Intersection Purpose Driven Marketing Accelerates with CEO Chris Grosso

Intersection, an urban digital out-of-home advertising company, is embarking on a bold purpose-driven marketing initiative to make cities more environmentally friendly. According to Chief Executive Officer, Chris Grosso, Intersection, “is focused on three things as it pertains to sustainability. The first is the core piece of our business to support public transit. The second is to reduce our own footprint and the third is increasing brands and advertisers who want to align with sustainable products.”

To meet each goal, Intersection has been solidifying relationships across the board. For goal one, “We work with government agencies that help people do public mobility in cities,” he noted. Grosso estimates that Intersection prevented 1.2 billion pounds of CO2 emissions, according to the American Public Transit Association fact book. This was achieved by “getting people to take mass transit and micro mobility things like bike share and the like. We support those businesses by providing real time transit information, way finding, transit shelters, as well as generating revenue through advertising.”

In addition, according to Grosso, “We've provided more than a billion dollars in payments to municipalities over the last 10 years, most of which to support public mobility. So, by supporting public mobility and public transit that's a great way to drive sustainability and making cities more sustainable and help the environment.”

For goal two, reducing Intersection’s environmental footprint, “We put together a cross functional sustainability team to look at ways to reduce our carbon emissions and that includes things like reducing or transitioning our electric usage to clean sources as well as starting to test electric vehicles for our own vehicle fleets to support all of our infrastructure.”

With goal three, to increase brands and advertisers who want to align themselves with sustainable products, “We've identified a broad set of sustainable products for advertisers to sponsor. That can be things like electric and hybrid buses and clean electric power trains that our transit partners have in the streets, solar powered bus shelters that we deployed, bike share stations and even EV charging stations. Taking products that are clearly sustainable and environmentally friendly and giving advertisers and brands the opportunity to sponsor them and be associated with them,” he stated.

The main objective is to support public transit in cities, “which is a core piece of our mandate, getting our own house in order, by reducing our own environmental footprint and also helping brands align with sustainable products,” he stated.

With advertisers, Intersection seeks the right fit for each company and, as more companies and agencies are interested in sustainability, the time is right for action. Grosso explained that, “I was on the phone with one agency head yesterday who said that sustainability is a huge priority and they need these kinds of products in front of them. So it's actually being driven by the advertisers. We think it's the right thing to do, but the market is driving this and they're telling us that they want this.”

For Intersection, “This is a long term initiative for us. We're always going to be focused on public transit and I think you're going to increasingly see brands wanting to be associated with green and sustainable products. That's going to be a big growth area for us. With regards to our own footprint, over the next three to five years I'd like to see us mostly using EV vehicles, using mostly sustainable materials for our static business and mostly using green power,” he stated.

For Grosso personally, “I'd like to see us get to a much more sustainable place. It's an important long term initiative for us to get right because it's something that our employees are demanding, our city partners are demanding, our advertisers are demanding and honestly it's just the right thing to do.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

Out of Home Will Reign Supreme in the Cookieless Future. An Interview with Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection

Chris Grosso, the new Chief Executive Officer of Intersection, understands the role of urban OOH as an important component to an advertising campaign. 

His company, Intersection, “is an experience driven, out of home media technology company  focused on bringing programming, consumer amenities and advertising to cities,” he explained and added, “We are aiming to elevate the urban experience for consumers and advertisers.” His company, which reaches the 15 biggest cities in the U.S., offers a range of consumer services such as free internet access, such as through LinkNYC, real time information and way-finding products.

A Changing Media Ecosystem Based on Greater Privacy

In an emerging world of IDFA and the prospect of a cookieless future, there will be some media platforms that can easily pivot to this new reality. Out of Home is one of them. The shift from consumer opt out to consumer opt in creates an opportunity for a more passive form of collecting consumer data coupled with a platform the offers premium content. “If you advertise on a premium publisher you know the audience you're getting. You know that the audience is going to be high quality. I think that's got benefits for publishers, because the publishers get the full value of the audiences and they don't have these ad tech companies as middlemen,” he explained and added, “The notion of content and context becomes much, much more valuable and publishers that can deliver that kind of audience are going to be in a really good position.”

Privacy looms large as a challenge for many companies but Grosso is unconcerned because when it comes
to out of home, “You don't need to know who that person is you just need to know that people who were by your screen showed up at the store. You don't need to know anything about those people other than that and that's a very privacy friendly way.”

Intersection’s Offering

Intersection positions itself as a publisher that can offer a range of compelling content such as that found on LinkNYC which offers weather, time, factoids, art, notices of local events, etc. In addition, the company can offer a point of purchase opportunity for advertisers. “Say you're a beer company and want to reach people who are going to bars. You could buy a digital out of home campaign on our screens on Friday nights, right around the bar. I don't need a cookie to be able to get that audience, I can just get that audience, where they are at a logical place in a logical time,” he noted.

And the sun-setting of cookies poses no problem and even offers a compelling point of difference for out of home, according to Grosso. “I can put ads in the drugstore, but I also can put ads on digital out of home screens or even static out of home screens right outside the drugstore and again that's a powerful context, so I think location and context become really important in a world where you can't try to use cookies to track that kind of audience,” he shared.

Intersection’s Measurement

Measurement deliverables for advertisers include both established currencies and strategic partnerships. “We rely on Geopath which is an audited set of metrics for the out of home industry,” for reach, frequency and impressions, Grosso explained. “Geopath is the currency that people buy and sell on. We found that it was a good baseline. But you have to enhance on top of it. So we’ve put together an ecosystem of partners that can build on top of what you get from Geopath,” which includes more demographics – the types of people who have seen the ads and what they do after exposure.

One example is StreetMetrics for exterior buses. “We sell advertising on 10,000 buses in the United States and using StreetMetrics provides digital style measurement in attribution based on the data they collect,” using the GPS from the bus to match to the data they collect to better understand the audience, he noted.

Looking Ahead for Out of Home and Intersection

For Grosso, the future is bright with possibilities. “Valuable premium audience with differentiated content is going to be really, really successful,” he began, “That's going to be true in the digital space and that's going to be true in the physical space.” He pointed out that the opportunities are there for both big and small companies. Big platforms like Facebook or Google, “will continue to be hugely successful because you have lots of data and big audiences that are highly engaged. If you're a specialized vertical publisher with good audience you're also going to be successful. The premium out of home companies that have assets that can reach hard to reach audiences with really good creative in contextual brand safe environments are also going to be hugely successful because so much advertising is targeted by location and without a cookie trying to find those people on a mobile phone, is going to be very hard, I can guarantee you.”

He sees that, “People are coming back to cities and going out frequently. Advertisers want to reach those folks at critical points throughout the day, so high quality out of home publishers are going to really thrive. Out of home will become a great way to add highly localized reach for any of these marketers because if they want to target locations or consumers who congregate and specific neighborhoods, the best way to do it has always been out of home, but now it'll be the only way to do it. Out of home will continue to be the most cost effective, privacy friendly and brand safe way, if you want to target a geography,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com