Our guest this week is Jack Shannon, co-founder and CEO of Recess, a platform reimagining sampling for consumer packaged goods brands. Jack shares the platform’s evolution and explains how Recess connects brands with experiential marketing events across a broad range of venues, driving targeted and measurable activations. We dive into Recess’s targeting capabilities, integration with retail media networks, and new features that can enhance brands’ marketing with retailer data.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS, 

Jack Shannon: You’ve got your on-site digital media on the website and on the app. You’ve got your off-site media using retailer data. And then you’ve got your in-person marketing in the store. And Recess can be that fourth quadrant, which is using retailer data to reach consumers outside of the store.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy led full service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Distributing free product samples is a long-established promotional strategy that directly engages target consumers, enhancing the brand’s visibility and hopefully boosting sales. Ideal for launching new products and tapping into new markets, sampling also generates reactions from customers that can inform market research. Today, with social media, the reach of this direct marketing approach can extend beyond in-person events as consumers share their experiences with a broader audience online. Our guests today lead a company that’s on a mission to reimagine sampling events For increasingly omni-channel retail experiences and consumer shopping behaviors. Jack Shannon is the co-founder and CEO of Recess.is, a platform that facilitates unique sampling and sponsorship opportunities for consumer brands across multiple venues, including fitness studios, co-working spaces, and college campuses. Jack and his co-founder Deuce’s entrepreneurial journey in experiential marketing began at Indiana University in 2010, with a campus event that has since transformed into the company they lead today. Recess’s clients include Kraft Heinz, Red Bull, Sierra Nevada, Cliff Bar, SC Johnson, Mondelez International, and many, many more. As we’ll here, the Recess platform offers marketers audience filters and geo-targeting capabilities, enabling hyper-targeted and measurable brand activations. to discuss Recess’s capabilities and use cases, I’m delighted that Jack is joining us today from Los Angeles, California. Jack, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Jack Shannon: Yeah, Adrian, thanks for having me.

Adrian Tennant: Well, I gave a brief overview in the intro, but Jack, what is Recess, and what problems does it aim to solve for marketers?

Jack Shannon: Yeah, Recess is a software platform that connects CPG brands to offline marketing opportunities all across the U. S. We focus a lot on experiential, sponsorship, and sampling. We make it really easy for brands to reach their target audience within trusted communities like fitness studios, like Equinox, co working spaces like WeWork.. College campuses, music festivals, and more. So, these types of programs outside of retail stores have traditionally been executed by experiential agencies or big house infield marketing teams, you know, that can oftentimes be hard to get off the ground, expensive, tough to scale. So we thought there was a better way and wanted to build a tool and a platform that could make offline and in-person marketing as easy as it is to launch a Facebook ad campaign or an influencer campaign. 

Adrian Tennant: Which consumer categories or verticals does recess primarily serve?

Jack Shannon: Today, we’re really focused on consumer product goods, CPG, so food and beverage, personal care items, alcohol, beer, wine, and spirits, a lot of those categories. Traditionally, that industry has done a lot of sampling, you know, you kind of can’t taste a banner ad at the end of the day. And so for a lot of these brands, when they’re launching a new product, or they’re launching a new line extension, getting consumers to try that product and then share that product with their friends is, you know, a kind of tried and true growth tactic and strategy for driving bottom of funnel and middle of funnel conversion for a lot of those brands. And so we’ve primarily focused on CPG because getting physical products into these communities and these places is not easy. You know, it involves the real world. It involves shipping, it involves coordination. And those things, traditionally, were not as easy in the digital space to build the code and load into a DSP and an ad platform and, just kind of have it run and do its thing. And so, that’s a category we focused on from a go-to market, and kind of initially, today we’re starting to expand into other categories like retailers, restaurants, like Panera Bread and Pizza. We’re expanding into apps and tech companies, like the Cash App and different people that are looking to get some type of offer or opportunity or promotion into these communities and places and spaces and offer it as a benefit or a discount to those folks. So, still really focused on consumer product goods and that category, but starting to kind of look at other categories as well and see how our tool and solution could solve problems for the space.

Adrian Tennant: Well, we’ll certainly dive into some of those use cases in a moment. Jack, you co-founded Recess shortly after college, while your co-founder Deuce was still studying at Indiana University. Can you tell us a bit about how you first came up with the idea and what the first few years of growth looked like?

Jack Shannon: Yeah, the version of Recess today was certainly not what it was back then. So I linked up with my co-founder shortly after I graduated. I was working at a talent agency in Los Angeles and my co-founder Deuce was still back in school in Indiana. And we started as concert promoters. We were organizing large, you know, five, ten-thousand person, really mini music festivals at the time that dance music, EDM, DJs were becoming really popular, in the US. And so, for the first four or five years of us working together, we were producing our own concerts and events and festivals. We were selling sponsorship into our own events and festivals. at the same time, we had a network of digital websites that we had built, or partnered with. And we’re selling digital advertising across those. So, yeah. We had these kinds of offline, online marketing packages to reach the coveted, 18 to 24 demographic that we were selling to brands. And on the digital side of our business, it was really easy to partner up with other larger platforms and publishers like Complex or Vice that would often bring us additional deals when they couldn’t fulfill that inventory through their own website. They had sold it out, and they needed, you know, they’d sold bigger deals, and they needed to run it on other people’s websites that were like-minded. But there was nothing like that in the physical space for our events and sponsorships. And, we saw big companies like IMG Learfield and Live Nation that had built these really big sponsorship businesses aggregating large audiences across, Learfield, multiple different college sports, organizations, and Live Nation, and obviously all their venues and festivals and tours that they have. And so we thought, “Why isn’t there an ad marketplace? Why isn’t there the equivalent of what happened in digital? What was happening in the influencer space with influencer marketplaces? What’s happening in out of home with, you know, a home now being bought and sold on programmatic addressable exchanges.” And events and experiential and sponsorship was this huge bucket of advertising and marketing spend by Fortune 500 brands that were all still largely done, how digital was bought and sold, you know, in the early days of ad marketplaces and digital, advertising. It was all done over phone calls and spreadsheets and RFPs and, media plans and relationships. And, you know, there was no software layer, no technology that could enable better targeting, better measurement, better efficiency. So yeah, I think we kind of saw the need really out of our own use case. we were event organizers ourselves initially. And we’ve now built a tool that can help every other event organizer out there, or any venue for that matter, you know, a coworking space, a fitness studio, a college campus, all of those places, all those communities have immense value in today’s ad marketplace and marketing landscape. And we can help them better monetize those audiences. You know, they’re all recognizing the value of that audience. And that’s what we’re aiming to do is help them, more seamlessly partner with other like-minded brands that have a similar audience to theirs that they want to partner up with and reach at the end of the day.

Adrian Tennant: What have been some significant milestones for Recess? 

Jack Shannon: I think one of the biggest milestones for us was coming out of the pandemic, we had really focused on, particularly in the collegiate market, and that was our initial go-to market. That was the initial category of events that we were aggregating on our marketplace and on our platform. And the pandemic hit, and all that inventory basically went to zero. You know, events stopped. We took a hard look at our business. We kind of made a slight three-week detour into virtual events and tried to facilitate partnerships and sponsorships there, but it wasn’t the same as what we had built for the physical world. We do a little of that today, but it’s not a huge part of our business. But coming out of COVID, it was definitely a scary moment, but we had a drive-in movie theater that, I think, two or three weeks into COVID, signed up to our platform and we were like, “Oh, that’s interesting. I guess those things are still happening and still going on.” And then we had a drive-through concert sign-up. And then we had a drive-through haunted house sign-up. And the light bulb went off. “Wow. there are still things happening out there, and maybe this could be an incredible opportunity for us.” Because there were no Live Nation events going on, there was no sampling happening in retail stores, and these were really the only opportunities there. And so we capitalized on that and built three very large networks in those three categories. And then, as the world opened back up, we went category by category, acquired partnerships, and built alliances with large groups and large audiences that were looking to drive revenue for the months that they didn’t have any revenue. And so we went to music festivals. And then we went to co-working spaces. And then we went to fitness studios. And as things opened back up, started to add more and more inventory to our tool. And today, to your question, the milestone that we were really proud of was actually surpassing Live Nation in terms of total aggregated audience size that we reach through all of the opportunities on our platform. When you add them all up, [we] now reach over 200 million consumers on an annual basis. I think Live Nation is somewhere around there, maybe 105 or 115 [million]. So we’ve built, you know, in a very short span of time, the largest aggregated audience of people that you can reach in real life, IRL, of any company in the US. So that was a huge milestone for us. You know, I think the other big one, we very recently released a data layer over the top of our platform that can tell brands where certain consumers and where audiences actually exist in real life. For example, if you just got your product into Target and you wanted to see, “Where do Target shoppers actually go? Which gyms do they go to? Which concerts do they attend? You know, where do they work? Where do they go to school?” We have a data layer in our tool now that can help, from a targeting perspective, can help identify and help show brands where are those consumers in real life. And then help them build and deploy marketing and partnership campaigns with those places to reach and acquire those consumers. So whether you’re a CPG brand, and you’re in these retailers, when people aren’t shopping at that retailer, where else are they? And where can you reach them on the consumer journey? Or if you’re, you know, McDonald’s and you want to know where are those customers in the real world? This is very similar to kind of what Comscore has done for the digital space and what Nielsen has done in the television space. We’ve built an index for the real world to help brands when they are choosing, you know, “Which music festivals are right for me, which partnerships do I want to do?” You know, there hasn’t been a kind of a consistent data layer over the top of the real world to enable that kind of targeting, and efficiency. So that’s been a big milestone for us. It’s been really exciting to talk with brands. And we’re really just kind of at the early nascent stages of that product, but, you know, very, very excited about it.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Well, let’s dive into the Recess platform. Jack, could you walk us through what a typical engagement looks like?

Jack Shannon: Yeah. So a brand will come to us and will say, “I have this goal or objective, you know, I’m trying to drive sales at this retailer. I’m trying to acquire new customers. I’m launching a new product.” Sometimes it might even be, “I have, you know, a lot of my product that is set to expire,” in the CPG space, “… and I don’t want to just donate it or try and sell it for pennies on the dollar. I want to be able to use it in a way that’s going to help me grow my business.” So we always start with, “What is the need or what is the goal of what that brand coming to us has?” And then, we’ll understand, “Who is the target audience they’re trying to reach? Where do they shop? How old are they? What type of affinities do they have? Is it an active lifestyle consumer? Is it a college student? What is that person?” And then our platform is self-service if it needs to be, but the vast majority of the kind of Fortune 500 brands we’re working with, we do have a fully managed service team that will basically work with them to understand that brief and that input. And then, we’ll feed all of that information into our tool and into our system. And we’ll build out a program or a campaign for that client. And so we’ll then go back to them and, you know, share “Based on what you shared, here’s what we think makes the most sense, in terms of where this is how we’ve set up the targeting to best optimize who you’re looking for within that.” And then once the brand okays that, we’ll submit those offers. Those go out to the organizers on their end, the partners or the locations, and they get to approve it and say, “Yeah, I want to work with that brand.” “No, I don’t want to work with that brand.” And then from there, all the coordination, all the back and forth, is scaled through our platform and our team. So the brand doesn’t have to talk to a thousand different gyms or co-working spaces. They don’t have to have a thousand conversations or coordinate shipping with a thousand different partners. All of that is taken care of through our platform and our team. So it’s incredibly easy for the brand on their end. They just, you know, they might have to provide some creative, and obviously, we work with them to make sure if there is a physical product of some type and how does that make it to the right place and the right location at the right time. And then after that, all of the reporting, all the metrics are also executed through our platform and our team. So the organizers, they provide photos, they provide feedback, all of our programs have a built-in measurement component to it where we’re able to measure sales lift or attribute to other goals or objectives that the brand might have. So it’s truly, really hands-off for the brand or the agency that we’re working with. And just making it really easy for them to build these big impactful programs, without a lot of the burden that typically comes with that.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jack Shannon, co-founder and CEO of Recess, a platform that facilitates unique sampling and sponsorship opportunities for brands. You mentioned that you offer a managed service. Jack, for agencies, is a self serve option available? 

Jack Shannon: There is, yeah. We have a supply side, basically kind of like an SSP side of our tool as well. So a number of our suppliers, our partners, for instance, like WeWork, you know, if you Google “WeWork brand partnerships” and you go to the first result on Google, that’ll take you to a page that ultimately lands on a website that we provide for WeWork. And it allows anybody to go in there and book a lunch and learn, an activation, a sampling program, getting marketing or promotion into that WeWork, or that location. So, we have a lot of B2B clients, that’ll come in looking to reach business owners, looking to reach entrepreneurs. And they can just use that self-service portal to book a handful of one-off activations at any WeWork in the country. So that part of the platform is self-serve. Where it’s a supplier or an organizer or a venue or a location that might have a lot of inbound – they might have people coming to them saying, “Hey, can we do this? Can we do that?” And we’re, you know, almost like a Shopify or an Eventbrite then for them to better manage all of those partnerships, process the payments, process the coordination. So it’s very hands-off for those folks. So that’s on the supply side. We do have an option, you know, I’d say our agency partners are probably the ones that take advantage of our self-serve platform the most, where they’re able to, you know, they say, “Yeah, I understand you have a managed service, but we really want to get in there and get familiar with the tool and build a capability and,= be able to use this for any of our clients.” And so, yeah, the tool is self-serve. The managed service team on our end, they’re using the same self-serve platform that an agency partner or brand partner could be when they come in. There’s really no difference in the capabilities there.

Adrian Tennant: Great. Thanks for the clarification. Now, Jack, does Recess offer tools that can help agencies or CPG brand managers ensure that a potential partnership is likely to be effective?

Jack Shannon: Yeah, we have a number of ways that brands and agencies can use our tool to predict the effectiveness of those campaigns. The first one is our past partnerships data. So we have information on every listing on our platform, all the brands that they’ve worked with in the past on programs. We have photos and examples of those past campaigns that brands can see. There’s also any kind of category exclusivity that might be already in place. We don’t want to waste anybody’s time if it’s an energy drink brand and they’ve already got an energy exclusivity or really any beverage trying to do anything directly on campus presents a lot of challenges due to traditional Coke and Pepsi pouring rights exclusivity. So we have all that data in the tool that can cut down on some of that back and forth. So that’d be one. Our retailer audience data, I think, is probably the strongest capability today. If we have, you know, a healthy snack brand that wants to reach active lifestyle consumers, there are thousands of gyms that we have on our platform that they could tap into to reach those audiences. But, maybe that brand is only available in, say, Publix or Wegmans or, you know, a specialty retailer right now. Or maybe they want to specifically build a program for that retailer because they just got into that retailer, and they want to make sure that they’re driving sell-through and showing that they’re being a good partner. So we can use our data to be able to say, “Out of these thousands of gyms, which ones have the highest percentage of Wegman shoppers there?” That type of real-world targeting hasn’t been available before, and so if somebody is trying to reach a specific audience, whether it’s CPG or it could be a retail brand, a restaurant brand, or anybody with a physical location, we can now help them understand what types of places have the highest correlation to their audience. I think that is a total game-changer when it comes to these types of partnership marketing and helping to inform what that would be. So those are the two today. We have some tools on the horizon leveraging some AI capabilities, where we’d be looking at past conversion data, you know, actually looking at what was the sales data, what was the conversion data? Or if somebody was looking to acquire emails and build their CRM, like whatever their goal was, which locations and partnerships ultimately help drive the greatest outcomes? And factoring that information into the recommendation engine that we built. So, yeah, I think we’ve got some really interesting tools today and an interesting product roadmap on the horizon to just fine tune that even, make it even better for our partners.

Adrian Tennant: Of course, we live in an omnichannel retail environment. How can Recess help marketers blend physical, in-person sampling experiences with digital strategies?

Jack Shannon: I think this is a really important question. I think a lot of times with experiential, sponsorship sampling, it is so much about the in-person experience, or it might be about the big event to drive brand awareness, but the outcomes are where our space has been lacking traditionally. You know, measurement is sometimes even a word that people don’t want to talk about because the cost of executing programs – many times if you’re just looking at it on a direct outcome basis – are never going to back out from an ROI perspective, in the traditional way of activating with big impactful moments and experiences, which are great for reaching a set amount of consumers or telling a big story from a press or PR perspective that could, carry in the press. But I think the types of programs we’re building, they’re much more performative in nature, and they’re really focused on “Let’s reach a lot of people at a very cost-efficient price point because we do want to be able to measure the outcomes of that and what was, you know, what was the ROAS it was associated with those programs and campaigns?” And so we have a number of different ways that we can do that. We have our own, built-in measurement product within the tool, and that’s a survey-based measurement product where we’re asking for product feedback. We’re asking, “Have you tried this brand before? Have you experienced this brand before?” And then we’ll follow up with folks 30 to 60 days after to understand how did their consumption patterns change after having had that experience or tried that product, particularly in the CPG space. We’re amplifying that in-person component with other digital extensions from those partners as well. So if you’re at an Orange Theory or an F45, and there’s a partnership program or a sponsored class that’s happening beyond the physical in-person part, where there might be signage with QR codes that are pointing to that digital conversion place, there are also omni-channel extensions beyond that. So there might be a sponsored email that goes out about that class ahead of time or after the class to say, “Hey, if you didn’t make it out and you didn’t get to try this, here’s a ‘buy one, get one’ offer to get it in the retailer,” or even “a hundred percent free, discount to be able to go in and purchase that product in a retailer and get to try it if you didn’t get to try it at that particular class.” So we’re amplifying these programs through the social handles of these partners. So at the F45, they might be creating content about that sponsored class and then, there’s an opportunity to take the best of that UGC content from those partners and put paid against that to target that back to those audiences to drive the conversion. So a very similar tactic that is used in the Influencer marketing space, but just apply to these communities and locations and looking at them as the influencer in that sense. So social, we’re leveraging email, and all of those channels can be pushing to whatever the outcome could be. It could be our built-in measurement product. It could be an in-store digital coupon, where somebody just has to go purchase the product, scan their receipt, and text that receipt in to get cash back on Venmo or PayPal or Amazon as a partner. We’re hearing from a lot of brands that they want to run a promotion or something to capture CRM data. Building that first-party data as the coming cookie apocalypse is upon us next year or whenever that happens. They’re looking to build their first-party data with partners like Epsilon or other partners. So, you know, we’re definitely hearing more and more of that. And I think, tying that in-person experience and being able to leverage it for a number of different outcomes – if the CRM team can be happy because we’re acquiring emails, if the shopper marketing team can be happy because we’re driving to a retail partner, the brand marketing team can be happy because we’re driving, awareness and trial. So, you know, hopefully, the brand can spend once on that program and garner multiple outcomes for multiple different stakeholders within the organization that can benefit from it ultimately.

Adrian Tennant: We’ve witnessed incredible growth in the number of retail media networks over the last couple of years. With so much investment now going toward retail media, how does Recess fit into the overall landscape?

Jack Shannon: Yeah, it’s certainly been an explosion on the retail media side, and doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon. I think experiential sponsorship, sampling, it’s traditionally been viewed as a brand marketing objective. It’s about awareness, it’s about more top-of-funnel. But I do think there’s an interesting opportunity for us and for our platform and that retail targeting capability, to leverage that to take these programs and campaigns that have traditionally been more on the brand marketing side. They’ve been about engaging consumers in these communities and spaces, like, you know, the gym they go to or the office that they work out of, or their first apartment in college, these really impactful communities and places and spaces. You can still get all of the benefits of a brand marketing campaign, but when you leverage on retail or targeting or even just adding a digital coupon onto that program, we could take what would traditionally be a brand marketing program, target it specifically at locations that over-index on Walmart, and then with all those omnichannel extensions, push to an offer on the Walmart app, to drive, you know, actual sales and drive conversion at those places. So I think there’s an opportunity within retail media for this to be kind of a new frontier or a new opportunity where we can convert or even just combine the benefit of what has traditionally been a brand marketing campaign and kind of, turn it into either a customer-specific shopper omnichannel campaign or or tap into more national shopper dollars or opportunities that are there as well.

Adrian Tennant: You just said offline marketing is the next frontier, Jack, can you explain what you mean by that?

Jack Shannon: I think all these retail media networks, you know, they need to continue to drive growth. What I’m hearing, you know, is there’s a lot of the inventory on-site, but there’s only a finite amount of people that are on the app that are going to the app. There’s a finite amount of impressions. So retailers have looked to offline, to extend that and to get that additional growth, get that additional inventory. So, using the retailer data to target consumers when they’re not on the retailer’s website or the app – using that data to reach them on the open web, anywhere that they browse on the web. You know, a lot of people are talking about in-store and that being a new area of growth as well. And in-store sampling, demos, those programs, obviously those have been around for many, many years, and I think they totally serve a purpose and, you know, a lot of brands we work with leverage them, but a lot of brands we talk to as well, they say, “Those are important, but I want to be in these places and communities, and I want to be reaching consumers at that point of consumption,” as well. So if I’m a deodorant product, sampling in a store, maybe I’ll take that home, and I’ll use it, but how much more compelling would that be if I was in, you know, the locker room of an Equinox and somebody could grab that product and try it and have that, point of consumption moment right then and there? For us, we look at that analogy of you’ve got your on-site digital media on the website and on the app. You’ve got your off-site media using retailer data. And then you’ve got your in-person marketing in the store. And we think Recess can be that fourth bucket or that fourth quadrant, which is using retailer data to reach consumers outside of the store. So, you know, almost like re-targeting, the same type of data and targeting that is commonplace now in the digital space for offline marketing or off-site marketing, but applying that to the physical world. So, you know, brands can reach consumers that are target shoppers, or they all are Walmart shoppers, or they go to 7-Eleven, and they can reach them on that path to purchase, actually capturing them in the wild. And then, most importantly, tie that back to the retailer. you can build that in, whether that’s through QR codes or digital links, or through omni. We run a big back-to-school program, for instance. And this program is so impactful because for a lot of these students … We have this big network of offline campus housing, so all these really nice apartments look much nicer than when I went to college, when I was in college, where I lived, but there’s been this big real estate boom in college, and there are all these apartment complexes now. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they’re moving, they might be moving into their very first apartment, they’re going to be off the meal plan, and they’re going to be shopping for themselves for the first time. And what an incredible moment for brands to be there in that moment, when they get their keys, they open the door with mom and dad, they see their apartment, they have this, welcome gift box of different products and, you know, everything from food to beverages to cleaning supplies And then, what’s the very next thing they do after they move in? They go to make the run to Target or Walmart, they could basically go and stock up on all the things that they need. And mom and dad, if they’re there with them, will hopefully go and stock them up on all the paper towels and maybe, three months’ worth supply of things. So for all of those, offers or opportunities or promotions to be pointing back to Target or Walmart, that’s an incredibly powerful moment. And, there’s a big opportunity there for one of those retailers or Kroger or, Albertsons or anybody else to be in there in that moment. And that has a real opportunity to change behavior there. So, you know, we think it’s a really interesting category, and with the targeting that we are able to provide in terms of helping brands understand where are these audiences in real life and the closed loop measurement that a retailer. Or you know, even a restaurant brand or anybody who could offer a coupon that closed loop measurement. I think it just puts this type of marketing in an entirely new category. And it’s something that hasn’t really been available before in the space where you could have that level of targeting and the closed loop measurement, to be able to show performative outcomes in the space. So, that’s what we’re really excited about. You know, we think there’s a really big opportunity for retailers, they could build, substantially large businesses and we’re in the early stage of some of those discussions now, but you could imagine an entire network for any of those partners, Target or Walmart, if you’d see the gift bag at the Holiday lights event, that you’re driving through during the holidays, or, New Year, New You at the fitness studios where you’re getting all the healthy products, to fuel you for that new year. Any one of those moments could be entirely powered by a retailer with all those different products driving back to their store. And it has the opportunity to make them ubiquitous within their local community. So taking what used to be probably a marketing expense for their marketing team to get out there in the community, and actually turn it into a revenue driver for them where this could be a new inventory, a new asset that these retail media teams could be selling and monetizing on. So it’s something we’re really excited about and, hopefully we’ll start to see more of that in the market this year.

Adrian Tennant: Jack, are there any new developments in the works for Recess that you’re allowed to talk about?

Jack Shannon: Well, one really exciting one. We had launched our retailer targeting. We primarily focused on the grocery space initially, and some of the larger QSR brands like McDonald’s and Subway and those folks. But, yeah, we’re really excited that we’re going to be rolling out that same capability to understand where your audiences are in real life to over 4,000 of the largest retail outlets. So that’s everybody from grocery stores to restaurants, to State Farm Insurance, anybody who has a physical retail presence where people go. You know, we’re going to be able to help those places better understand where else their customers are going. And, there are other tools and software that do that today, you know, it’s an entire industry. I think the difference for us is, you know, not only are we going to be able to tell you which ones and where those are, but then you’re going to be immediately be able to act upon that and actually execute partnerships to co-market and reach those audiences. You wouldn’t just have to go, “Oh, I over-index with Orange Theory Fitness. Okay, now I got to go do a national deal with Orange Theory Fitness.” But in reality, maybe that’s only in certain markets. There’s a high correlation there. And with our capability now, you don’t just have to go partner with one Orange Theory Fitness. You could say, “Actually I want to partner with the locations my audience is most closely aligned with.” In that sense, you could partner with Orange Theory, and F45 and Equinox, and any number of combinations of those places. So you can cross collateralize those partnerships across a number of different banners and not just be reliant on going and doing kind of a top top-to-top National partnership deal on that side of things. So we’re really excited about that. I think for us, it’s going to open up a whole new range of client conversations and possibilities, that we’re really excited about in the next year.

Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about Recess’s platform, what’s the best way to do so?

Jack Shannon: Just on our website, recess.is. As in “Igloo” and “Sam”. Recess.is. We’re working on getting the .com, but it’s not cheap!

Adrian Tennant: Jack, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Jack Shannon: Appreciate it, Adrian. Thanks for having me.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jack Shannon, co-founder and CEO of Recess. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation and links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.