way to get the stuff you don’t love doing out of the way quickly. And that’s always a bigger opportunity.

 

Izach – 00:04:05:

 

Totally, totally, man. So I gave a brief definition of hyperlocal marketing in the intro. How do you describe it as someone who’s living in that world every day.

 

Wayne – 00:04:20:

 

So interestingly enough, the old phrase location, location, location, it still resonates today. And so even though the web, web.2 and our web.3 is all about bringing information closer to us, making things more convenient, at the end of the day, still 85% of your disposable income is going to be spent where you work and live. You’re going to go to the bar for a pint of beer. You can go to the restaurant for a meal. You’re going to buy your house, which is your biggest expenditure, typically close to where you work or live, unless you’ve got a job that’s moving you. That’s where you work and live. So in all cases, a lot of what you’re doing, what the internet has really done is actually allowed stuff to be brought to you versus you going out and finding it. So everything still manifests itself as hyperlocal. Your community, your friends, your kids’ school, the sports the kids play, the sports you play, everything is local. And so hyperlocal marketing is just a way of reaching a particular audience in a local. Now, what’s really interesting about the Web, the internet specifically versus traditional media, and traditional media, the more finite our audience is, the more expensive it becomes. So if you actually had a show that is very, very focused around investment professionals and it’s got a very small audience, you’re paying a premium by advertising there. On the Web, on the other hand, because it’s an auction, it’s the perfect market, it’s a perfect free market, you’re bidding against other people. So if there’s no bidders in a market, you end up paying less. And later on in the podcast, I’ll talk about some great case studies where the cost of media is typically 60 to 70 percent less than buying the equivalent national media.

 

Izach – 00:05:53:

 

Interesting. Okay, I’ve got a bunch of questions around LiveRetail, but I’ve got to ask a question on the title here on your podcast. So you’ve got your name and then it says, serial entrepreneur 5X, it’s $110 million. I’ve read your background. I know a little bit about what those exits were. A lot of our listeners are thinking about an exit, planning for an exit. Starting to plan for an exit or actually in the process of exiting their business. Can you just give us a little bit of overview of your exits? What they look like? How you structured them, what some of your takeaways were from that experience that you’ve had with really successful exits? 

 

Wayne – 00:06:36:

 

Cool. So I believe in a very simple concept of what I call the 3 Cs, contact, credibility, and chemistry. If you miss any one of those three, you’ll never do a deal. I’m not talking about deals of selling a widget or a milkshake or a car. What you need to do is have access to someone in an organization that knows you and likes you, you need to have credibility. They’re not going to risk their position in that organization to do a deal with you. So you have to either have case studies or other exits or other businesses you’ve built, or you need to be filling in a gap that you can work with them on. And then the final piece is the chemistry. If people don’t like you, they won’t do business with you. No matter how good the opportunity is. And so those three things are very interesting. So for us, if you look at one of the first deals, before we even came to the US, we went public in South Africa as part of a group of companies, and that was the same model. And it gave us some of the cash we needed to get. My number one goal in life was to become an American. I had seven goals in life. My number one is to become an American, greatest country on the planet, Bonn. And so when I, part of my stepping stones to get to that was to actually build the ability to do. The opportunity to move our company from South Africa to the US. And to do that, we had to be part of a public listed company because it’s almost impossible to get work permits and everything else. So that was step number one. And we actually did very well in that public listing. And we then did a management buyer to buy ourselves out, to break ourselves from that entity in South Africa. Glad we did that, gave us the autonomy. And then we ended up selling to a fairly nice sized portion to Omnicom Group, the largest advertising holding company. And that was phenomenal. Got to know the top guys of Omnicom all the way from the CEO. Worked very, very closely with Randall Weisenburger as the CFO, literally on a weekly basis. And from Omnicom, we did a deal with Jupiter Media Metrix, which was the largest data analytics company on the web. We invented the ClearPixel originally, which is what got them interested. And we had a whole bunch of different sequences. And each one of the deals was people we had done a deal with before that ended up in another entity and gave us the credibility to do it. Each time, it was really just identifying a gap and a pain point they had and something that was the new and unique for us to build that could be replicated at scale based on their organization’s unique abilities. In the case of Omnicom, they owned at that stage 1,870 ad agencies or different businesses across the globe that do everything from direct mail all the way through to traditional advertising across the BBO network, for example.

 

Izach – 00:09:15:

 

So you started those companies with the idea of solving a specific problem and a strategy of being able to sell to that buyer as a final outcome.

 

Wayne – 00:09:25:

 

Yeah, and it’s not really that bias. So when we see a gap that needs to be already streamlined, and advertising is a great example, because advertising is still gatekeeper-based. So every single brand has an agency that’s a gatekeeper. And it’s not really commoditized at the level of any other market that size. I mean, we’re looking at literally hundreds of billions of dollars of media spend and ad spend and media agency services. And it’s really never been automated. We’ve seen it automated on the web, but we haven’t seen it, the traditional advertising being automated. So there’s huge opportunity there to automate and make things more efficient and more productive. So we look at that and then we look at who the players are and we look at both the risk players that are at risk of being automated, which is obviously the WPGs, the WPPs, the Omnicoms, et cetera, because they’re making most of their money from selling FTEs, full-time equivalents, as they call them, paid for. So there’s a risk there. If computers replace them, they don’t have the ability to charge those amounts. So we saw those as opportunities. And then we looked at the companies that needed to optimize it. You know, the latest version of LiveRetail is very simple because there’s a huge portion of media advertising that hasn’t transitioned at the speed to the web that it should have. And because of, and the reason for that is the cost of ad production is so high. And so that’s made it harder for Google, Meta, Microsoft and all these other companies to actually get access to that media spend. So there’s a huge gap there. So that’s one of the reasons for the latest iteration is to automate that entire process. If we can reduce the cost of ad production to zero, and that’s our goal, we’ve done it, then suddenly it opens the floodgates for the media spend and we just take a small percentage of the media spend. So that business has been built specifically looking at those big entities as the strategies for exit. And there’s a bunch of smaller players. And when I say smaller players, they’re still multi-billion dollar companies like Sochi and those other companies that are in that market as well. They’re trying to figure out how to automate it.

 

Izach – 00:11:21:

 

So let’s get specifically into LiveRetail a little bit more. And then if we’ve got some time at the end, I want to ask a little bit about your tax planning advice because you had some really interesting things to say offline that I think would be super cool to talk about. If you’re willing to share them, but LiveRetail. In a nutshell, what does LiveRetail do? You just talked about it a little bit, but if you can give us like just the elevator pitch for LiveRetail and then I want to kind of break it down a little bit more for the listeners.

 

Wayne – 00:11:52:

 

So it automatically creates on-brand advertising. Pre-boil them. Sends them to the local entity. That operates under that brand. And allows them to use those ads for free. To post them to their social media pages. Or to buy media with those ads. Within two clicks at a budget from $10 to $100,000. So in a nutshell, we’ve reduced the cost of ad production for branded ads. Big difference between independent. And branded ads. Cost of ad production to Zero. And the reason is it costs us a few cents to build ads because of what we’ve done. And so what I mean by branded ads, everything from a franchisee, so. A Subway store to a Nissan car dealership, Honda dealership, message MP and not the auto parts store. There’s 5 .5 million businesses in the US alone that actually operate under the constraints of a brand. Shouldn’t use the word constraints because a brand is a huge value, but operate within the constraints of a brand. Or sell branded entity or sell branded products. So for example, your 7-Eleven operates under the brand of 7-Eleven, but will sell Pepsi and Coke products and… 10-gap products and everything else. And then you’ve got the Lowe’s and the Home Depot’s that will sell the Wolt and Whirlpool and GE appliances. Fridges and grills. And so in those cases, you’ve got two brands at play. And in the cases of… Things like Century 21 as a real estate group. You’ve got 86,000 agents operating within the brands of each Century 21 franchisee, which is their own brand. Which then falls under the corporate brand. So there’s really three brands. It’s the agent themselves who are a brand. It’s the office they work in with which is a franchisee, which is a brand. And then it’s corporate’s brand. So what we do, is we automate the production of ads. And it’s actually a lot simpler than anyone can imagine.

 

Izach – 00:13:41:

 

So, talk about a couple of maybe examples just to kind of make that a little bit more tangible because I’m going through my mind thinking about the Nissan dealership or Century 21, I think is a really interesting example for me because website closers is similar to a real estate. Brokerage model where we’ve got a corporate entity, we’re independent franchisees, we have our own brand office. And then really what I market is myself, my experience within the website closers organization and support. So talk about a couple of examples, maybe some success stories, how some of your clients are using the services. And then I want to tie that back to a question I have about how this could be applicable for e-commerce.

 

Wayne – 00:14:25:

 

Cool. So the easiest way of thinking about what we call a branded network. So if we take something as simple as Subway. So Subway, traditionally. Big brand they’ve spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars building their brand. They’ve got 20,000, 30,000 stores across the US. And there’s two types of ways that these brands provide marketing support. To each of their franchisees. So one franchisee may have one location, ten locations, five locations, whatever. At the end of the day, they either send them a brand guidelines book. Which that local franchisee then gives to their local agency to then produce the ads, which is a lot of manual process. And in fact, every one of those local agencies, s actually building the exact same ads with different price points, different offers. That it’s exactly the same. Subway only has about 37 products. They’re promoting, but every one of those 37 products is being re-entered by every local agency. Tens of thousands of times [inaudible 00:15:27] The dollar of cost. What I’ll take does, is we actually built an AI engine. The reason we built this is we were working with one of our clients. And I don’t want to mention the name, but within the LiveTechnology Holdings Group where the few come. And one of our other companies is one of the largest provider of corporate portal systems for their networks, big banks, financial institutions. The number one Forbes-rated insurance company on the planet uses our tech. And what it does is it’s these massive expensive portals that cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year. And what we found is they really add both. So they compete against the brand muscles. Competes against the brand muscles and the pyconines and all those other companies. But at the end of the day, they expect people to go in and build ads. And that’s part number two that these brands offer is these portals to build ads. But someone who runs a franchise doesn’t even want to go into the system and build ads. So what do they do? They give them [inaudible 00:16:21]to that portal to their local agency. Well, the local agency has convolected because they hate these portals because they’re restricted. And so the local agency ends up rather going and doing their own thing and putting the digital assets out of these portals and bullying the ads themselves. So at the end of the day the pollution, which is the PDF of the brand guidelines or the website of the brand guidelines, is solution number one that these companies roll out, or solution number two is going to invest in hundreds of thousands of dollars for a portal to give to these guys. We turned an entire model on this. We said, there’s really three things you need to build a solution. And we need to move away from expecting to be able to build their own ads. No one wants to build their own ads. What we need to do is have something that actually. Already pre-builds every possible ad you could want. And the reason behind that is if you tell someone to create a spreadsheet from scratch, it’s really hard and complicated. No one wants to create something from scratch. If you give them a spreadsheet and ask them to edit it, everyone can edit it. So the same with marketing. Instead of saying you need to go into the system and build an ad. You basically say to them, here’s your ad, run it or edit it. The model completely on set. So we built an entirely new business, massive competition to one of our other companies. Very hard to do. But we did it on purpose. Because we said if we can actually send every single franchisee a set of pre-built ads that they can rent. For free and we make no money. But if they do decide to run it, we get 10 % of what they spend. And that’s a bit of a gamble, but at the end of the day, what we found is there’s way more money of you remove the barrier and cost. To producing ads is way more money in the meter space. Instead of them spending $600 building an app. And then trying to spend a thousand bucks to run it. You’ve now limited who’s going to run ads. We now allow them to run an ad for 10 backs. We get one back. What we find very quickly, that 10 bucks becomes 200, that 200 becomes 600. Are we making 60 bucks? And we’re making it every single month. And we already have quite a few thousand franchisees local offices and local brands. So your question of how do we do it? What we do is to build the three components needed. What you need to know is how the brand guidelines are for that business. We need to have. Every single location of that business, every franchisee, every office if you’re a real estate every financial advisor, if you’re a financial firm, every branch, if you’re a bank. And then the third thing we need is what they want to promote. Well the irony is all of that’s on their website. So we built a crawler. To go to their website. Put all the CSS off their website, feed it into our own AI engine. Which analyzes the primary color, secondary color, tertiary colors. For every single one of those colors we get the posing color and the complementary colors we get the font styles, font sizes, relative sizes. Our AI engine builds in a matter of minutes an entire digital brand representation of that brand. It then goes and fetches every single stalk. And because we saw the business to Bing many years ago. It actually goes and fetches all of the storefront images from a combination of Google Maps and Bing Places. And it actually aggregates the content of every single store that’s already on that site. And then it finds what the scientist is promoting, pulls all the art out of the headlines, feeds it into AI to actually trim the headlines to right sizes that fits on ads. And pre-boots an entire matrix of ads. So if someone likes Subway is promoting six items this week. And they’ve got 28,000 stores. With one person and no major work, we can build every single one of those 150,000 ads for a few cents. And then we distribute it to every subway to run and they can click to run it or post it.

 

Izach – 00:19:55:

 

That’s fascinating. I guess one of the things I didn’t understand is how the media spend worked within that kind of large retail national franchise model, first of all. Which is why I didn’t have the idea to start your company. And, but that’s really interesting to think about. And I could definitely see why there’s a huge advantage to automating that and systematizing it and bringing down the cost. I mean, that just makes, that makes a tremendous amount of sense. What I’m thinking about is, and I’ll give you an example. I don’t know if it’s going to be applicable or not, but I run an e-commerce business that sells art work. What I found is that I target specific geographical niches of the country for styles of artwork. I have a part on my website for East Coast beach houses. I have a whole selection on the website for New England beach homes because I found that if you have a beach house in South Carolina, you want a picture of a pelican and a dolphin. If you have a beach house in New England, you want rocks and a beach and that type of New England scene. And so there is, you know, it is a print on demand, fully automated e-commerce business, but I have this geographical-based demand for certain products. And I’m wondering if there’s a way to advertise regionally for that business around that specific regional product set that I’ve developed.

 

Wayne – 00:21:33:

 

100 % it’s it’s actually very interesting because the minute you add location to the ad, the response rate goes up and the cost of media goes down.

 

Izach – 00:21:42:

 

And that’s been my problem. I’m trying to target these audiences, maybe on like Facebook ads. And I’m really looking for, you know, for one group of products, right? I’ve got, that’s like I said, that part of my website for these, this type of homes, I’m looking for, I just want to target North Carolina, South Carolina beaches, basically, Georgia, Florida. And I’ve got other products that are, you know, Northeast. I need Washington, Oregon State. But it’s pretty hard to do that with some of the social media advertising that I’m using.

 

Wayne – 00:22:12:

 

There’s a few problems you’ve got if you’re just using the systems natively. So if you’re using Facebook, using Instagram, using Twitter, using Google Display Network. You’re actually going to have to go in there and actually fill in all the audience buying. You’re going to have to upload the ads. And then there’s no way to automate the creative based on those ads. Yes, you can use the Facebook meta tools, but they really don’t work the way you want. You need a PhD to try and get them working. So what we have is everything is a creative matrix. So what that means is we’ve got all the entities down the vertical axis and what we want to promote across the top. So let’s just say you had, and each one of those things you can promote could be a collection of things. So it could be a bunch of wines, it could be a bunch of pictures, it could be whatever cool. So across the top and what our system does, it takes all the local entity stuff and renders the ads for each product across that local entity. So we put politicians that I’m talking about property tax is increasing. And they want to target 16 areas that actually has a picture of the town. In the ad which basically says property taxes have increased 16% in Melbourne. This is in the town in Florida. And the video plays, which is also customized. And so we’re getting engagements rates that are over 700% higher than the same ad running. Where it’s just saying, “probably takes a bite in Florida.”

 

Izach – 00:23:36:

 

Yeah, I get it because it’s immediately identifiable to your target audience. Yeah, it makes sense. 700% is a huge increase, but that does make sense to me.

 

Wayne – 00:23:48:

 

We’ve got an online university that actually discovered that there’s certain kids from certain schools are their best feeders to the universities in the different locations. So even though they’re online. They’re for specific reasons, they’re in Dubai, they’re in Europe, they’re in different places. And so the way they advertise is they actually take the locations, I mean, the schools as the feed down the left. And so they have these ads that basically say, hey, if you went, you know. Kids that went to this college find that, you know, through the university, you get the highest response rate. The minute you mention something that is close to someone’s heart, where they live, where they work, surrounding towns, the school they went to, the sports teams they love. The names of themselves or their family members. And you just mention your name, people look at the name of it, it’s just one of those things we do. So you can customize that, especially with art. It’s very cool. If you know, you know. As an example, we bought a flat charter company. Another tax reason for doing that, but we bought a fly charter company. And I looked at it and I was like, okay, how do we get people interested? So what we did is we targeted people who had traveled to Green Turtle Cay, to Andros Islands, to all the islands in the Bahamas. And we cross-referenced it, so across the top were the different islands they’d been to. With pictures of those islands. And then go on the vertical with the cities they live.

 

Izach – 00:25:12:

 

Yeah.

 

Wayne – 00:25:12:

 

Now the cost of that media was about 18% of normal media because no one’s bidding against. No one’s bidding for someone who lives in Melbourne, Florida. Who’s visited Green Turtle Cay. There’s no audience competition.

 

Izach – 00:25:26:

 

Yeah, it’s super niche, but you need those people specifically.

 

Wayne – 00:25:31:

 

Correct. And the cost of those ads were nothing. I mean, we’re talking about cents. And the ad then said, Green Turtle Cay, most beautiful islands in the Bahamas. Private flights cheaper than you can ever imagine. And it didn’t give the price on the opening. It then showed how six people flying on a private plane… From the airport. To green turtle is cheaper than the cost of a taxi to the airport. Fly there, catch the fairy, blah, blah, blah, and you know, did the whole thing. And that literally ended up booking up flights. Even though there’s no [inaudible 00:26:01] And it’s, you know, it was just to drive people to actually end that booking. So the booking system was all online. But the actual, they weren’t selling something to be shipped. They were just selling a service to you. And so there’s another very interesting one. Unilever, which owns X deodorant. And X deodorant has always been targeting 18 to 35 year old males. Now the old ads were all about. The guy would put on an axe and the woman would jump. And those are not politically correct. They were very-

 

Izach – 00:26:34:

 

I wear an axe in high school just because I was hoping that would work, but-

 

Wayne – 00:26:37:

 

Exactly. When did we all know? 

 

Izach – 00:26:40:

 

Yeah, I remember that 

 

Wayne – 00:26:41:

 

It rocked and the ads were brilliant people loved it. And they had this niche brand that everyone, you know, all the young guys will axe. Well, so they needed to actually build a registration database of the young males now to, to start getting some insights. So they decided to give away some PlayStation 5’s. So they’re running a national campaign. Which said, “Winner PlayStation 5. And they had the Axe branding and the ad then ran through with some PlayStation 5 images, etc.” So there were two brands of play. Multi-carousel image. Campaign working very, very well on the national level. The problem was the media buy was as expensive as you’d expect because they’re competing against Blizzard Interactive. And every game studio. They competing in Microsoft Xbox and PlayStation. That audience of 18 to 35 year old males that are interested in video gaming is expensive. They took our tech, they chose 236 shop rights. That they had some trade funds, some market development funds to use. And they basically fed the ad straight into the system, and our system went and picked up. The more that each shop writer’s ends storefront image as taken by the Microsoft cameras that drive around onto their site. Embedded that into the front page of each ad, added the town name. So instead of winner PlayStation 5, It had the axe branding and said, win a PlayStation 5 and then it had just an overlay. Saying, Morristown. And a picture of them all. So how are you going to imagine the consumer responds to that much higher? So they would start, you know, paging through the images of the carousel ad. So the comments and the shares went through the roof. But more importantly, the final image was register now to win. So it had nothing to do with local, nothing. And when I think about it,

 

Izach – 00:28:22:

 

This is so interesting to me because my wheels are just spinning right now. I’m wondering, if I’ve got a brand, even if I have a product that’s not doesn’t need a hyperlocal audience, but if I, if I can identify some propensity for a local audience, if I could just target that local audience, cause I’m, you know, that is one of the biggest things for my business and for the businesses of all the clients I represent is keeping the cost of advertising low and trying to improve your, your row ads. Um, and it’s very expensive right now, but adding a local element into the advertising could convince somebody to buy your product, even if it wasn’t necessarily a local product, that’s, that’s really fascinating.

 

Wayne – 00:29:02:

 

It’s also interesting because it’s not only limited to, to geography local. It can also be interested in, into think of the hierarchy, geography is just a hierarchy of national, of international, USA, states, counties, zip codes, cities, towns, etc. But it could even be interest-based hierarchy. You can put anything you want on this Y-axis. So say for example, you’re thinking about different demographics of wine drinkers. And across the two different wines. So, you know, we ran for one of the largest, in fact, I happen to be an investor it’s one of the fastest growing hard sells for companies in the US. And We got involved in it purely because we have a shareholding in it. What was very interesting about this is the first thing they did is they did a launch where they launched the hard sells in specific stores. So they were able to use that to buy radius around it for taste and that. And then they basically came to us and they said, “okay, we’re actually finding some interesting things. We’re finding that there’s an audience that is people that do yoga”. There’s an audience that people that do Pilates. There’s an audience that does. So they literally did the different interests. Kayaking, windsurfing, kiteboarding, and they literally down this Y-axis set up all these different interests. They chose some keywords for each one of those interests, and then they had the hard-siders across the top. And so the ads actually now were launched as kayaking with a picture of the hard cider. Images have been taken for kayaking or pilates and so they had like namaste this and you know in the case of the yoga and the ads went through the roof. We’ve got, for example, one of the fast food companies. We’re targeting vegetarians for one of the smoothies. Then we target vegan for one of the smoothies that’s actually vegan compliant. So the key, the matrix concept is huge. What you want to promote across the top, the X- axis. 

 

Izach – 00:30:58:

 

So interesting. 

 

Wayne – 00:30:59:

 

And then the Y-axis, you can put whatever the hell you want.

 

Izach – 00:31:01:

 

I wonder if it, is it correlation or is it causation, Wayne? You know, like, I guess my question is, let’s take the example of the hard, the hard, is it hard cider or hard seltzer?

 

Wayne – 00:31:10:

 

Hard seltzer, sorry.

 

Izach – 00:31:11:

 

But if it’s, so the hard seltzer, right? Am I more likely to? Is a kayaker more likely to buy your seltzer or is the fact that I’m just associating the seltzer with kayaking more likely to pick up somebody who’s kayaking and say, Hey, I want that seltzer. In other words, is it? Is it the ad that’s just, is the kayaker already going to? Interested in seltzer or does the fact that you put the kayak in the ad just makes somebody who kayaks decide to buy the seltzer? Does that make sense?

 

Wayne – 00:31:42:

 

Yes, I understand exactly what you’re saying. And it’s actually a very, very interesting problem to analyze. But so the concept of AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action. So to-

 

Izach – 00:31:50:

 

Say that again, AIDA? 

 

Wayne – 00:31:54:

 

And AIDA is an old system from the 1970s, um, which basically said to be able to market to some of the difference between marketing and selling cool, to be able to market, you need to focus on attention, interest, desire and action. In other words, you need to get someone’s attention first. If you don’t get their attention, they won’t even look at it now. Then the ad means be relevant so you get their interest. Then you need to have an emotional tie to get their desire. And that’s the one thing that misses, that most people in, ironically enough, direct mail, any performance-based advertising, miss the emotional tie. The automotive companies have figured that out for years. Tesla is a perfect example. No advertising, massive emotional tie. So moving from the interest to the desire is really hard. And in traditional media, moving from the desire to action is super hard. And on traditional media before the web. Before our phones and everything else, we’d be watching TV, we’d see something cool, we’d go, oh, shit, I need to go into the store tomorrow to go buy it. So the gap between the desire and the action was big. Internet and digital marketing compress that massively. You can get someone’s interest. And it’s the same thing, you know, if you advertise Bugatti’s, you know, high-end sports cars, you’ll get most people’s attention, a lot of people’s interest. And everyone’s design, you’re going to get no action because no one can afford it. So there’s eventually along those different ways that allow us to actually tweak it. You know, some people say it’s a funnel, that’s not really a funnel. It’s a sequence. I need to get your attention. I need to get you. I need to make sure I’m only getting the attention of the people I want. So to answer your question about the Kayaker, I get your attention if you’re a Kayaker, but I need to know that the Kayaking community was an audience. So typically as we launch the product we start analyzing. Almost like the lookalikes on Facebook, we start looking at what types of people like it. And we see these correlations. Now we can drive our media costs down. Because we can buy kayakers. In a certain city or certain area that would be interested in this product. So you can get multi-dimensional. And the key is the more, you know, as much people think that Facebook is completely oversold with inventory, no, they’re not. They’ve still got a huge amount of unsold inventory. So even if they’re getting paid more for their, the 18 to 35 year-old male is interested in video gaming on a national level. If you come in and make a bid for the 18 to 35 year old male in Timbuktu, there’s no one buying that. They’ll give it to you at the lowest price possible. Interesting concept. 

 

Izach – 00:34:18:

 

So fascinating. I’m like, uh… I want to go just rewrite all my ad campaigns right now.

 

Wayne – 00:34:24:

 

You just touch me.

 

Izach – 00:34:26:

 

Or maybe I just need to get on LiveRetail and have you help me figure it out.

 

Wayne – 00:34:31:

 

Absolutely. It’s free to build ads. And if you decide not to use the system to buy the media, you just download the ads that are built and use them. The buying of the media is super easy. It buys across all the channels automatically for you as well. And we keep 10% of that. And typically the response rate will be a minimum of 60 to 70% higher. Your total effectiveness of the ads in terms of the media buying will be cheaper. But more often than not, it’s around 300 to 500%. So.

 

Izach – 00:34:55:

 

So, okay, so let me just ask another question. Yeah, so let’s say I want to target, and I’m not sure this is applicable, but I’m continuing down this example that’s a little bit relevant to e-commerce. If I want to target a demographic in, you know, Kiawah Island, South Carolina. Can LiveRetail help me find those people in Kiawah and put my products in front of them? And how does it actually do that? Where do you find the Kiawah Island people? And how do you know where they’re looking?

 

Wayne – 00:35:34:

 

Yeah, so all that it does is it uses Facebook’s geotargeting as well as Google displays. Or when I say Facebook’s Meta, so it’s Instagram and Facebook. It uses Twitter’s geotargeting, and it uses Google’s geotargeting.

 

Izach – 00:35:47:

 

But can I expand that geo -targeting? Like slightly more broad. Could I say I want to find? Know, let’s is it, can I go by zip code? Can I say, I want Charleston, South Carolina to like Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, you know.

 

Wayne – 00:36:07:

 

Yeah, so you, in fact, if you look at, you know, some of the campaigns we have, we default based on the population density. So for example, something that’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, maybe a 16 mile radius, whereas something that’s in Bold Colorado might be a 27 mile radius.

 

Izach – 00:36:25:

 

I got you, because you have less people there than Scottsdale.

 

Wayne – 00:36:28:

 

That can all be done automated, or you can just turn standard radiuses, or you can turn specific sets of zip codes. You can say, I want to target all these people in these zip codes, or you can target people in a combination of counties. For some legal stuff, what we were doing is we helped some, personal injury lawyers. Sadly, it’s not something I really like, but I’m never going to stop people from using our tech. But what they do is they basically target people who have visited hospitals. It’s a mile radius around the hospital within a certain period of time. And it’s spoken about accident. And the reason we do that originally, it was they were talking about crash, accident, etc. So there’s warehouse injury where they target people who are members of the union. And they then target people are talking about, you know, some calamity or, you know, accident. 

 

Izach – 00:37:17:

 

How do you know that those people are talking about an accident?

 

Wayne – 00:37:21:

 

So Facebook gives us some good insights on the keywords. And so it allows us to target specific words that people are communicating about. And that’s what people are doing. Facebook owns Facebook Messenger, and they own WhatsApp as well. Although, WhatsApp, they say they don’t watch, which is talking about. I don’t really know how they gather it. So we don’t invent that side, we just use what’s already there. And for even the top agencies to try and use that information, it’s really, really complicated and PhD-based. We simplified completely. We set one set of carousel images, which can be videos, images or just mix of the two. We automatically render those and we do the buy across all of them. Based on geo, based on interest, based on keywords. We use our crawlers to get search engine optimized keywords from the websites to turn that into targeting using AI. So we’ve literally taken a lot of pain out of the process and we do it massively. So when we do it for you know, a brand. Take someone like a tire pro, you know, 600 odd locations, we don’t have to, we only do it once with all the targeting set for each type of tire, all the brands from Dunlop to all the different brands automatically in captured setup, and then we pre -build the ads for every one of those locations and they just click buy and they’re targeted.

 

Izach – 00:38:41:

 

Wow. Super interesting. Really fascinating. There’s so much going on right now, there is a groundswell of technology that is changing this industry and I think you’re at the forefront of it and it’s just really, really cool stuff. Couple other questions I had. So I want to talk about some specific success stories you’ve had with the company, but what is a retail media network? And just kind of describe what that means to you? 

 

Wayne – 00:39:12:

 

So yes, a retail media network. So if you look at companies like Walmart and Kmart before they went bankrupt and all of these companies made a lot of money with the biggest advertisers on the planet, which are the Procter & Gambles, the Unilevers, the Colgate-Palmolives, et cetera. These folks, Coke, Pepsi, all those guys, they spend money to advertise in these stores. So that money is typically referred to as trade funds, a different form of it called Market Development Funds, MDF, and some of it’s shopper marketing. The most prevalent really is the shopper marketing. This is money that the trade funds is based on what they buy, they get money back. The market development funds is they getting ready. They’re buying advertising in the store. So if you look at an end cap, a window king, a ceiling dangler within a Walmart, someone’s paid for that. And that is a media network. If you just took what advertising is spent on the Walmart screens, which are the digital screens within Walmart, that’s about eight and a half billion a year. That makes them one of the largest media companies on the planet. People don’t even realize that. So if you think about that, it’s huge. Now, Procter & Gamble spends almost $14.5 billion a year marketing. They’ve got about 210 odd brands, and then within each one of those brands, sub-brands. So Mr. Clean’s got sub-brands. Each one of those has a budget to spend through retailers, because you can’t buy Mr. Clean directly. You can only buy it through a retailer. And so retail media network is where someone like a Walmart has a whole bunch of locations, or a Lowe’s has a whole bunch of locations. So DeWalt, who advertises through Lowe’s, pays for each location. The thing about the digital version of the retail media networks is they literally became lowe’s.com., homedepot.com. They missed out the power of their location. So now you’ve got lowe’s.com competing against Amazon for those dollars. But of course, you can imagine, loads of companies don’t even get a fraction of the Amazon traffic. So Amazon’s getting most of those dollars coming from the big advertisers. But what Lowe’s has that is a competitive advantage over Amazon, is their 2,000th stores or 1,600 stores. So they need to set up a social media page, which they’ve done. And actually allow the advertisers because people are way more likely to follow Lowe’s in Stuart, Florida, then they ought to follow Lowe’s corporate. And the aggregate of all your local followers builds your own local social retail media network. So there’s a huge opportunity for these big retail groups to customize ads for DeWalt and Ryobi and Milwaukee and Whirlpool and Samsung and LG and Apple and Mr. Clean and you know, Huggies and a single brand you can imagine, they just haven’t done it very well. And so there’s a fairly big revolution that’s going to happen there. We actually allow, ironically enough, in LiveRetail, a brand. Sorry, a retail group can set up a retail leader network in four hours using LiveRetail. It doesn’t cost them a cent.

 

Izach – 00:42:14:

 

Unbelievable.

 

Wayne – 00:42:15:

 

What it does is it just imports everyone in their stores, builds the ads automatically for all the product brands that they have. And we’ve got most of the big brands already.

 

Izach – 00:42:24:

 

Super cool stuff, Wayne. Could continue to go on and on here. If there was one call to action that you have for our listeners to kind of take away from the conversation, what would that be?

 

Wayne – 00:42:37:

 

Look at where you want to be and figure out the five steps that you would have taken to get there. Always look. So you always begin with the end in mind. And then most people say, I want to be there. And then they start working towards it. The only way to be there is to imagine exactly where you are, what you did to do it. Then you look at what you did last month. Then you’re not going to watch you do the quarter before that. So you actually look back, you need to completely immerse yourself in believing that you’re there. And you need to then be able to work to the pieces to building it. It’s pretty much like a house. You don’t basically start off with sand and build bricks from sand. You end up looking at what the house needs to look like, and then you build what the rooms need to be, and then from the rooms you need to build, you know, the different windows and the doors and then from those doors. And that’s how you build a house. But we have a tendency when we build a business going, okay, this is my big idea. I’m just going to go forward and run. You need to figure out where you want to be there. So that’s the only advice I’ve given. We’ve made so many mistakes that we’ve learned more from mistakes and we learned from doing things well.

 

Izach – 00:43:36:

 

Yeah, I’ve got a little bit of that too. How can our listeners connect with you and what’s the best way to connect with liveretail.com?

 

Wayne – 00:43:51:

 

So you can go straight to liveretail.com and the entire site’s there. You can find your brand if it’s not there. Just enter your brand name. The crawlers will go out and onboard your brand and within 48 hours your brand will be there. And it literally is that simple. We also are doing a small capital raise. Anyone who is interested in that, within the library retail site, you can see it, it’s under invest, you can read all about it, you can see the track record of people, you can see what it’s doing and our goal is very simple, we need 200,000 businesses using it and it then ends up being a very attractive company for some other players.

 

Izach – 00:44:27:

 

Is the capital raise publicly available? Is there a minimum investment required?

 

Wayne – 00:44:31:

 

Yeah, it’s a RIG CF, so $200 is the minimum investment. Legally, I’m not allowed to say what I want the return to be, but I want people to do very well. Most of it is, you know, we in the first week of switching it on, we raised a good chunk of money just from people in the industry that have worked with us before. So that’s always a good sign.

 

Izach – 00:44:57:

 

That was Wayne Reuvers. If you’re looking for information on hyperlocal marketing and how Wayne’s team can help, head on over to liveretail.com. Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of The Deal Closers Podcast brought to you by WebsiteClosers.com. If you liked the show, be sure to rate us, write a review, and press the follow button to share it with your network. And of course, if you’re looking for help selling your ecommerce or technology business, be sure to visit websiteclosers.com. This episode was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Izach Porter, follow me on LinkedIn, and we’ll see you next time on The Deal Closers Podcast.