What’s your current position? How long have you been in this position?
CEO, since day 1!
What is a typical day like for you?
I try to minimize context switching so a single day for me is usually homogenous. For example, I might be in eight back-to-back 30 minute meetings to cover monthly 1on1s with team members on a single day. Or I might have traveled to our London office for 4 days and will have non-stop client meetings for the whole tripe. Rounding things out, a typical week for me is a mix between strategy, product prioritization, senior client relationships, and general business operations.
How have you seen digital out-of-home technology change over the past few years?
Like most technology, it is always getting incrementally better - in this case, the bigger changes come with education and usage more than the technology itself. We built Vistar 8 years ago, and it is really the larger adoption of users in these past years and massive scale that has been reached (and continues to grow in programmatic OOH) that now drives innovation in new features, workflow improvements and other tech changes to make clients’ lives easier..
Can you tell us about the most interesting campaign you’ve gotten to work on?
I love seeing campaigns that take advantage of the unique capabilities of programmatic. We have some news broadcaster clients that run “tonight and tomorrow” tune-in promotions, getting creatives that react to breaking news up immediately to promote viewership. Tapping in to the flexibility and quick activation of programmatic combined with high-impact formats like billboards is incredibly impactful.
What's your favorite thing to do when you’re not at work?
I like being outside and if I had the luxury, I’d be on a beach (a little hard in NYC).
What is your favorite movie/TV quote?
“Expect the unexpected”...”Take it outside”...”Be nice” - Dalton, Road House, 1989
What was your favorite childhood book?
Catcher in the Rye
Tell me about your experience working with Lamar?
I first met Ian and John about 6.5 years ago. We were introduced by an agency partner. At the time, Vistar had zero billboard inventory on the platform; we were working with place-based media owners only. Given the unique attributes of digital billboards and the massive scale of the businesses at the top of the sector, partnering with Lamar was a crucial moment for Vistar and was the catalyst for the next phase of growth in programmatic DOOH. Our engineering teams worked closely together for months to launch the first programmatic billboard campaign in the world. Since then, we have scaled our partnership in revenue and created the vanilla standard for programmatic OOH advertising globally.