An Innovative Strategy for Using Data to Influence Behavior with Jim Harenchar, CEO at Response Marketing Group
In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray sits down with Jim Harenchar, CEO of Response Marketing Group (RMG). They discuss RMG's innovative "smart pixel" technology, which identifies and profiles website visitors by matching IP addresses with a comprehensive database of public information. The episode highlights the critical role of data in understanding consumer behavior and improving marketing strategies.
Have a guest recommendation, question, or just want to connect?
Go here: https://www.harvardmurray.com/exploring-growth-podcast
Connect on LinkedIn:
Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehmurray
Jim - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharenchar/
#ExploringGrowthPodcast #DataDrivenMarketing #ConsumerBehavior #ResponseMarketingGroup #SmartPixel #Bullseye #MarketingInnovation
Jim Harenchar
00:00:00
Our clients tend to be folks who are willing and interested in embracing technology. the other side of this, I'd be ignorant if I didn't bring this up, is, you know, when I when we present this a lot of times for the first time to certain clients, they're like, how is this legal? Right. This can't possibly be compliant. You getting there? You can't do this, right. There's no way that that that our attorneys will allow you to do that. And so you have a lot more hurdles to jump through.
Lee Murray
00:00:30
So every company has a web presence. And the goal is to build awareness and visibility to the right audience around what they're doing. Right. sometimes the tools we have at our disposal aren't enough to give us the direction we need to maximize that visibility. So the more access you can get to the right data, the less you're operating in the dark, and the more you will meet your buyers where they are in their buying journey. So this is very critical for B2C audiences.
Lee Murray
00:00:59
I think more so, as they can be much more difficult to understand and track than be to be. But it's also important for the B2B side. but today I'm talking with Jim Hinshaw, CEO of Response Marketing Group, and we're going to dive deep in the topic of utilizing data to influence behavior. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Harenchar
00:01:20
Thanks, Lee. looking forward to it.
Lee Murray
00:01:23
Yeah, this is a really interesting I don't I don't spend a lot of time on this topic. as much as I spend on messaging and creative and those kind of things, from a content side, but, you know, data is obviously very important. Data is very big driver in a lot of things that B2C especially do. you know, you have attribution, you have modeling, you have, you know, segmentation, you have all these things. So I'm excited to talk about, you know, driving behavior with data with you today. And so why don't we start by you just kind of giving us a high level of what you guys are about, what you do and who you work with.
Jim Harenchar
00:02:00
Yeah, sure. So Response Marketing Group actually in October of this year will be 38 years old. So. Oh wow. Yeah, we have been around for quite a while. we started, back in 1986 at a time when really the only two, what we'll call below the line channels for marketing were telemarketing and direct mail and RPGs. Value proposition at that point in time was, how can we take customer data that our clients already maintain to become more targeted with the effectiveness of our direct to consumer or B2B, marketing efforts? you had a lot of your above the line radio, TV, you know, outdoor, all of that. we never played in that space. we used the customer's data or purchased and acquired data to make marketing more effective. So a great example. if you remember, you're probably too young. But back. Back in that day, you would hardly ever go to your mailbox and not see some form of direct mail from a financial services company, right? we worked with hundreds of financial services companies in the 80s and into the early 90s, where whether that was a home equity line of credit, when that product became very popular, whether that was a credit card invitation to apply.
Jim Harenchar
00:03:22
What we did is take customer data and we said, look, if Jim Renshaw is your best customer, how do we model off of Jim based on whatever attributes seem to rise to that? To the top right, is that a presence of children? Is that a particular income or age bracket, whatever the case might be? So fast forward 38 years. we are still doing the same thing. the difference is now we have a lot more than two channels. Yeah. we've we've got quite a few. And so where we position our value proposition updated to today's marketing efforts are with all of the different channels where you can put your dollars. How do you, number one, identify what the best performing channel is? So really coming up with response attribution, understanding how to generate an ROI. And then, because we're, we're media neutral. So we don't, you know, we don't do media buying for clients. we're all about, leveraging data, and measuring, effectiveness of campaigns. So that's where we really plug in with clients in this day and age, across a broad spectrum of industries, both B2B and B2C.
Lee Murray
00:04:33
That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. and, you know, so what I thought we could do then is just maybe take a couple, a couple practical examples of what you've done in the past with clients and break those down. I know in our, when we were introduced, we were talking about, smart pixel technology that you guys have. and tell us a little bit about that technology, and then I'd like to you know, kind of learn how you utilize that with clients.
Jim Harenchar
00:05:00
Yeah. So Smart Pixel is the ability to be able to place a pixel in the header of a website, any web property. one of our clients may have, so that we can then anonymize. And I get people who roll their eyes when we when I use that word. But but folks that have an opportunity to identify who that website visitor actually is. over the 38 years we've been fortunate enough to build a large normative database of about two thirds of the US population, and into that database, we have put all of the publicly available information that we can get our hands on.
Jim Harenchar
00:05:40
So that can be surveys, registrations, warranty cards, subscriptions, that can be real estate transactions. That's DMV data. That's voting records. a lot of people don't realize just how much information is publicly available, either through direct purchase or license or whatever the case might be. That includes things like the US postal systems and CoA data. So, okay, we've got 220 million households with, upwards of 200 demographics appended based upon both purchase behavior and self-reported information. And so what Smart Pixel does is it is a proprietary technology that allows a combination of identifying the or the originating location of an IP, and a geolocation of an individual or a machine, a mobile device, whatever the case might be. we take that data that we're able to, to ascertain, we see Jim Bar at one, two, three Main Street. we look on our normative database and say, oh, yeah, we also have a Jim at one, two, three Main Street. We make that match, or we're not matching 100% of the site visitor.
Jim Harenchar
00:06:54
We're matching anywhere from 40 to 60%. But as we like to say, you know, historically you're matching zero. Yeah, you're working off Google Analytics data, which is which is good. But, you know, that's technology that was developed in 1997. And so we've come a long way. So placing a pixel and I know you you've probably been close is probably many in your audience. Have you know Google's been talking about the deprecation of cookies and how is that going to affect us. And, you know, kind of kicking that can down the road. And just recently they announced they've given up. Right? They're just they're concerned about the legal environment. They're concerned about regulatory environment. And so they're you know, now they're not backing off with cookies, as they've told us for the last four years they were going to do. the biggest difference, honestly, between a pixel and a cookie is that cookies are very easy to clear. A pixel is not, a pixel allows us to get a depth of information.
Jim Harenchar
00:07:45
And so effectively what we're doing is we're going back to our clients and said that, you know, last night at 9:00, this person, Jim Renshaw, who lives at one, two, three Main Street, who happens to be x age X income. Presence of children, owns a home, drives a Chevy Tahoe, whatever, whatever publicly available information we have on Jim Renshaw, plus all of the pages in the time date sequence that they were on the web page. So Jim landed on our page because he clicked on a Facebook post that we exposed him to, and he came in at 910. He looked at these five pages in this sequence. And so now we are providing our client this incredible set of understanding and intelligence that Google Analytics can't really match. It's it's great in the absence of nothing but a smart pixel technology. Now, with that combination of pixel and IP address, allows us to really kind of provide a full profile of who Jim is, what were the pages that he was looking at and the end goal of that? As you can imagine, Lee is now we can start to build segments of the population who's actually coming to the web page, right, and validate all of that media spending.
Jim Harenchar
00:08:53
That's going on because you sat down and you said, hey, I'm trying to identify African American women with children in households that make over $100,000. And you you may find you're getting 65 year old white males who make less than $75,000. And so you're not even getting the audience. And Google Analytics would tell you some of that, but not at the level of specificity, is what Smart Pixel will do.
Lee Murray
00:09:15
Right? Okay. So going way beyond Ga4 capabilities. and then are you so since you're not buying media, are you working with, your clients, ad agencies or are you working? How does that work? Like, you take the data, right. And you can segment it and do all these, these great things with it. Then what?
Jim Harenchar
00:09:38
Yeah. So the simple answer to your question is yes. So we provide a variety of services. While data is our bread and butter. we do have creative resources. So some of our what I'll call less mature clients who don't have a formal agency of record relationship, or maybe looking to us because of our specialty will turn and say, look, you've identified the audience, you understand the segment.
Jim Harenchar
00:10:00
Can you help us craft a set of messaging to go to this very particular audience that we're looking to target? others will say, Jim, we want RMG to have a seat at the table. We want you to meet with our agency, our internal team, and help us to understand how do we interpret the data that you're that you've collected so far, and then how do we enhance our creative capabilities? How do we look at our budget? How do we allocate that budget across the appropriate channel based on where we know, for example, the 35 year old with no kids is going to be versus the 65 year old empty nester is going to be. Right.
Lee Murray
00:10:36
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of overlap there when it comes to strategy. from what you're learning on the data and how it's going to be deployed for sure. okay. So let's, could you give us some some examples of how this plays out in the real world?
Jim Harenchar
00:10:52
Yeah, I'll give you I'll give you a couple examples.
Jim Harenchar
00:10:54
So, since the mid to late 90s, we've actually done a lot of work in the tourism industry. I was intrigued by the fact that if you think about tourism, I'll take my home state of Virginia. they spend a significant, you know, north of $20 million a year on trying to build awareness for the great state of Virginia. Yeah. and and get folks to come here. but in reality, apart from some primary and secondary research, no. One, the Virginia Tourism Corporation doesn't know if Jim Gerenciar by name actually steps into the state of Virginia. Yeah. and so what we want to do is help clients to understand that. So we saw the tourism industry as a natural for us. you've got so many of these entities trying to drive traffic to the website, so let's understand who they are. Is it aligning with the ad budgets and ad targeting that they're doing? And then secondarily, what are the other channels that we want to use to reach those individuals? Because there's a lot of different segments, right.
Jim Harenchar
00:11:51
The behaviour in the booking windows of the family with kids is very different than the empty nesters who can pick up tomorrow and be gone for two weeks with no strings attached. So we've done a lot of work in that space with some big names like Ritz-Carlton, where we really looked at their data to understand, what was the booking behavior of the most profitable, profitable segments of their guest population to a small little destination in Northeast Florida? That said, when we when we originally kind of gave them a profile of here's the people who are coming to your website, they looked and said, oh my goodness, where are the 18 to 34 year olds? Right. We've got so many great activities. We've got stand up paddle boards, we've got swim with the manatees, we've got state parks, we've got horseback riding. We got not far from the beach. Right. All these things, where are these individuals? They ended up taking our data. To your previous question, we sat down with the ad agency and they said, you know what, we need to create this thing.
Jim Harenchar
00:12:49
We've got a trail. We got this concept for a trail and we want to get it's craft brewers, it's craft tea manufacturers, it's antique shops and stores. We want to create this. What ultimately became the cool craft trail that had 17 stops on it and a map that, you know, really cool, colorful map they put on their webpage and then said, now help us find the people that, you know, the 18 to 40 year olds that are going to really be interested in this. And and we did that. We delivered back about 400,000 people in five key markets within a drive distance of Northeast Florida and help them to identify how do we how do we get the message out to these folks that the cool craft trail even exists?
Lee Murray
00:13:32
Okay, well, that's interesting, because that was going to be one of my questions as we dove into this more is, do you know, is it cart or horse first, you know, is it hey, we have the data. This is what we should do for a concept or we have this concept and, you know, let's go find the data to support that.
Lee Murray
00:13:46
We need to do this concept. So it sounds like the latter here where they have this cool craft trail concept, and then they're like, help us find the people that will most align with this concept. Is that, yeah.
Jim Harenchar
00:13:57
I would say in the answer in a way is both, right. Because we have we have some clients who say we know we have these assets, but we think that we have probably underutilized or under promoted them. And so help us to make sure that the the ad budget we're spending, the targeting that we're doing is correct. And we're seeing that traffic on our web page. Right. Can we validate that what we're doing is the right thing to the other side of it, which is looking at the data and saying, oh my goodness. You know, we feel like we have assets, but but we're not. Maybe we have not even thought about the right way to market those. And so, you know, let's create a landing page. Let's create an addition onto our website.
Jim Harenchar
00:14:40
Let's come up with a whole social campaign around this. So it does work both ways.
Lee Murray
00:14:46
Yeah. Because one informs the other. And then there's sort of a cycle that happens there. seemed like if we zoom out a little bit as you're talking, what this reminds me of is I just learned in our county that our sheriff's department has technology to read all the, license plates of anybody who comes in or out of our county. Yeah. And so they know who's here, right? yeah. And I think that's that's wild that they can do that. But it's it's great as a, you know, law abiding citizen. I think it's great that, we know who's here and what they're doing essentially, and what it could lead to. So it helps to mitigate a lot of, like proactive crime, you know, policing. And it makes me think of that technology for what you're doing. Is that you it's like you have this sort of area that you can, you can kind of fence off and say, you know, anybody who comes in or out of that area, we can know enough about them to market to them.
Lee Murray
00:15:41
And, and so, so, so your smart pixel technology is, similar to like a Facebook pixel, in the way that it works. But it's the it's it's different in that it is proprietary that you guys created this on your own.
Jim Harenchar
00:15:57
Yeah. And it it allows us to really kind of give our clients a much better view of the how are their ad campaigns performing. Right. Because we're embedding UTM strings behind images, behind links. And so now they can I mean, even if you just take an email, that's that's a highly creative email. You can look at that and say, oh, we thought that this was going to resonate a lot with people. And in fact, it didn't. Right. And so if we're going to do a revision of this, we may want to look at different imagery. or if we've got a, you know, click here box. And it wasn't getting a lot of activity. We can tell them that level of information. So yeah, I mean, I think, I think the pixel is in our mind, it's validation that where you are currently spending your money is in fact working.
Jim Harenchar
00:16:40
You're driving the audience you want to drive. And if not, a lot of our clients, you know, are using Ga4 as the the only measurement tool, so Smart Pixel presents you with an alternative to say, I can get a whole lot more granular. And I can understand now way more about who my audiences are.
Lee Murray
00:16:58
Yeah. That's amazing. That's that's such great technology. How long have you had this out?
Jim Harenchar
00:17:03
so we actually partner with we are not the inventors of it. We work with a partner who does, actually, the in 2004, the gentleman who developed it, created an abandoned cart widget that that was the inspiration for all of this. And the technology has advanced. And so we now partner with the, you know, original inventors of the product to use it in the applications that we use it in.
Lee Murray
00:17:29
Gotcha. And you have another product called bullseye. Tell us about that. Yeah.
Jim Harenchar
00:17:34
So you were just talking about isn't it is the license plate technology. Right. And so the ability to be able to identify those license plate and then marry that back to where people are coming from.
Jim Harenchar
00:17:44
Yeah. Bullseye really is, is kind of that on steroids. So building a geo frame, what we can do is when a mobile device passes inside of that frame, that polygon, which can be any size or shape, so we can frame, a concert venue, we can frame a region around a city, we could frame a state. There is nothing that is too small or too large to be framed. and so when that mobile device enters inside of that frame, if we have the ability for a cell tower to resolve to that individual device, then we match and marry the information off of that device that has granted us permission. So you think about when you download an app, right? One of the things you're ask is, you know, allow location tracking while you're using the app or all the time. and so as long as you have a web browser open or you have an app that you have granted location tracking, we have the ability to be able to identify that mobile device. And so, when we talk really about the customer journey, we're really excited about what the, the two technologies allow us to do.
Jim Harenchar
00:18:58
Right? Because now we can see that Jim Renshaw came to our website in March and April, clearly he was thinking about coming to the state of Virginia on vacation. And then when we have a geo frame up around an event and we see him there now, and that was in July, we're like, well, there's our customer journey, right? We understand the impact of serving him, advertising, building that awareness and what that roughly what that booking window or travel research period was until he showed up. And, you know, that's hard to beat. There's there's very little technology out there that allows you to truly close the loop to understand not just where are we in the consideration set, but we've actually booked a sale as a result of what we're doing. And so for our tourist partners. You know, they're all funded by primarily legislators or local funding sources. You know, occupancy taxes, those types of things. Now they can go back to those jurisdictions and say, we understand. First off, here's our target audience, and secondly, here's our effectiveness of being able to convert those individuals.
Jim Harenchar
00:20:03
Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:20:03
Yeah, that's that's really amazing. And you know, if you marry that with, all the other things you're able to do on and offline, you really can get a very full picture of what the customer is doing through there, through that journey.
Jim Harenchar
00:20:19
You can and I'll give you a B to B example, which we've used now in, in a couple, iterations for, for clients. And that is someone says, hey, I know there are five really big conferences in my industry, and my target audience is going to be at those conferences. So I'm going to geo frame the hotel. I'm going to I'm going to geo frame where the conference is being held. And if I've got 2 or 3 days, I'm going to get up, you know, somewhere between a 30 and a 50% match rate of those devices. now, again, I have to be able to know that that the device ID that I'm tracking and the data, the address in my data file is, in fact, the same person.
Jim Harenchar
00:20:59
and the second thing that makes bullseye a little bit more complicated than Smart Pixel is that the cell tower and the device have to resolve. And so where we run into snags, it's like we have some destinations that say, you know, I want you to frame our football stadium. you know, we've got, you know, take SCC football, right? Big deal down where you are. You know that, when you've got 85,000 people sitting in a stadium for roughly 2 to 3 hours, you've probably been there. You can't send a text, you can't open up a web browser. That's because the cell tower and the phone just don't resolve. I can't match that individual. But nonetheless, back to the B2B example. So now they have the ability to gather this information of known attendees who they want to speak to. They're going to now get a name and address, and they can then either send an SMS text to that individual to tell them, hey, come to our booth, visit with us while we're here at the show.
Jim Harenchar
00:21:50
Or as a follow up, they've got an address of these individuals. They can send out some sort of three dimensional mailer or, you know, a postcard or whatever. you know, we'd love to love to engage with you. And they know definitively that they were at that conference. So we've used that for a number of clients that are looking to be able to gather information or to augment their CRM.
Lee Murray
00:22:11
How many companies are using this technology, you know, more rapidly, because the more that we talk, the more ideas come into my mind about how it could be used on both applications B2B, B2C, and it makes sense that people would at least want to try it and see, you know, if this actually works. And I would assume if they tried it enough times and in testing that it would work and they would be hooked. so to me, to me, I mean, I would assume that all the big companies are using it because they are really wanting to see what's in the data, because they have a lot of other trends that they have to map.
Lee Murray
00:22:49
more so than just marketing. what's the middle market look like for, and even the enterprise market? I mean, is this what's the adoption rate on something like this?
Jim Harenchar
00:23:00
Yeah. So I would tell you that the reality is, even though the technology is about four years old, most people don't know about it. and, and and I would, you know, not to sound in any way prejudiced. I mean, I think that your, you know, your folks like Google, who have had a product which has been the, you know, de facto default for measurement. Most of our clients will still rely on that because it's what they're used to. Right? They understand how to read and interpret the data. Anytime you introduce new technology, there's always a little bit of a of a reluctance to embrace it fully. But those that have done so have been very pleased because our level of visibility is far greater than anything else that we use. So, I would tell you, our clients tend to be folks who are willing and and interested in embracing technology.
Jim Harenchar
00:23:51
the other side of this, I'd be ignorant if I didn't bring this up, is, you know, when I. When we present this a lot of times for the first time to certain clients, they're like, how is this legal? Right? This can't possibly be compliant. You getting.
Lee Murray
00:24:03
There? You can't do.
Jim Harenchar
00:24:04
This, right. There's no way that that that our attorneys will allow you to do that. And so you have a lot more hurdles to jump through. our folks at Marriott, you know, put us through the ringer and met with a lot of attorneys and a lot of compliance, and we had to make sure that we were, walling off US residents versus residents in any other location because, compliance with GDPR is much different than compliance from a US perspective. But but we're very, very aware of that. Right? So we have we have attorneys on our staff that are constantly monitoring what's occurring in state by state, compliance requirements. So, we're following that closely. But I would tell you that the bigger corporations recognize that there's a there's a bit of a landmine that you have to navigate.
Jim Harenchar
00:24:47
So it can be a 6 to 9 month process to go through legal, compliance, regulatory and procurement. so it's tends to be the smaller, more nimble that say, I got it right. I understand we've done our due diligence. We're comfortable with it. You're using publicly available information. They embrace it. They deploy it. They have no problems with it.
Lee Murray
00:25:06
Yeah. I mean, that brings up a great point about the good and the the good and the bad of having access to all of this, public data. I mean, it is public. So, you know, that's one thing. And I understand there's there's some companies that have much, much more regulatory hurdles than others. so I think personally, just looking at this sort of first glances, it, it does come back to what you're doing with it. Right. So what kind of ads are you putting in front of people? what kind of frequency, you know, is there, that you're of the ads that you're putting in front of them.
Lee Murray
00:25:42
Are you texting them too much? Are you? You know, I'm sure there's a lot of other ways to look at it, too. But but what's the good and bad side of this? I mean, how do you mitigate that other than just the regulatory?
Jim Harenchar
00:25:54
Well, I think if you look at the spectrum kind of of our clients, you have some that are very conservative, and the way they're using the data is more directionally and to validate. So, you know, they're spending a significant amount of money monthly, in digital ad buys. And so, yes, they can use ga4, but they're not going to get the level of detail that they would get from the products that we talked about. Gotcha. They may not take those names. So they've identified Jim Renshaw. They may not actually engage Jim Renshaw as a result of that. But if Jim is in their database and Jim has opted in now, all that's doing is enhancing the picture of Jim. We knew a little bit about Jim.
Jim Harenchar
00:26:39
He stayed in a hotel room with us once in Philadelphia three years ago. But apart from that, you know, we've got an email address and a terrestrial address, but we don't know anything else, right? We don't know if Jim has kids. We don't know how old he is. We don't know what he makes, so on and so forth. So the conservative client is opting to use it to to validate and to enhance the, the profile of that. The more aggressive client is saying, I want to engage with these people. If if I know that Lee was inside my football stadium or he came to my concert last weekend and I want to promote him, other concert events that are occurring, the aggressive will say, I'm going to use SMS text as long as I'm clearly allowing him to opt out to any further messaging, and that would apply to email as well, right? Our advice to clients is, as long as you have an unsubscribe and an opt out, you have the opportunity to engage with that individual because they've granted you that permission.
Jim Harenchar
00:27:36
and, we in Smart Pixel, for example, there's very clear and conspicuous information that your site experience is being tracked via a pixel and an unsubscribe should you choose to unsubscribe. I mean, we're all now used to that pop up. I think there's hardly a site that you visit that you don't get right. The pop up. I found it fascinating that Deloitte did an analysis in 2023. So it's now almost a year old to understand what behavior people took when the pop they were exposed to the pop up, 82% do absolutely nothing. They just ignore it. They neither reject it nor accept it. and so that's implied consent basically. And so we're offering we're operating under implied consent as well following this, you know, the state regulations that apply. so I would tell you that that's kind of the spectrum, right? You have the conservative that's using it for validation, and for greater visibility. And then you have the more aggressive that's saying I want to engage with these people. And in some cases, all you're trying to do is get them to opt in to an e-newsletter or opt in into an offer so that you then are fully compliant and doing whatever it is that you want to do and engaging with that individual.
Lee Murray
00:28:45
So I'd be remiss to ask if you, you know, how much you work with law enforcement agencies or, you know, maybe political agencies. Does that come up at all?
Jim Harenchar
00:28:56
Well, we we do not work with political. There are firms similar to what RMG does, not identical. And that is their sole area of focus. Sure. obviously we're living in that space right now. And so think about, you know, pick a candidate at a local level or a national level, the ability to geo frame a rally. And now all of a sudden, you know, who the you know, likely someone's there because they are a follower of that, of that candidate. And you can capture that information and then engage with those individuals. So yeah, there is there's a whole market. We're not in that space. that, that does just that from a political perspective.
Lee Murray
00:29:35
And what about the, police or state.
Jim Harenchar
00:29:39
Yeah, that that is something that we've not we've actually never had any inquiries.
Jim Harenchar
00:29:43
We've never reached out to them to, to gauge their interest. I would tell you if something that I didn't expect to lead, in terms of potential industries, and that was a company that builds bridges, tunnels and toll roads. Okay. And they got on our radio, on our radar from a referral, from a friend who said, I think these guys would be very intrigued by what you're doing. And the more we talked, the more it was a great fit. What they were trying to understand is owning those types of assets. What happens if there is a construction project going on, and folks who use your tunnel are not going to be able to go through it for 30, 60 days while that's occurring, where are they going instead? And how can I message them so that I don't have runoff? or I don't have some amount of, of of attrition because those people have found a different way or vice versa. Right? Yeah. Understanding the person that comes right up to a point at which in the next half mile, they got to pay a toll and they exit right.
Jim Harenchar
00:30:41
And they go a different way. And so I in my mind, I when I was thinking about the technology that wasn't an application I ever thought of.
Lee Murray
00:30:50
It's super interesting. Yeah. I would never have thought of that either. and I think what my what my mind goes to almost immediately is evidence, right? how can these, these tracked instances of, you know, Lee Murray was in this stadium at this time? You know what I mean? Like. Yeah. Yeah. And, and and using that as a point of evidence. So that's why I think that law enforcement would be so interested in, in knowing it for validation. And of course, there are, there are hoops that to jump through to to qualify that as evidence or not. But that's where my mind goes.
Jim Harenchar
00:31:25
Yeah. Yeah. Well for sure. And, and I think I'll give you a spooky example, although I should have told you earlier when you mentioned, you know, how people feel about compliance and all that.
Jim Harenchar
00:31:35
You know, I have a client who The first time we introduced Smart Pixel, they called it Creepy Pixel for the first six months. but my my son and I were on college tours, and we happened to be. I won't name the university, but it was a university in the Southeastern Conference, and we're sitting at a football game. And while probably somewhere between the first and the second quarter, he gets a text message from a competing university who had Geo framed one of their competitor schools to say, you know, you really ought to come look at XYZ. And I was like, wow, that's that's pretty impressive, right?
Lee Murray
00:32:12
Well, impressive, but aggressive too. Like you're doing it while he's sitting there. Maybe later, you know like not so obvious about it.
Jim Harenchar
00:32:18
Right. Well, you'll find I think a lot of us don't realize what the application is. The technology has, as I said, been around for a while. You know, like I was at a football game not that long ago.
Jim Harenchar
00:32:28
And at halftime, I think I got a text message saying that, you know, if you show up at the bookstore now and present this coupon, you get 30% off of a hat or a jersey or a t shirt or something like that. so, you know, a lot of people have been using it. They've been they've been focusing on the anonymous side. Right. So they know that there is a device with this mobile added in our football stadium or in our town, we don't know who or what or anything about that individual. We just know definitively the device is there. So all we have to do is send a, personalized or as we call a dumb ad, right out to say we're just trying to spark behavior. Yeah. so I think a lot of folks and it happens all the time on Waze. So if you're ever driving somewhere and you stop at a stoplight and you get a while, you're stopped at that light, you're presented with a pop up for McDonald's, who's who's offering a two for one on biscuits.
Jim Harenchar
00:33:20
Right? Yeah. That's how that that technology is being deployed.
Lee Murray
00:33:24
That makes a lot of sense to me. And it's relatively benign. you know, the implications there, you know, could go any way. But I see that, as you know, you're here doing this thing. Have you consider that it's almost like being in the checkout line at target? There's an impulse buy that could be made on your way. all that kind of stuff makes total sense. I think the more complicated or more strategic applications, they take a lot more thought as you look at the data and you and you understand your audience and you already have, knowledge about how they, how they behave.
Jim Harenchar
00:33:58
Well, what I guess when called an argument, I would say what we would, we would like to point out is that some people might say that Waze pop up from McDonald's is invasive. And and I would probably agree with you. Right. I'm sure they're making money, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Right. Sure.
Jim Harenchar
00:34:15
what I would argue is that our technology, I hope, allows our clients to be far more informed. And so when you are presented, whether that's a pop up ad of which we don't have a lot that do, but any type of then investment that that client is making going forward is, is much more educated by validating who their audiences are. And and logically, you know, I've become now an empty nester with my youngest off in college. And so our behaviors are going to be different than they were ten years ago when our kids were in their early teens. Right. And so, you know, we've long had research and surveys that indicate that people do not find that invasive if in fact, it's relevant and informative and something that they can use.
Lee Murray
00:35:01
Yeah. Agreed. this has been a great conversation. and I in our, meetup originally, I think you mentioned you had an example of working with Augusta, Georgia, and trying to understand who's coming, coming to the Masters. Is that the bull's eye of technology you're talking about? Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:35:18
Can you talk about that example?
Jim Harenchar
00:35:19
Yeah, absolutely. So, Augusta, you know, for years and years has, has, you know, that first week in April is, kind of their opportunity, you know, for the world to come to, to see them and to learn more about Augusta. And anecdotally, they had a pretty good sense of who that audience was, but they weren't sure. And so the other thing they wanted to understand, and just to clarify this, our technology is not made to come up with an economic analysis, right, to understand what what visitors, what the visitor spend is what we're trying to just identify what has been anonymous visitation. And so in this case, we geo framed a number of areas the heavy retail and restaurant area, the heavy lodging area, the areas around the golf course themselves, with the intent for Augusta to not only validate again who they anecdotally in the past had thought, but now to actually get some clear information on, for example, what percentage of folks were coming from the northeast.
Jim Harenchar
00:36:17
Right. So when we looked at that data, we found that, you know, north of north of 35, 40% was coming from New York, new Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut. So therein you present an opportunity for follow up engagement to go out to any of these individuals to say, hey, you saw us in the spring, you ought to come back and see us in the fall. We've got all these festivals and events. If you're thinking of of retirement, relocation, you know, our property tax are lower, our real estate's lower. All of that. And then for locals now you're validating a whole audience of locals that that, you know, enjoys spectator sports. And so for, that particular fall after we built that frame, they were hosting the US, Ironman competition, international. Sorry. And so they had a whole host of people that clearly had, kind of identified themselves as interested in sports. And so now they would go out to that local group. So and you can segment the data based on, you know, zip codes and states and all those other types of things.
Jim Harenchar
00:37:19
And so, hey, you know, we're hosting this. We'd love to have local people out supporting the athletes and to show up, show how great Augusta is. And they engage those locals on a completely different strategy then those people that lived in New England, and then we're only there for a day or two days or five days, whatever the case might be.
Lee Murray
00:37:38
Yeah. That's awesome. You know, as I'm thinking through this, how much do you work with the, with the mid-market companies or small companies versus enterprise?
Jim Harenchar
00:37:49
I would say mid-market to small is probably about 60 to 65% of our client base.
Lee Murray
00:37:54
Okay. Yeah. And I'm wondering, you know, because I'm thinking of clients that I have right now, I could refer you to and, and, and I can see the application in their businesses. how would someone think about the pricing structure for bringing you guys in and looking at their, their data? And, you know, because I think there's like you mentioned, using to validate is such a great way to start if you already have data.
Lee Murray
00:38:23
but it seems like it's really up to our imagination of how we could use this technology.
Jim Harenchar
00:38:28
Absolutely. I mean, I think there's opportunities that that no one's even even thought of, quite honestly. And, you know, the, the, the bridge client that I was mentioning, you know, would have been one that, you know, if you asked me to list 50, it would have been 54th. Right? So yeah, I would have never thought of that. But to your point, so there are similar technologies out there offered by other companies. The difference between us and everybody else in the industry is no one else delivers back a name and address, and all of the demographics. What they're doing is anonymous location tracking so they can tell you, for example, there were, you know, 10,000 people that came to our minor league baseball stadium today, but they don't know who that is. So that's our big differentiator. And and I feel a.
Lee Murray
00:39:07
Pretty big, pretty big one.
Jim Harenchar
00:39:09
It's really big.
Jim Harenchar
00:39:10
Yeah. and and our price point really we tend to engage early at a startup to say, let's do a 90 day proof of concept. We're going to make it very cost affordable for you to do that. And, and you know, like that we're looking at something in around, you know, the 12 to $15,000 range. Right. For for you to, to try out our technology if the end of 90 days you don't like it, you don't feel like it brought value to you. Then we understand. Hopefully we'll still remain friends. We have not had a relationship that didn't exist beyond that initial proof of concept.
Lee Murray
00:39:43
I think so, right?
Jim Harenchar
00:39:44
Because everybody's like, oh my gosh, this is a wellspring of data that I never even knew existed. Number one. And yes, it's validation, but it also presents that opportunity for me to engage with a whole audience. I'll give you another, another a small a small destination in Georgia, was using our technology. They decided they wanted to launch Restaurant Week.
Jim Harenchar
00:40:04
Well, within our demographics that we provide, there's all sort of self-reported information and things like they love cooking, they subscribe to cooking magazines, they're into exercise. So they were like, well, let's go back and pull all of the data that we've been able to capture over these last six months. Let's make sure that we send an email to all those people that have expressed that kind of self-identified information. They did, and got a 37% open rate on the launch of their Restaurant Week email. You know, perfect application of something that is not viewed as intrusive because, again, you're taking self-reported information and presenting that relevant information to an audience.
Lee Murray
00:40:41
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, this has been very eye opening for me. And I'm it's going to it's got my brain turning, you know, because there's so many applications. It's definitely going to be in my mind now for sure as I'm working with clients and thinking about it, you know, through the prior journey. It's it's all it's, you know, it's almost to me like using ChatGPT and not using it, like once you turned on to it, it's like, well, we have we have the ability to do this.
Lee Murray
00:41:07
Why would we not do this?
Jim Harenchar
00:41:08
Right, right. Well, you know where you live. I referenced the cool craft trail, you know, and at one point in time, you know, that's that's, you know, Georgia right there in, in, DeLand. And it was the inspiration from they and their ad agency looking at that data and saying, well, there's a real opportunity here. We know we have assets that that meet that audience. Shame on us. Right. And the and the board saying, yeah, not only that. Let's talk about, you know, our state park and let's talk about our airboat tours and everything else. yeah. We've we've not done a good job of reaching that audience. And so that created a great opportunity that they just had overlooked.
Lee Murray
00:41:48
Yeah, I like it. You know, why try and reinvent something when you have assets that you can, lean into. So. That's right. That's awesome. That's right. Well, thanks for being on the show.
Lee Murray
00:41:57
This has been very enlightening. And, if I want to send people your way, where do I send them?
Jim Harenchar
00:42:02
Yeah. Please do. So actually, what we've constructed is a link for folks that are, fans of your podcast. it's, you know, rmg, USA, backslash exploring growth. Awesome. so, like RMG Robert Mary George USA, backslash exploring growth. So that's.
Lee Murray
00:42:23
Great. Yeah. We'll put that in the description. And thanks again. This has been great.
Jim Harenchar
00:42:27
Wonderful. Enjoyed it.