Barbara Wardell and Ernesto Cullari discuss geofencing advertising for small and medium-sized businesses. They explain practical applications, benefits, and misconceptions of GPS-based targeting. Barbara and Ernesto share their insights on foot traffic studies, ad creative importance, and effectiveness metrics – offering tips for successful pilot projects. Expert perspectives on leveraging geofencing technology to drive customer visits and make data-informed business decisions.

Episode Transcript

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

Ernesto Cullari: Our sole focus is on using satellite-based technology to identify customers on the ground and then send them ads for local businesses. And then when they come to one of our local businesses, the satellite pings us, alerting us that a new visit has taken place.

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. The Global Positioning System, or GPS, is a satellite-based navigation system that provides location and time information anywhere on Earth. Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1970s, GPS has since become an integral part of our daily lives, from helping us navigate to new destinations to tracking our fitness activities. But beyond personal use, GPS data is used in advertising, particularly in the form of location-based advertising known as geofencing. Today I’m joined by two experts in the practical applications and benefits of geofencing. Barbara Wardell and Ernesto Cullari are the co-founders of Cullari and Wardell, a digital advertising and marketing agency. With a focus on driving customer visits for small and medium-sized businesses, they use GPS data and geofencing technology to deliver highly targeted and measurable campaigns. Ernesto Cullari is a digital marketing specialist with a commercial photography and production background, while Barbara Wardell brings expertise in data analysis and business strategy. Together, they’re on a mission to make advanced advertising technology accessible to businesses of all sizes. To discuss the potential of geofencing and location-based technology for advertising, I’m delighted that Ernesto and Barbara are joining us today from New Jersey. Barbara and Ernesto, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Ernesto Cullari: Hey, thanks for having us.

Barbara Wardell: Yes, absolutely. We’re so excited to talk to your audience.

Adrian Tennant: Ernesto, how did you and Barbara first meet and what led you to co-found your agency?

Ernesto Cullari: So it was in the middle of COVID, and no one was supposed to be socializing and enjoying life. And since me and Barbara are a bunch of rule breakers, we had not yet met, but we went to this Halloween party in my city. And I saw this really pretty woman and I decided that I was like, I’m just going to get to know her. So introduced myself. I took her phone from her, added myself on Facebook, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Barbara Wardell: Yes, he literally took my phone, requested my Facebook, and then he actually accepted it at the same time.

Ernesto Cullari: Well, if you’re gonna … you might as well just go full circle. You know, at the time, we were complaining about COVID, and a third of small businesses shut down in New York, New Jersey, California. And we decided that we wanted to do something about it. And I had already been doing geofencing for about a year and a half. and Barbara and I both come from a medical background, and so we related to each other on that, and then maybe eight months go by, and I said to Barbara, I can’t do this by myself, and she had also the same passion of helping small businesses grow. So we decided to team up, and we went from Cullari Media, which is still our website, but to forming Cullari and Wardell, and our sole focus is on building small businesses, by using satellite-based technology to identify customers on the ground and then send them ads for local businesses. And then when they come to one of our local businesses, the satellite pings us, alerting us that a new visit has taken place on behalf of one of our clients. That’s how we started. That’s our passion. That’s our focus. And that’s what Barbara and I are aligned to do.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Barbara, Ernesto gave us a brief introduction to how it works, but could you explain some of the practical applications of geofencing advertising?

Barbara Wardell: Everyone’s behaviors are indicative of what they do. So if you’re going into a Mercedes dealer, you’re actually looking for an actual car, whether it’s a Mercedes or a BMW or whatever, you’re actually looking to purchase something, not just online behavior. So we target anyone in that center, service, dealership, any small business, big business. If you’re looking for skilled labor, target males in a Home Depot or women who are actually building homes or are driving trucks or vans. We can manage physical therapy clinics, targeting physicians and patients in the same time frame as targeting medical offices. All that is combined how granular we can get for our businesses to make them money. The satellite actually verifies when you look at an ad, and when you come into that establishment, it sends us a ping and tells us that you actually got a visit for that ad.

Adrian Tennant: Ernesto, what are the key advantages of geofencing compared to other forms of digital advertising?

Ernesto Cullari: So the wonderful part about geofencing is you really can identify who your customer is. So one of the most obvious things that geofencing is often used for is when you know who your competitors are, you can use our satellites to draw a virtual fence around that competitor or location. You can then send them ads as to why your proposition is a better proposition. you can then target lookalike people. And the greatest part about it is when someone shows up at your location, you’re getting GPS verified data to confirm that you have a new client. And why that’s very important, you know, all of us as business owners, we’re dealing with finite amounts of money, right? We’re not a bank where it’s not unlimited funds. And we identify with our clients who also need a high return on investment. So you’re able to go after your competition. You’re able to go after lookalike audiences. You’re able to confirm when someone shows up at your doorstep. And it’s the highest return on ad spend because you see, if you know the value of a new customer and you say, oh, this month we got 100 new customers to our hotel or to our restaurant, and you know the value of a stay or you know the value of a visit, then you can easily see if you’ve made your money back. And in most cases, almost all of our clients are making a return on their investment for each visit. We love it. We do? It’s against the tide of what COVID did to small businesses. And we feel that we’re helping small businesses recover quickly. And we can work with big businesses too, but our passion is, that’s where we learned how to perfect this technology. If you can make this technology work on small budgets, then obviously when we go to work with the hotels of the world, the Indigo hotels or resorts, obviously if we could do it with a small budget, we could do it with a big budget.

Adrian Tennant: Barbara, your agency recommends foot traffic studies. Could you explain these and why they’re important for effective geofencing campaigns?

Barbara Wardell: Oh, absolutely. Great question. We use foot traffic studies to show other businesses in the area how their foot traffic goes up and down in the timeframe so that they know what actually is happening granular to their business, right? We see how their competition is doing. We see how they’re gaining traction. We understand that using this foot traffic study is coming from the information that is being targeted. And it’s such a helpful tool. We can do it from beginning of a business before you even buy it to see if there’s actual value to that business. Or maybe there is something that owner is not telling you. We could also do it for a business that is actually right now in business. and driving traffic to websites as well. The foot traffic is understanding where the business is coming from and where is it going. The targeting of that is so important. We see a half hour before and a half hour after that location. So it gives us a real picture of that business before we even target our advertising.

Adrian Tennant: I bet that’s really interesting for quick-service restaurants. You mentioned, I think, hotels, bars …

Barbara Wardell: … yes, liquor lines. I mean, we can do almost anything as long as it’s just driving foot traffic. The impressions are amazing. We get over 250,000 impressions for a campaign in one month.

Ernesto Cullari: And for when we’re consulting with a client, like Barbara said, like where people are a half hour before and a half hour after visiting your store, that gives you insight into your client’s journey. If before visiting your store, a client is in, say, Whole Foods, the majority of them are in Whole Foods. And then after visiting your store, there may be a shopping district. Maybe it’s a historic shopping district that people go to. That’s really where the data becomes valuable because then you can target people in that Whole Foods or Home Depot. You could target people in that historic district or in that business district and you’re gonna find people who are just like your existing customer. So that’s why we find foot traffic studies to be so valuable because you’re getting a bird’s eye view, a holistic view of your customer behavior.

Adrian Tennant: Can you give me some idea of the turnaround time if a client is working with you? How quickly can you usually get that data to the client?

Ernesto Cullari: So once we set someone up, we could start measuring foot traffic immediately. You know, it’s often we start running an ad on a Friday and by Monday, we see that they’ve already received two or three visits. But Barbara actually has a fun story about one of our clients who, you know, he didn’t tell us his situation. He didn’t want sympathy. He just wanted to know, could we handle his store?

Barbara Wardell: It is really amazing. We got a call from this Daytona laundromat and his name was Michael. He called us up and he wanted help marketing his laundromat. He was struggling with growing it. So at the time we did a deep dive. We looked at the business. We did a foot traffic mobile study. We looked at everything and we came up with a great marketing plan for him and we launched it. And we started sending him 50 to 60 GPS sat verified customers a month to his store. We found out later he was actually living in his laundromat at the time. We had no idea that he could, couldn’t even afford us, but he He got it together and he was actually in a strip mall and shared the parking lot with all these other businesses. And they were calling us wondering, Oh my gosh, he’s getting so much business. They didn’t know what he was doing. So they were so curious, but. You know, he just sold it, made a nice profit for himself and the new owners are now working with us. So that says a lot of what we can do with small businesses.

Adrian Tennant: That’s great. Ernesto, could you share a couple more examples of geofencing campaigns you’ve run for clients and the kind of results they’ve achieved?

Ernesto Cullari: Sure, so it’s no secret if you know me that I like to drink either tequila or mezcal.

Barbara Wardell: Oh, he’s telling his secrets now again. I don’t know.

Ernesto Cullari: So one of our favorite brands is Electrico Mezcal, and they are an artisanal designation for a mezcal, which means they’re made in Oaxaca. It’s handmade entirely without electricity. And it’s grown by a family farm. So we do tastings in the New York area. And for every tasting we do, we start before the tasting event. We geofence other high-end restaurants, lounges, hotels, stores like Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, those kinds of stores, Tesla. And then we send the mass to come to the tasting and then we can measure visits. So on average, we’re doing anywhere from 75 to 100 satellite verified visits. for each tasting event. And it’s enjoyable. I mean, we love the Mezcal. We love the brand. We love the founders of the company.

Barbara Wardell: Do we like the environment?

Ernesto Cullari: We like the environment. We like to drink while we eat. Well, we like to imbibe. But what’s great is this is a partnership that the restaurant is actually benefiting from 100% because these restaurants are picking up the brand, carrying the brand, but also the restaurants post-COVID Through COVID, we’re suffering. PPP and employee tax credit only goes so far. It’s a hundred percent net benefit to the restaurateur. And at the same time, our client is developing a new customer as well. We like those win-win scenarios. And obviously restaurants, privately owned restaurants, are an important part of each of our communities. And any way we can help, we certainly want to do that.

Adrian Tennant: Absolutely. I’ve heard you say that geofencing allows advertisers to target a space as small as a phone booth. Really though, how granular can the location targeting be and what are some creative ways this granularity can be used?

Barbara Wardell: Well, if we had GPS satellite and used it for Lois Lane to find Superman, we would do a really good job. But targeting everyone on your business route or the grocery store, laundromats, hardware stores, I think that when you’re as granular as we can get with the geofencing, It goes directly to your clientele to bring them into the business. We’re hitting them constantly in their apps and reminding them, even if they didn’t install the ad the first time, they’re going to come in because we have a 90 day flight and we’re hitting those 90 days. So name recognition, we can target, what was it? 30?

Ernesto Cullari: It’s within … it’s a meter to three meters.

Barbara Wardell: One to three meters right there at the front door. That’s how close and as granular as we can get. So when we’re drawing our geofences, we’re targeting those areas that the clients do come in from our foot traffic study, as well as those that fit in that demographics that would come to that store or that business.

Ernesto Cullari: And we’re able to distinguish between noise, at least on the foot traffic measurement part for an ad campaign. We need to verify that device in a location three separate times. If you’re in a store for 15 minutes and we’re going to try to record that visit, if it’s not done independently three different ways, it’s not counted as a visit. That’s even a more superior technology than the foot traffic studies where we’re only doing foot traffic studies. So we use multiple tools and the geofencing tool that we use is very accurate between one and three meters and able to cut out noise, which is very important.

Barbara Wardell: And we’re outside the Facebook, Google universe. We’re on the wide open web, as well as on apps.

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 Barbara Wardell and Ernesto Coleri, experts in geofencing advertising. Now, since we don’t have the benefit of visuals in an audio-only podcast, I’m curious, when you say drawing the geofence, I’ve got an impression of you with a pencil on a tablet, literally drawing on a screen around a map.

Barbara Wardell: That’s what it looks like.

Ernesto Cullari: Yeah, so when Barbara and I run a foot traffic study, we get a map representation of where foot traffic is coming from. But If you’re a supermarket and you see that foot traffic is not coming from certain neighborhoods where it needs to be coming from, we then hand draw that polygon around certain buildings or certain neighborhoods so that your ads can deliberately target the areas that you’re missing. Yeah, we’re hand drawing polygons, and part of it is algorithmic based. For example, for different businesses, Barbara and I will know that we need to target people of a certain demographic, certain language, certain income level. But then beyond that, we use the foot traffic studies to target what we’re missing.

Adrian Tennant: We talked about the science of it, now let’s talk about the art. Ernesto, what role does the ad creative play in the success of a geofencing campaign?

Ernesto Cullari: To back up, I had dropped out of high school and I had asked my mom, hey, I want to one day be two things, a songwriter and I want to work in the medical field. After graduating college, my music career was starting to take off. And immediately as a songwriter, I knew that if I wanted success, each message had to resonate with the audience immediately. So in 2007, I had the number one song on Disney Radio for most of the summer. It was called I’m Late for School Again. That was with actor Pauly Litt from the Hope and Faith show and from the movie Speed Racer. And then that same year, I had a top 100 song on Country, Boys in Boots. What I learned from that experience is you need to grab your audience right away. And it’s that same creative mindset that we take to our ad creation. Sometimes it’s a little unorthodox. Sometimes when you see our ads, these display at the top of your phone when you’re in an application. Ours breaks a lot of the rules. Fonts might be different. The size of the fonts might be huge. But I believe it’s our ability to understand what resonates with certain audiences and don’t bore us, get us to the chorus mindset, is what we take to our ad creation. For small businesses to be getting 50 to 100 new customers a month, and for our ads to appear through the clutter, I think even though it’s a little unorthodox, our ad creation mindset, I do think it’s getting our clients a good return on their investment.

Barbara Wardell: I think go bold, get their attention and get them in the door!

Adrian Tennant: Barbara, I know you have a background in data analysis. How do you typically measure the effectiveness of geofencing campaigns and what metrics do clients typically focus on for reporting?

Barbara Wardell: Mostly our clients want to just see the actual conversions. They really just are focused on the actual data of who walked into that store because our reports are so detailed. We know what app they saw it on. We know the size of the ad that they saw, whether it was native or banners in the middle. We already know all that data once the reports come in from the satellite platform. and that shows them as we’re looking through the data, it shows them that their campaigns that we’re using are working and the ones that are not, we’re already taking them out and putting it in a different vertical, which is great for the small businesses because the bigger companies that do this, they let it run, we don’t.

Ernesto Cullari: And there’s one other metric that we love. It’s the cost-per-visit metric. So nationwide, the cost per visit across all kinds of clients is $5.75 per visit. Some of our clients are below $2 a visit. But our goal is generally to get a visit to cost you about $5.75. So that’s how we know from what Barbara is saying, if we know we’re getting repeat visits, it automatically brings that cost per visit down.

Adrian Tennant: Are there any common misconceptions or myths about geofencing advertising you encounter when discussing the technology with prospects or with clients?

Ernesto Cullari: We protect your privacy. This is not spying on you. I know a lot of times, you know, the three of us could be having lunch right now. And then we mentioned something. And then sooner or later, we’re looking at Facebook, or we’re starting to receive an ad for it. And I don’t know, call it coincidence. But what’s great is geofencing anonymizes your device. So we really do respect your privacy. We’re not allowed to advertise in certain areas. For example, if you’re a marijuana company, THC company, we know where you can and can’t advertise. If you’re in the medical field, same. We know what we can and can’t target. But I would say the number one misconception would be on the privacy side. And even though we’re tracking devices in and out of locations, we’re anonymizing your device. So we don’t know that it’s Adrian. We don’t know that it’s Barbara. We don’t know that it’s Ernesto. And our technology really does protect your privacy. We use what’s called clean rooms. So we segregate the data away from who you are personally. We give you an anonymizing device number, and then we track foot traffic based on that. It is not as invasive as some people might be led to believe.

Adrian Tennant: Barbara, if anyone listening is considering running their first geofencing campaign, do you have any tips for ensuring a successful pilot project?

Barbara Wardell: I think that if you’re going to do a pilot, you should make sure that you have the proper marketing budget for a 90-day campaign. I think that’s very important. And from there, I think that you should have all the other things in a row, like everything that shows who your business is, so that the campaign reflects that. Because when we’re doing a marketing campaign, we don’t want any friction. We want them to see the ad, the landing page and go to the website in a beautiful kind of musical way that it just flows in and there’s no restrictions from that client looking at that ad to get it to transition where they’re either in your door because you will get on your landing page you will get a map that actually shows you where to go or to your website for a conversion. It’s so important. So I think that between your marketing campaign, making sure that you have a proper budget, your logo, your message. The message is so important when you’re out there. And I think the third would probably be making sure that when they come in, they feel welcome.

Ernesto Cullari: One of the big metrics that customers always report back to business owners is the quality of service. So if we’re bringing them in, we’re doing it in a streamlined way, reducing friction, reducing bounce rates, someone shows up to your business, the number one thing you could do is greet them. and keep the experience positive and give them good service. That’s something that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from business owners we’ve worked with, is that we take advertising off their plate, just like you do, Adrian, at your agency. You take the advertising marketing burden off their plate, and then it allows the business owner and company to focus solely on the customer experience once they’re in the door.

Adrian Tennant: Absolutely. Well, Ernesto, how do you see geofencing and location-based targeting in advertising evolving in the coming years?

Ernesto Cullari: So you can probably speak to this as well, Adrian. Location data, location is the most indicative of true consumer intent. I think the future is only getting bigger and brighter for location-based advertising and location-based data. And I think for small businesses and companies looking to grow, investing on the data side, whether it’s just the analytics, like Barbara was saying before, do a foot traffic study before you think about opening up that commercial kitchen or that retail location or that small business downtown. Know what kind of foot traffic is existing there. Barbara and I were consulting an investment banker that represented a group of investors that was going to open a laundromat. And they were going to open up, they have a really cool concept, they were going to open up near a university. From doing foot traffic studies all over the U.S., we’ve come to know that there are certain services now that universities offer, and one of them is laundry. So do not open up at a college. Free laundry. Yeah, don’t do it. For their students.

Barbara Wardell: They’re not going to pay for it if they get it for free.

Ernesto Cullari: They were going to renovate a Rite Aid. They were going to convert this huge old Rite Aid into a new multi-use wash, dry, fold, drop-off, pickup, delivery laundry center for college students with a study area. And then we said, “Hey, just a heads up. Based on our foot traffic data that we have, we know that a lot of these universities offer free laundry. So why don’t you call them up?” So they halted everything. They’re like, “You’re right. They offered that. We’re going to pick another city.”

Barbara Wardell: So now they’re in the process of figuring out where else they want to go.

Adrian Tennant: De-risking your investment. That’s as important.

Barbara Wardell: That is important of the foot traffic study. You can go into, say, a cash business or any type of business and you’re taking over, doesn’t mean that their books are actually right. Wouldn’t you like to know just to see what the volume actually is before you make that offer? It will save you tons of money, like one of our clients did with, you know, changing a Rite Aid to a laundromat. He would have spent millions of dollars.

Ernesto Cullari: 2.5, I believe, was the amount.

Barbara Wardell: And he was so happy that he talked to us and that we did all this work. And he was like, “Oh my gosh, thank you!” Because it makes a difference. Could you imagine spending $2.5 million and the business doesn’t go off the ground?

Ernesto Cullari: And in this case, the market data that he was receiving externally made sense. Okay, college town, they need laundry. The off season when kids weren’t in school would not have supported the business. So he was heavily relying on the on season. At one glance, a few glances, it looked like a really good investment. But if you don’t have experience and location data, and you’re not being consulted by the right people, you could end up spending a lot of money and then losing your shirt, so to speak.

Adrian Tennant: Well, he was smart to triangulate his data sources with your help.

Ernesto Cullari: Indeed.

Barbara Wardell: It’s very important. Data is a lot. When it’s used for the right purpose, it works really well.

Adrian Tennant: Barbara, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about geolocation-based advertising, how can they get in touch with you?

Barbara Wardell: Well, it’s Cullari and Wardell, and our web address is cullarimedia.com, C-U-L-L-A-R-I mediamedia.com.

Adrian Tennant: Ernesto and Barbara, thank you both very much for being our guests on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Ernesto Cullari: It was our pleasure. And well, was it your pleasure too, Barbara?

Barbara Wardell: Absolutely.

Ernesto Cullari: I don’t want to speak for Barbara.

Barbara Wardell: He does a lot, but that’s okay. We’re business partners.

Ernesto Cullari: We had a great time.

Barbara Wardell: No, this was a pleasure. Thank you.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guests this week, Barbara Wardell and Ernesto Cullari. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation with timestamps 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 time, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:01: Introduction to Retail Revolution Study  

00:59: Introduction to Geofencing Technology  

03:33: Meeting and Co-founding Cullari + Wardell  

05:19: Practical Applications of Geofencing  

06:36: Advantages of Geofencing  

08:39: Foot Traffic Studies  

12:54: Examples of Geofencing Campaigns  

14:35: Granularity of Location Targeting  

19:18: Role of Ad Creative  

21:05: Measuring Effectiveness of Geofencing Campaigns  

22:35: Misconceptions about Geofencing  

23:45: Tips for a Successful Pilot Project  

26:01: Evolution of Geofencing Technology  

29:45: Contact Information