In the final episode of season 2 of our 10x10 sessions, Caspar catches up with an old friend from the Shazam days, Greg Glenday. Now CEO of digital out-of-home ad network, Lightbox, Greg is paving the way in one of the oldest forms of advertising, bridging the gap between traditional ad inventory and an always-on camera strategy.

They chat about: 

1. Integrating AR into the Shazam app
2. Reimagining traditional media inventory with AR
3. The power of AR for DOOH advertising
4. How Lightbox and DOOH how to evolve during the pandemic
    

The conversation: 

 

 

Greg’s journey into digital out-of-home

We asked Greg what led him to DOOH and Lightbox after his tenure at Shazam: 

“Yeah, I'm so glad to be, you know, getting the band back together, so to speak with you and the Zappar team. In much different circumstances this time. So I've been in advertising, sales, media for almost 30 years, across a couple of different types of companies from media and entertainment, live events into mobile apps where we started working together when I was the global CRO at Shazam, to launch our product around AR and visual search and sort of the new phase for Shazam. And then I found myself now in out of home, which is the world's oldest advertising medium.” 

“So, you know, pretty easy to innovate here, in the sort of the oldest, signs on a wall. And so, yeah, we've been here three years and really try to lean into digital out of home innovation and led me back to you and to Zappar and a completely different strategy for AR.” 
 

“We added a camera almost as a lark just to kind of, you know, for album covers and things like that so that you could do a visual search, pretty easy to do. And then the advertisers started asking about that and saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I've got a print ad’.”

 

Integrating AR and Zappar into the Shazam app

Speaking on the strategy for Shazam in the early days and the challenges faced when integrating AR into the Shazam app, Greg mentioned: 

“Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I'm working here with some of the team from Shazam on the ad op side. And, we were talking about the fact that this really isn't the same playbook we ran at Shazam.”

“So even though we're working with the same partner in AR, it is from a completely different approach strategy. You know, we were solving a problem at Shazam because one of the things before WebAR was how do you get people to do this at scale without having to download something separately?” 

“There were all these challenges that AR was facing to become mainstream and scale. And because Shazam had a billion downloads, we had already solved that problem. So most people knew to hit the big Shazam button, which then connects you to audio in the real world.” 

“We added a camera almost as a lark just to kind of, you know, for album covers and things like that so that you could do a visual search, pretty easy to do. And then the advertisers started asking about that and saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I've got a print ad’.”

“Can I send someone to my website from the print ad? And we said, sure. So we started doing that. Not very interesting. And that very quickly evolved to what else have you got? What else can you do? What else can we do with this visual search if we want to bring a poster or, you know, a piece of paper or even a TV ad, how do we bring that to life with Shazam through this camera app?” 

“And that's where we found you guys and said, Oh, we can do all kinds of experiences. It's really if you can think of it, we can make it happen.” 

 

“And what we wound up doing was having real success with bringing packaged goods and things like that to life as consumers brought them home. Advertisers were really keen on continuing that conversation in the living room..."

 

Shazam: a change in strategy

On talking about Shazam, Greg recalls how his team thought the opportunity for AR and visual search would be different: 

“When we launched Shazam. I don't know if you remember this, but I had these great plans to, you know, we were essentially going to make our TV advertising, a way to communicate with the TV ads, right?” 

“In these 30 second TV ads, you point your phone at the ad and then it's going to jump onto your phone, and the creative continues. And all this. That was my idea. Well, if you look at the success we had, it was not TV ads.” 

“It was literally taking packaged goods, right? We had diapers, we had Lay's potato chips, we had Bombay Sapphire Gin, we brought the bottle to life. So literally our plan was for me at least to bring things like TV ads in the real world to life visually.” 

“And what we wound up doing was having real success with bringing packaged goods and things like that to life as consumers brought them home. Advertisers were really keen on continuing that conversation in the living room, right?”  

“When your bag of potato chips can all of a sudden come to life with this incredible animation and you can enter a contest, I still talk about the thing we did with Corona, where you know the beautiful package of the tropical island. The Corona box comes to life and you can win a vacation to go to that place, and it's like getting your head around something like that.”

“But now we have the problem of uninspiring creative and, you know, where do you take people when they want to engage with a digital out of home ad? And that's where the idea of, of course, an AR experience is something that would be very special to these advertisers.”
 

“All of a sudden we are now on par with all of the other interesting things that advertisers are doing across the board, TikTok and things like that. Now, all of a sudden out of home is just as interesting and, you know, just as compelling for the brands.”

 

The opportunity for AR and DOOH  

We then asked Greg about the opportunity for AR and digital out-of-home advertising, and how he sees AR playing its part: 

“Well, the timing is great because I've spoken to probably two dozen advertisers in the last two weeks since we announced this, and so many people are interested in it. The incoming calls are very similar to what happened with Shazam.”

“Really the cool thing about out of home and the reason I joined this is I spent my whole career in ad-supported media right, where advertising was a necessary evil to keep the product alive, right?”

“Like, here's this content, and we're so sorry, we're going to interrupt it with ads to pay the bills, and it's just such a weird way to interact with consumers, especially now. So what I love about out of home is it's an ad intended media like our screens and our kiosks are built for advertising like we're not pretending to trick consumers.”  

“These are beautiful ads, and the more beautiful and the more engaging they are, the better they work. So what's the next logical step now that everyone has a device in their pocket? What's the next logical step is what do we do when somebody wants to interact with that ad?”

“There are no rules in OOH, we can run an ad for five minutes. And if it's got a compelling reason for somebody to take out their phone and interact, that's where you come in. And that's where it makes our ads.”

“All of a sudden we are now on par with all of the other interesting things that advertisers are doing across the board, TikTok and things like that. Now, all of a sudden out of home is just as interesting and, you know, just as compelling for the brands.”
 

"So very quickly people started pushing the envelope on the creativity and then they said, OK, well, how do we get even more interactive? How do we gamify this? What can we do? Can we do something like AR?" 

 

Evolving DOOH during the pandemic 

But, it wasn’t all plain sailing, we also asked Greg about how the pandemic had affected digital out-of-home: 

“They say necessity is the mother of invention, right? So in the darkest days of the pandemic, which you know, we hope are well behind us, but it's hard to even think of what that spring/summer of 2020 was like.” 

“But essentially we've got 5,000 screens in the United States. They all went dark, right.” 

“People were locked at home and our media company essentially went dark. We turned everything off. So that's not great for revenue when you don't have them on.”

“So we quickly started thinking about OK, coming out of the pandemic, what's the world going to be like? And we diversified our screens from just shopping centres to WeWork, AtWorks and we're in all the WeWork screens.”

“So very different set of advertisers. And then the most interesting product we launched at the end of 2020 was what we're calling Lightbox Unlimited. Essentially taking a problem of empty storefronts in big cities, right? Companies that, you know, restaurants and things like that maybe have closed down and, you know, taking that blight of an empty window front on Fifth Avenue and using high lumen projectors.” 

“We have a partnership with a wonderful company in Canada that has high lumen projectors and intellectual property around a special film that essentially turns an empty window front into a screen.” 

“So now an advertiser, like Disney or Ford can have a 24 hours a day, 100% share of voice on a window in Manhattan or Los Angeles or Detroit, wherever they want to be. We sign a short term lease with the landlord, and all of a sudden this empty storefront that maybe had a poster in it and didn't look so good. All of a sudden is now beautiful with, you know, you name it, we can come up with it. So we've got a creative studio to help launch that. And very quickly, we realized that this is a creative problem, not an advertising problem.” 

“Companies would come to us and say, Hey, we want this location, but we don't know what to do. We don't have anything that runs 24 hours a day. So we help them with concepts and ideas.” 

“And it's become the most fun thing that as a sales guy in my DNA, it's the most fun thing to pitch because it's essentially the sky's the limit.” 

"So very quickly people started pushing the envelope on the creativity and then they said, OK, well, how do we get even more interactive? How do we gamify this? What can we do? Can we do something like AR?" 

"And you know, the first four or five times I heard that in a meeting, that's when I said I'd better call my friend in London and get this thing and get the band back together..."

 

That’s a wrap...

As this is the last in our series of 10x10 sessions we wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to all our amazing guests (yes, all 32 of them!). It’s been truly inspiring to hear all their stories and highlight the part they’ve played in advancing immersive technologies and taking them mainstream. We hope that, in some small way, we’ve been able to inspire the creators of tomorrow, and take our mission to democratise AR, one step further. 

Lastly, we’re hoping to get every 10x10 episode up on Spotify before Christmas, so you can listen to all our guests talk about XR, while you’re doing the Christmas shopping, making Christmas dinner, or maybe even going for a run...who knows. 

Until next time, see you in 2022!