Advertising Can Save Lives - Kris Johns

0:00Kris Johns:Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Chris Johns, founder and CEO of AdGood, and somebody whose career sits right at the intersection of innovation, media, and impact. Chris has spent more than 15 years helping shape the streaming and ad tech world, building platforms and businesses that transformed how audience discover content and how companies create growth.

0:47Kris Johns:He helped scale AdPool into one of the world's largest CTV marketplaces, played a major role at Whirl before its acquisition by AppLovin, and was part of the growth story at Maker Studios before Disney came calling. But what really grabbed my attention is what Chris decided to do next. Because after helping build businesses and scale technology, he looked at something most people barely noticed, unused advertising inventory, and saw something entirely different. He saw potential, he saw opportunity, and he saw a way to turn empty ad space into something that could actually help change lives. Today, through AdGood, Chris is helping nonprofits across the power of connected TV and giving organizations that normally wouldn't have a seat at the table a much bigger voice.

1:33Kris Johns:Chris Johns, we met at Possible probably a month ago at the time of recording this. It is great to see you again, my friend. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Steve. Absolutely. Really good conversation at Possible. I knew within 30 seconds I got to get this guy on so here we go so you've spent years on scaling building streaming tv ctv ad tech and so on and so on but ad good feels like a different kind of chapter so I want to start with that give us the story behind it and was there a moment or moments that you said I need to build this yeah I mean I guess it all started you know I'm a big blood donor and you know don't even blood locally here and you know where I live and a lot of times I go and there was just never anybody in there donating blood.

2:15There's just a huge capacity problem kind of happening there. And being in the space that I was in formerly, I knew that there was a large percentage of inventory that goes unfilled for streaming. So more or less kind of putting those two pieces together, looking into how the donated media model works, how people can access donated media and how difficult it is, and also thinking about the full scale of how many nonprofits actually exist out there. And of those that do exist, the 1.9 million, just a small percentage actually even get access to this level of inventory that's donated. And so the more I dug in, the more I realized that there should be a much easier, more democratized access so that all nonprofits can really dive in there and get it in a simple, easy way.

2:56And it can accommodate nonprofits of all sizes, both large and small, so they can connect even if they don't have creative and don't know how to run media and don't know what the different pieces are that they need to do to be able to execute. I wanted to create a scenario that was simple, easy, and affordable for them to get the power of TV and what it can do. Both the biggest brands and the biggest nonprofits that exist, a lot of them were started on TV.

3:19Kris Johns:So is this open to, I mean, just any nonprofit? What's the parameters? Yeah, the only parameters are is we don't do anything faith-based and we don't do anything political. Those are the only two kind of pieces that we stay out of. But pretty much, you know, we run the gamut for causes. You know, we run across all the major verticals and have already done so in the past year. You know, we've been able to execute campaigns both at the micro level using our self-serve Gen AI ad manager, where there's even a tiny nonprofit that we work with that's based in Galveston, Texas. They've ran, they've been running through that and are still consistently running through that platform.

3:54And they've seen great returns, you know, so it, the model proves out no matter what the scale is. that even that tiny nonprofit saw like a 433 % increase in donations and a 200 % plus growth in attendance to their events. So even them running small budgets, like I think they started at$250 a month and then they saw so much success from it. They got up to, I think they're up to like 450 towards the end of last year and they were seeing massive growth. And this is a huge benefit to their small organization, both from an awareness standpoint. So people can actually go there and get you know the education for music that they wanted to as well as them getting additional donations so they could actually grow what they're trying to do and get more impact when it comes to

4:36Kris Johns:ctv i think i think a lot of people when they hear that think of or very often think of giant brands with giant budgets did we somewhere along the way like accidentally or on purpose create like a velvet rope if you will around this technology well i think it's always been cost prohibitive And I also think that it's a connection aspect. Like, where do you even go to get it? I think there's been a big breakdown in that because there's been a big focus on ad managers kind of coming out across CTV. A lot of the big publishers now have that. They're going after kind of SMBs that are out there, you know, all the way down to like pizza parlors and things like that.

5:10So our ad manager that we have through partnerships with Streamr and Magnite, we're actually able to access that same great tool that's used for SMBs, but we use it for nonprofits. So it kind of combines the power of what they've built for SMBs and then the power of our discounted media so the nonprofits get access.

5:28Kris Johns:What frustrates you the most about how access to CTV works today? Well, access in what sense? You mean for nonprofits or just in general? Yeah. Well, we can start. Let's just start in general. For most of my listeners are not nonprofits. So start there. And then if you want to work more granular. I think from an access standpoint, you know, smaller businesses can access it, but only through specific locations and specific publishers and things like that, which I don't think is bad. Like they can still get in there if they want to, but they, if they've never bought in that, then they're never going to know.

5:59And they just think TV's unattainable. Right. And sometimes they'll call like the local station and they get some broadcast, but then they're missing out on all the targeting that could come in. So even sometimes when they get access, it's like, you know, the targeting piece is very important for what they're trying to achieve for their business. Because then if they're hitting the wrong audience, it's just kind of wasted spend in some aspects. So I think that piece, I think, could be a little daunting for any business, any buyer that's never bought it, right? And I think that piece and the lack of education for it and the complexity that I feel like sits on top of it, that it's complex, but it's not that complicated.

6:37where as long as you know your audience, you have your budget. And to be honest, the other big piece is the minimums, right? Like some of these minimum spends could be quite high for, you know, a lot of these different types of buyers.

6:49Kris Johns:Yeah. So I know when we talked, one of the things you said was there's an awareness, right? Where a lot of, or it used to be a lot of nonprofits could only get like the 2 a.m. slot, you know, when infomercials ran, right? Remember that? Exactly. And so I would imagine part of what your company does is educational. Yeah. So yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, we, there's a lot of nonprofits come to us too, because even the ones that are savvy, they're out there, they're buying a lot of digital paid ads. They're, you know, they have their Google ad grant and they're running a lot of stuff. They have their meta account set up.

7:21They're running ads in the, in that platform. But unfortunately they've kind of hit this plateau where even if they put a lot of spend in, they're only getting very incremental small amounts of growth. And so now they're looking for new channels to kind of bring more top of funnel in and get more people transacting at some of these and some of these other destinations. And so that's where we'll get a lot of nonprofits reaching out to us and getting access. And then they realize, oh, this is just like digital. We can do this. This is great. But a lot of it for them is getting access because they don't know where to go.

7:51The minimums are too high. And I think there's a trust piece to the fact that we're a nonprofit kind of trying to build out this platform for other nonprofits, right? That's hopefully here long after we're all gone, right? Like we want this to be something that's much more than like come to ad good because we're discounted media for all nonprofits. We're much actually much more than that. We're trying to build something that's sustainable and there for the entire nonprofit community so that even the smaller nonprofits can get access to what has made some of the larger nonprofits so powerful and grow so quickly.

8:24Kris Johns:Yeah, I would imagine there's so many nonprofits who are on the smaller side thinking, yeah, I mean, well, we don't have the budget that XYZ does, so we can't possibly run. And you're sitting there in the corner going, wait a minute. Yeah, you can. So to me, it's a good challenge to have to say, no, you can. Here's how. Exactly. And we're doing other things, too. We work with a lot of different partners to be able to show attribution. And we do lift studies for free through one of our partners. And so we're trying to build out the data component as much as we can so that they can be marketers, right?

8:58Because even with regular donated media, there's this problem of how can you actually be a marketer when you get a set amount of inventory and you get whatever reporting you're going to get? And then what if this campaign is doing fantastic and you're seeing it across all your other channels? You can't go buy that inventory and grow what you were doing. You can't put more into that campaign to add more juice to it so that you get the maximum amount that you can. And so there needs to be a lever for these nonprofits so they can go in and actually be marketers, right? Because if they can actually go be marketers, then they can have all this great technology that exists to be a marketer.

9:36And so that's what we want to pretty much give access to. A lot of the partners we work with, we get great rates from, we negotiate that piece, and then we just pass that cost directly onto the nonprofits. It's like, we don't charge more for that stuff. That's just what it is. We let them know that that access is what that access is. In some cases, give them seats on some of the platforms, et cetera, depending on their savviness and what they need. Some need a little bit more in-holding than others. It really just depends. I mean, some of these nonprofits have just like performance shops. I mean, they're great.

10:05Like they know what they're doing. They're way more versed than even us in all these different aspects. And so we learn a lot about the ecosystem, how they track things and the data components that they're looking at. And it gets really quite interesting. And we love those partners because the more we can work with them and optimize, then we can kind of pass that knowledge in a simple way on to the other nonprofits that we work with that aren't as sappy.

10:26Kris Johns:Yeah. Holistically speaking, I think every industry has a dashboard problem, as I call it. But especially nonprofits, they don't need more dashboards, not that anybody does, but they need simplicity, right? And I want to get into how important it was for you to remove complexity, really, and build something that feels just very usable versus more than just powerful. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a blend of the partnerships, right? Kind of streamlining and getting partnerships that we know will work best for what the nonprofits are trying to do. And having a self-serve tool that has the data pieces that they need in there, I think was a huge component as well.

10:59And as we kind of continued to grow, we've realized like some of the platforms weren't working as good as the other ones. And we've kind of had to sunset those and move on to other ones. So we're kind of learning as we go to for based on what their needs are. And we're constantly evolving. And so that's just an ongoing piece. But a lot of the same things that we look at and what we hear from the nonprofits, even the really savvy ones, everything we're doing is really kind of helping them to achieve their goal or what they're trying to get to as far as understanding. Because TV itself isn't clickable.

11:27And a lot of the way that they do their performance marketing is heavily click based attribution and things like that. And so they want to be able to look at this top of funnel and then see how it's attributed across the growth for all their conversion channels, like their paid ads, their organic, their meta, whatever they're running for social, all that good stuff.

11:45Kris Johns:Yeah. Again, like I said, you know, I talk to CMOs all the time and they're just, they're, they're overwhelmed or consumed with dashboard after dashboard, right? The data, the analytics. And half the time, you know, they tell me like my, my team just sits there staring at charts and to have that. And especially in a nonprofit where presumably they don't have as much of a marketing budget as a non, a non nonprofit, stay with me, has the need for simplicity is just so paramount. Yeah, yeah, it is. And we're able to work with the nonprofits and or their agencies as well. We work with a lot of agencies.

12:20So depending on how and what data they need, we also do all kinds of stuff from like flat file delivery so that we can actually work with into whatever dashboards they're using for visualizations of their data. We do that with a couple of different partners. And we've recently just set up our whole kind of data platform here so that we can better accommodate those specific needs. We don't see that as much with the smaller nonprofits, obviously. But our reporting that we do for a lot of our managed services, it's pretty simple stuff. But one of the interesting things, because you mentioned about day part, we actually added impressions by time of day to our standard reporting just to help the nonprofits understand and see specifically like you're not just running in the middle of the night.

13:00Like you're getting prime time, you're getting everything. And we actually allow them to also day part target so they can target specific day parts, whatever they need. Like we're able to accommodate all those things.

13:10Kris Johns:I love that. Yeah. And clearly, I just can hear, wait, I can do that? I can target like the big guys do? Yeah. Yeah. And we, you know, we target all the way down to the zip code. We can do any sort of geo. And we do a lot of things, too, where sometimes nonprofits will come in and say, you know, we want to target, you know, a specific state and specific kind of income levels and things like that. And we'll, you know, see the price of the targeting depending on if their budget's not huge. We're like, okay, well, it's going to add, you know, a dollar CPM because of the targeting from the third party source that we're getting it from.

13:41But there's scenarios where we can look at the census data for that specific state. And we look at what the income levels per zip code. And then we'll do geo-targeting for them because it's a highly reduced cost for them to do that. And be able to target those specific zip codes. So there's a lot of interesting ways that we've been doing to kind of adjust what we're doing on the targeting front for lowering costs for the nonprofits and still providing good return, right? Like they're still seeing great success. And we've done tests on those same cases where we have the targeting and then we kind of did it our way where we look at the zip codes and the income levels from the different census data that we get.

14:14And we've been able to actually see a lot of the same returns. Obviously, this was just across a few states. They weren't national campaigns. But, you know, we typically could do that across the U.S. as well.

14:25Kris Johns:I know something you're very passionate about, which I love to, is purpose-driven advertising. Yes. Right. I kind of want to start this little topic about how does Chris Johns define that term? Purpose-driven advertising. I mean, it's really just cause-based, right? Like social good. Like how are you trying to be good and help your community or good and just help humans or animals or there's, you know, the environment, like anything out there, just trying to make the world a better place. Like that's really how I look at it. Okay. With actually saving lives, you know. Yeah. Changing lives. Yeah.

14:56changing lives, educating, you know, all those things just really help people and or animals or the world, right?

15:04Kris Johns:Inherited in that is the word trust, right? How do you think about trust when it comes to purpose-driven advertising? So I think TV itself is probably the best channel to build trust with an audience. People sit down with their families or by themselves to watch specific types of content that they love. It's long-form content. people are engaged, they're committed, they're watching this content. And having your nonprofit and cause alongside that content just helps the viewer understand, you know, that your, you know, your brand can be trusted. Like, this is just something that's, it's just inherent, right?

15:43Like, anything that's on TV, I mean, ever since I was a kid, you know, like, something's on TV, it was like this big deal. There's still elements of that, I think, that exists. And I still think Like there's this power of what television can do. It's the biggest screen in the home. It's the most engaging thing that you can see in a home. And I think, you know, when you tie that into what you're doing for a bigger campaign, like that's where all these things come in. Because when you think about these other channels like social and, you know, some of these paid banner ads and things like that, like there's a trust problem out there, right?

16:11Yeah. It's a known thing, you know, it's scale, but there's a trust problem. And TV helps build that trust and helps all those other channels convert. some of the best growth that we've seen is when you mix social with tv if you have big tv campaigns going then you're running a bunch of social because that's where people are engaging the conversion levels increase you know incredibly it's it's fascinating right from a human nature

16:34Kris Johns:perspective because as you're saying this the first thing i'm thinking of well is it is it because tv's been around the longest and there's that inherent trust i think so maybe it's like generational and it's passed down but there's just something about it like the tv goes on and just kind of looks at it it's like you know everybody faces their self everybody what else do you point your furniture at that that it's like fire and tv you know it's like these are the things point yeah you know point it at the oven or the refrigerator yeah i mean it's it's it's like there's just something inherently about that it's you know that co-viewing with your family like it's yeah it's a thing like family movie night like there's all these things there's not like family refrigerator night or you know any of these other things that you have in your home maybe you'll start a new trend but i doubt it well we actually just we actually just activated some inventory from one of our partners samsung and it's actually uh they have a viewing experience on their refrigerators so we've actually just started running some ads there which is interesting interesting but it's still in a tv space kind of thing yeah well it's a screen on a on a screen right yeah right that's really interesting stuff uh because tv just and and you're spot on with Excuse me, there has, if you're going to do social, add it onto TV.

17:47Kris Johns:Don't just do social. Yeah, I mean, it's like the two together, right? And nobody's, I don't think any of these nonprofits are ever going to not do social. Like, it's a very powerful thing for them. And you want to continue that engagement. But to attain new audience and to help convert those people that are like, you know, I'm not quite sure. Or just to remind them to go back about the importance of what their causes are, right? Like, and what they're doing and how they impact, especially at a local level. Like the smaller local nonprofits, like, you know, they just miss out on so many dollars because they could be helping during a disaster, all kinds of things.

18:20But they're not going to get a big chunk of money. They're not going to get the money that they need. That actually goes a lot further with them because typically they're just not able to kind of get access to the audience.

18:30Kris Johns:Yeah. When I was going over the notes for this, you know, and some of the things we wanted to talk about. And one of the things was the following. I'm just going to read it verbatim. was purpose-driven campaigns deserve Fortune 500 technology. What did you mean by that? I just mean that there needs to be a level playing ground, right? Like nonprofits of all sizes should be able to get the same access to the great media and the great tools and the great technology that even Fortune 500 brands can get access to. And with us, they have that access. You know, they could come to us and spend a$10 ,000 budget and get access to all the same great components as far as targeting, attribution, lift studies, all these kind of key things.

19:09Now, obviously, you want a certain impression level, but they also kind of get that with us

19:13Kris Johns:because of the price book that we charge. So they actually get a lot of impressions because they're getting 4X what they would get or what the big brands are paying for. And so, yes, 100 % they should have that access because, I mean, all these amazing things have been built in ad tech. And, you know, it's more than just kind of driving the dollar. I think it's also about what it could do and the massive scale that it can do for social good. You know, it's just, I mean, it does amazing things. is like, why wouldn't it be used for all this stuff? It's just, right. Do you think there's kind of an unspoken assumption maybe that, hey, listen, nonprofits should just be grateful for whatever they can get?

19:48I don't know about, I mean, I think it's hard, right? I think there's a lot of nonprofits. I think it could be hard in some scenarios for companies to work with nonprofits, you know, small teams, you know, maybe some might be a little bit more disorganized than others. I think marketers at nonprofits at a certain size have a harder time getting, you know, budget and approval for things and how they have to kind of chase up sometimes all the way to the board level and educate all the way up those channels. So, you know, it's hard, I think. I think, I think everybody wants to do good. And I can say that all of our partners love us because they look at us as in some ways, like an aggregation platform of nonprofits so that they can actually do good at a massive scale without having to kind of put the manpower in to be able to go out and you work with as many nonprofits as possible.