Episode Transcript
Speaker A: Hello, hello, hello everyone. Welcome to today's episode. Today I have with me Gabby Stroller in her story is absolutely crazy. I cannot wait for you to hear this because really what she is doing over at Big Happy and what she has been before is seriously out of this world. And for those of you who don't know who Gabby Stroller is, Gabby Stoller is the Chief Revenue officer at Big Happy where she leads the company's revenue strategy, client partnerships and go to market efforts across its omnichannel advertising business. Previously she led the chill alcohol and convenience sales team at Walmart Connect, shaping the retailer strategy for some of the world's largest CPG brands and has held leadership roles across organizations including the New York Times. This star placed an verb. Gabby, a big welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you here and what I am really wondering from you is that you left Walmart to go build something new at a hundred person company. What did you see that made Big Happy worth it?
Speaker B: I have to start by saying when I went to Walmart what drew me there is the peak of COVID and and I was brought over there to be a part of the food team which was only 20 people at the time that I started over there. By the time I left Walmart Connect, the food team grew to over 400. So what drew me to Walmart Connect in particular was that startup mentality, but backed of course by the biggest organization in the entire world. And so I loved having that backing but also being able to have my fingerprints in a part of an organization and shaping that strategy. What I loved about it over there too is like I basically got my mba. I learned the ins and outs of business and finance and what actually goes behind the scenes from like a product being developed to a product going on the shelf. Those are things as a consumer I never really thought about. And even as a marketer and an advertising background like that's not what I thought about either. So it really made me super well rounded and allowed me to think really differently. The one piece on the retail side that's always been a little tricky is creative freedom. Retailers have a really specific way of certain guardrails and certain language and certain trademarks and certain placements of logos and totally respect that because they want to not be intrusive to the consumer and they really want it to be reflective of the company's brand guidelines. However, as off site continues to grow and bringing consumers off of the owned and operated back into like the ecosystem from a retailer specific, there is a Little bit more freedom for creative. And what made me the most excited was that this kind of blank space in retail and commerce where off site now has so many more legs and so much more opportunity to reach the right consumers using the best data available. But to really have this like prescriptive, high impact, immersive opportunity to reach consumers with something that's really going to resonate and stick. And so Big Happy has been doing this for six plus years on the mobile side, which I loved. The CEO founder is a former coworker of mine from Verve. So keeping it within the family. So I trusted, always admired him. When I left verb, I remember being so impressed by him and just the way that he thought. I told him I would work for him one day, not knowing he was going to start his own company. And so when he called me about this GM for digital home opportunity, it really felt like it took everything that I've been doing my entire career to come on over here. Knowing I had seven other coworkers here from a prior lifetime, knowing how fast they were growing and like their client base, I just saw that there was such a ripe opportunity to build from the ground up a digital out of home presence that connected consumers to place based inventory and to bring programmatic 3D digital out of home at scale into a market that really like had such an appetite for great creative on this channel, but it wasn't quite available yet in this scalable fashion. So I knew Big Happy had the chops to do it. We own our own tech. I did all of my evaluation just to make sure the pipes could be connected. But I saw that like it allowed me to really bring together everything I've ever done in my entire career and to get to do it at an organization that could be really fast, really nimble, really flexible and had really great people and really great energy. So yes, leaving Fortune 1 to come to a hundred person company is something that many were like, what are you doing? This is absolutely bonkers. But I felt like, and I always trusted my gut with every career move I've ever made. My gut has never led me wrong. It still hasn't. The digital out of home space is still so ripe. There's so much appetite and Big Happy is doing it in such a unique way and I love to get to be the face of it and to get to have my fingerprints on it.
Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah, I mean seriously, when I first heard the story of the jump, I was like, oh my God, she's gonna be psychotic when I speak to Her. But you're actually a really nice person.
Speaker B: I'm pretty normal.
Speaker A: Yeah, you are.
Speaker B: I'm a good butt instinct.
Speaker A: I do for sure. Yes, you, you clearly do. And one thing that that's fascinating is because you've had that experience from a Fortune 1 to now going to 100 person team. This is now the second time that you've really built this sales team and when you did it inside of Walmart, I'm assuming that building the sales team there felt very different than building it in this smaller startup. So what would you say worked in both places and what did you have to kind of unlearn?
Speaker B: I would say on the Walmart side we really were looking for a diverse set of candidates based on skill set and based on like the maturity of the organization. So like the very beginning it was someone that was really like data driven and was really able to craft a narrative based on the millions of data points that you have on a consumer from the Walmart ecosystem. And so it was very much rooted in like the data side of the house. And, and then like as we continued to mature as an organization, we definitely became more omni focused, more full funnel focused and then we were able to really expand our networking to folks that had that type of a background. So I would say we were hiring based on like what we needed at that moment in time, going to Big Happy and realizing like where we are and like the maturity of the organization, like Walmart's been around for a very, very, very long time. Big Happy's been around for six years. And so as we continue to elevate ourselves and continue to like graduate with who we're expanding our narrative and story to in our event presence. It was really critical that we were hiring like incredibly like scrappy, roll up your sleeves, willing to able to like knock on doors. And now that we continue to like grow we, we're really thinking about folks that are like thought leaders in the space and that are able to bring in a different level of like skills that can continue to teach the team. I will say like the Big Happy folks are some of the hungriest, smartest, kindest, love their job more than anything in the world people and they just have such a thirst for knowledge and they're craving that ability to learn. So when we brought in digital out of home, the amount of people that just like raise their hand to learn more, put time on my calendars to like learn about the actual channel, we only kept it to like a small subset of us. Selling my first six months for out of home. And because of how fast it grew, we then became Omni in January and that's when I stepped into CRO role. So I would say it's a very different skill set now that we're looking for because we need folks that are really willing to roll up their sleeves, are really thirsty to continue to, like, grow their career, are intellectually curious. Right? Because if it's a new channel and you've never sold it before, we have to teach you the fundamentals. You have to go through certifications and trainings and be okay being vulnerable. And I think at a company it's a hundred people, it's easier to be vulnerable and to ask a lot of questions because you just have access to the people that you need to ask the questions to so much faster. There's just a speed at which we're moving that's very different than any massive conglomerate, Walmart and others of like, the same stature. We just are able to move really, really, really fast. And we need folks that can keep up with the pace, for sure.
Speaker A: And when you say keep up with the pace, I'm curious, what, what is your sales team necessarily doing on a regular basis? Right. Because one of the things that I'm sure that you're needing to do because of the speed that you are growing is that recruiting. So if somebody was actually listening and saying, you know what, this might actually be a team that I want to join, like, what is that person's job necessarily? Like, what are they actually focused on to drive revenue?
Speaker B: So I would say, like, the Rev Org this year officially consists of all sales and all marketing, which is the first time we've actually merged the two functions. So marketing used to be a standalone division, sales used to be a standalone division. And why I love the way that we're structured now is that it allows us really to go to market and rowing in the same direction and that it's all rooted in revenue. At the end of the day, companies the size of a big happy or anyone else in the ad tech space of like a hundred people, like, we are all like, the health of the company is based on revenue. And so when you have everyone sitting under, like one part of the org, it means we're all rowing in the same direction. We have really clear goals and KPIs, we're all like, looking at the numbers on a weekly basis. We're seeing where we're trending. We're seeing common themes across the coast, we're identifying, like, areas of opportunity. And we're also Able to like make big bets on trends that we pick up like pretty quickly. So if you think about something like DCO, which we rolled out recently, DCO for 3D digital out of home was like almost nearly impossible to do. Why is that? 3D is really hard. You have to own your own tech. Typically. Usually if you're outsourcing it, it's three to six months to even get like one asset. We're doing it in less than 14 business days and we're building it in house and really truly consider ourselves a Pixar of digital advertising. And so like the speed at which we're able to build products and really build things that speak to what the audiences and consumers and brands are asking for ahead of the market. Like even knowing that it's something that they need is something that like we have to build at speed so that we could announce it quickly and we could get adoption. So I would say like we're hiring and recruiting folks that could keep up with the pace of like being taught how to continue to bring revenue driving products into the market. But always to be like really rooted in like what Big Happy focuses on, which is great creative, deserves to be seen. Whether that's on digital at home or mobile. We do 3D at scale. We do it faster than anyone in the market because we own our tech. But it's all rooted in that great creative at scale. And no matter what we're going to roll out from a product standpoint, it's going to be like rooted in those two things.
Speaker A: And what did you do that a team, a normal team probably would not have done that you guys were actually able to go ahead and do?
Speaker B: So I would say like any client that comes to us, you know, they're going to give us their objectives, their KPIs, and they're going to give us really like their static asset in general. Like what we do is we treat every single creative like a blank canvas. We don't work within templates because we want our tech. So we don't need to rely on what a template could look like and trying to cookie cutter like any sort of creative. So a brand that comes to us is going to ask us to build an asset and they're going to ask us to build an asset based on our portfolio. Big Happy has over 20 products that we sell in general. Our toolkit is pretty vast, even though we're on two channels and we're really like focused on digital out of home and mobile. But our mobile portfolio is huge. It could be everything from video to infusion, which allows us to ingest like APIs to be like more real time. And then when you think about digital out of home, we can run on any venues with 3D at scale. And so for a company that's like a CPG brand, what we would want to do is understand the goals and the consumers that they're trying to reach. And we would build out those custom assets to speak to each of those different cohorts. But to have different creative based on the different audience strategies. And so that's where having your own platform and being able to do CGI and 3D at scale, it allows us to speak to each of the different consumers and have a lot of levers in flight to understand what's actually working and resonating based on the KPI set forth. So any of the CPG companies you can use purchase data, you can use over indexing DMAs, you could geofence retailers with mapping strategies to get consumers in storage store while also driving them to an omnichannel like E Comm platform. So we're really just making sure that the creative meets the goals. The creative is our first step in any sort of strategy we're putting together. And then the media plan will follow after we understand like what they're trying to achieve and who the audience is they're trying to reach.
Speaker A: Amazing. And I know one of the hardest things and the fact that you guys have actually before I even go into that, the fact that you guys have your actually own in house software to be able to do this is something that 99.9% of agencies do not have. And that gives you guys a huge advantage. So I'm curious here is that everybody always goes ahead and they claim results, right? They talk about results that they're able to get. But I know my listeners hear results pitches all the time. So can you kind of teach them like what separating number that they can actually trust versus one that they can't.
Speaker B: So I mean I'll take like my Walmart hat and just put it back on for one second. One of the many reasons I loved working there is that you actually can't fight data. They it's their own data. You know every single exposure what it led to from an incremental sale or if it led to an online sale or if it led to an in store sale and it allowed you the ability to be like really smart in flight and to make decisions really quickly to optimize against exactly what you're doing. Coming to Big Happy one of the first questions I had while we were building on Digital out of home was we had all of our measurement partners for mobile lined up. We have it across all different KPIs. We have really great partnerships that are third party. A company like Big Happy doesn't own in house measurement tools. While we have creative analytics, we don't necessarily have like brand studies that we had built out a panel for. Most companies don't. So we wanted to work with like the best and the brightest in the space to really bring forth all different measurement providers that can measure, you know, whether it's brand studies or foot traffic or sales. We had a library available and a menu of options. A lot of brands in house have figured out their source of truth. So even when I was at Placed and we were measuring foot traffic, many companies needed place to be on every single plan. It was a mandate. So I quickly saw that third party verification was really critical, especially in big brands that need one methodology, one source of truth, an agency to get behind it, all the brands getting behind it, and then that it allowed them to really compare every single partner against the same methodology, see who's actually driving the best results. So at Big Happy, when we expanded Digital out of Home, we had to make sure that all those partners also were able to measure Omni. Because for us, what we're trying to understand is does digital out of home perform in isolation best? Does Omni perform best? Does retargeting perform best? Does mobile only perform best against each of the different KPIs so that we can figure out like what the playbook looks like and what type of messaging and creative at scale is going to speak to the right audiences and drive those different actions. And so third party verification is something that we are obsessed with and maniacally obsessed with. Over here we just hired a measurement lead who's absolutely fantastic. But we're continuing to double down in that accountability. Mobile always has been measurable. It's one to one. It's pretty easy to understand who's exposed and what actually happened. But digital out of home is something that we still continue to have to educate on. Not everyone is aware that digital out of home is measurable. And I love coming here and teaching the team and teaching our clients and our brands that it very much should have a seat at the table in the same exact way in which you're measuring every other channel, even a legacy channel like TV and linear. This is digital like it is something that very much is held to the same standard. And so we really set it up where you can't refute the data. It's the same trusted partners you work with across all your other channels. And now it's just brought to this Omni perspective where we have the ability to optimize in flight if those are metrics available. But post campaign we're typically funding the studies on behalf of our brands because we believe so much in the power of the data and really making sure that we're getting learnings so that it's not just a short term transactional win. The goal is to really build a long term triangulated partnership where the brand trusts us and the agency trusts us and then the, the data doesn't lie. It's something that they truly believe in because it's like rooted in all of that.
Speaker A: Amazing. And when it comes to digital out of home, what are the specific KPIs that you, you normally will look at and be able to share to a client to show that your campaign's actually working.
Speaker B: So digital out of home is so fascinating and obviously I'm obsessed with it. But what's nice about digital out of home is that it's really broken out in so many different ways. So we think that the scale that Big Happy has access to through our SSPs, there's millions of screens that we have at our fingertips that we use in our strategic approach with brands. Now you're able to break out reporting by venue type. So you can actually see if the goal is brand studies or brand awareness or recall. You could actually break out what drove the highest awareness or recall by gas stations versus billboards versus urban panels versus malls for each of the different brands. To me that's incredibly interesting because it allows you to create a playbook for if you have this KPI, where should you run if it's an innovation item versus something that's like a core item? Like there's going to be different things that we would do. I would say the majority of digital out of home campaigns typically get bucketed in more of that upper funnel area. However, with the connected commerce capabilities now that are available and screens available in stores and the ability to retarget based on exposure, you're seeing a lot of out of home be connected now down to lower funnel to really continue that sequential storytelling with different messages but reaching that same consumer, trying to move them further along. And that's where you would pair everything from a brand study down to sales studies. But they all break out performance by the venue type, which allows us to have just so much data to really be able to create the most robust, smart, intelligent campaigns for each of the brands that are coming to us and leaning on us for that storytelling.
Speaker A: That's amazing. And, Gabby, for anybody who's going ahead and thinking about reaching out to you or working with Big Happy, where should they go to?
Speaker B: Definitely our website. It's really up to date. There's so much information, and we are hiring pretty aggressively on our marketing team just to make sure that our socials are up to date. LinkedIn is up to date, but also our website is definitely telling our story and having all of our announcements. So I would say that's a great resource. Obviously, they can also reach out to me and I could direct them to anyone. So. Gabbyighighappy. Co not with an M. And we will definitely guide everyone in the right direction. That's also the pos. The positive of, like, a smaller type of an org is like, we definitely have the right people in the right seat covering everything, and there is an exact expert waiting on our side to service anyone in the best capacity with our White glove service.
Speaker A: Amazing. Gabby, thank you so much for jumping on today. This was fantastic.
Speaker B: Great. I'm so happy.
Speaker A: Absolutely. Big happy. Exactly. That's awesome. Well, guys, thank you everyone for listening. And remember to have a very big, happy day. I will see you on the next episode. Ciao for now.
Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you.
