Greg Star:

We’re able to capture device IDs of people who are around the cars and then we can send digitally retargeted ads to their phone.

Chris Dreyer:

Modern takes on traditional advertising backed by data are a great way to get additional touchpoints and secure new clients.

Greg Star:

We can tell how many people saw a car then went to the website.

Chris Dreyer:

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. Increase your return on ad spin by partnering with data-informed innovators. At Carvertise, founding partner Greg Star takes a novel concept, wrapping rideshare cars in ads and uses data to target locations where his clients’ ideal demographics will be and they do it in real time. From sporting events and conferences to auto body repair shops, Greg’s team can track on the ground impressions and retarget mobile ads to the user’s cell phone. When repeated visibility is critical to the success of a campaign, investing in a service like Carvertise can help put you ahead of the curve.
I’m your host Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people, so let’s get to know our guest. When Greg and his partner Mac were in college, Mac had the idea to pay people to put ads on their cars. Here’s Greg, founding partner at Carvertise.

Greg Star:

It’s very logical, there’re ads everywhere. On the advertiser side, small business owners have been wrapping their cars for decades, you see ads with trucks on them, services companies. And so we would talk to these small business owners and they would just swear by the effectiveness of their own cars being wrapped. They’re like, “Yeah, it’s the best marketing I do.” And then on the other side of it, the gig economy was just sprouting up, Uber, Lyft was just getting big and the idea of monetizing your own assets was becoming a thing so it was just a very logical idea of, “Well, ads on cars make sense and why can’t we let people earn money if they’re already driving? But we were helped by the fact that we had no experience in advertising, no experience in running a… We were in college, we didn’t know anything. Being naive and stubborn was very helpful in just trying to, “Let’s make this happen.”

Chris Dreyer:

In retrospect, I see the weird Red Bull cars and even my sister has a plumbing company, so I know the effectiveness of the wrapped vehicles, they sit in the driveway, it’s just an advertisement in their local market, but ideas are one thing and execution’s entirely different. So how did you secure your first brand, your first drivers? How did that whole process go about?

Greg Star:

It was just frenetic energy of showing up to local chambers of commerce, local networking events and just talking to everybody who would listen and just standing into a crowd of people and saying, “Hey, we have this idea, what do you think?” The key for us was when we did this exercise, we googled important people in Delaware because that’s where the company started. So we literally just googled important people in Delaware and we looked at people on the boards of non-profits, the boards of universities, government officials, and we just sent them all a standard letter, “Hey, I have this idea, I want to put ads on cars and pay people. You’ve been successful? Would love to get some time on your calendar.” And one of the people that answered us was a cabinet secretary for the state of Delaware of economic development and he was an entrepreneur himself, he sold his company to Walgreens, did very well and then had a soft spot.
So he took a meeting, I remember in the meeting I spilled water on myself, disaster. But he was like, “This is a great idea, you need customers.” So he put us in touch with the local CEO of the ShopRite, the Kenny family who owned six or seven ShopRites in Delaware and he put us in touch and said, “Give these guys a shot.” The guy took the meeting, gave us a shot and that led us to having a name, ShopRite, it’s a grocery store chain, that was a name in the state of Delaware and once we got them on board, we ran the product, we got the drivers, things started to snowball from there.

Chris Dreyer:

I love the hustle and you stand out with the handwritten letters as opposed to trying to bombard their email, their inbox. So I think that was really smart. When did you know it really had legs? When did you know that, “Hey, we’re onto something.” What’s growth been like for the past couple years?

Greg Star:

What helped was that everyone thought it was a good idea, it was a universally, “This is a good idea.” And I think what also helped was just nice people who were willing to take meetings with us. People that had a lot of other stuff going on in their lives, but they would just take a meeting and provide, “This is great, you have something here, just keep going.” And so it took two years to get a real sale, I worked part-time jobs, my partner was selling furniture out of his grandfather’s house, it was not fun those first few years because no one would buy the service because it just takes time for people to try something. So what kept us going was just stubbornness and the fact that we thought it was a good idea, people were telling us and then we just needed for the right opportunity.
And then growth the last few years has been very strong. I mean, it was 2012 when we started at it and I say we were in the wilderness for five years or so. I joke, I kind of blacked out for three years in that period, it was a mess. But 2018 was our first, “Okay, we’ve got 10, 15 employees now.” And then 2019 we doubled in size and we were like, “We’ve figured this out.” We finally made it eight years in and then COVID hits, throws a complete wrench when the world is saying, “Don’t go outside, businesses are scared.” So then we took a little dip, but then the last two years have been exponential growth.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, it’s interesting around, I’m going to say I think 2018 I talked to Michael Cannon who at the time was their head of marketing at Gomez Trial Attorneys and it was after the CRISP Conference and I said, ” You know what would be smart?” I was like, “You’ve got all these Uber drivers, you got all these Lyft drivers, what about wrapping their cars? They’re on the road all the time, that’s where we want to advertise.” And I think actually they ended up being an early client of yours in the PI space.

Greg Star:

Yeah, they were, the Gomez firm. We are very appreciative, John Gomez is a great guy, a great role model. Yeah, they blitzed Riverdale, California and that helped us get on the map actually because they were a name, people were seeing the cars and there’s no shortage of PI attorneys in California so it really helped.

Chris Dreyer:

How can Carvertise help a personal injury firm grow, big picture?

Greg Star:

Yeah. It can help it grow by helping them get more clients because this is a unique advertising channel that is not saturated. I mean, I think all advertising is great, I think it all works, but there is a saturation when you’re seeing different people’s faces on billboards driving down the highway, are you really being able to tell which firm is which? For the average person. You’re watching daytime TV and there’s just law firm ad after law firm ad, it’s important but again, it’s like, how do you really stand out?
And doing something different like wrapping cars lets you stand out. And I think one thing we’ve added to the product over the last few years really specifically for PI firms is being able to target places with the cars. So we’ve had law firms send cars to chiropractic centers or hospitals or different sporting events, places where they know their target demographic is going and you could send cars there. We call it active out of home. Don’t just sit back and hope people are seeing your message, get the cars driving and then send them to places where you know your audience is going to be.

Chris Dreyer:

Do you have some type of method of determining where the most individuals are going to be? Like, “Hey, there’s going to be a festival, let’s go to this and have more cars there.” How does that process work for the logistics?

Greg Star:

Yeah. So we work with a company called Placer.ai and they’re one of the leading data centers of foot traffic in the country. So we can identify events where your target demographic goes to, how many people go to the event, where they go to after the event. We use that as a tool to help identify local festivals, local concerts, big sporting events, we can identify where certain demographics go for happy hour, really nitty gritty, local. And Carvertise is a great compliment for billboards, for TV, for radio. I don’t want to make it seem like those are stale mediums that don’t work, Carvertise can help make those mediums come to life even better. You’re listening to an ad on the radio and then you see a car next to you, it’s a great touch point. You’re driving billboards on 95, you turn in off an exit and then there’s cars in your local town. It’s a mix and that’s made it so effective.

Chris Dreyer:

I think that mindset shift that you had, it’s not an either or, it’s an and. That a lot of people say that, “Well, should I do paper click or should I do SEO, on the digital side?” Both, I don’t know. Should I do billboards and radio and wrap my vehicles? Yes. So I think it’s a good compliment of the flywheel.

Greg Star:

Yeah, one thing we learned too is we started off with that mindset of it should be either or. We can help you 10 times by taking advantage of the strengths we have with the strengths those mediums have. So that took a while for us to grasp, but now that we’ve grasped it, that’s really been a better way to help our clients, make recommendations to them and help them with their efforts.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s compare some of the other forms of the mobile advertising. So you’ve got buses, you’ve got even shuttles and things like that. When we’re talking about an investment, maybe they have a limited amount of investment they have to choose, it is an either or. So how does it stack up against, say, buses? Because in the PI space, when I go to St. Louis, I’m seeing every single bus wrapped.

Greg Star:

Yeah. We have a saying, “Can a bus do that?” It’s an internal war cry for our company. Uber, Lyft and Rideshare is the future. Public transit has been declining for the last five to 10 years and that was accelerated in the pandemic, the same time Uber, Lyft has been skyrocketing. You look at their growth over the last 10 years. You go to a city, your first thought is Uber or Lyft, at the same time delivery, GrubHub, DoorDash, Amazon Flex, these are a part of the culture now. So it’s a more modern version of transportation advertising,

Chris Dreyer:

Wrapping personal entry ads around Rideshare cars doesn’t just turn heads. The cars can be sent to specific areas where target audiences are known to be and there’s an experiential element to it as well.

Greg Star:

Every time you get into an Uber or Lyft, you’re probably talking to the driver, sometimes whether you like it or not. But when you get into a wrapped car, you’re like, “What’s going on here?” And what happens is a conversation starts. So we have clients, actually a driver called me, he was doing a national campaign and he’s like, “Dude, do you guys have material you can give me? Because I’ve had four passengers ask me about this lawyer.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we can mail you some stuff but get them to go to the number.” He’s like, “Yeah, but is there just something I can give them?” I’m like, “Yeah, we’ll send something over.” So there’s stuff like that, that happens all the time with people are actually engaged and they’re actually curious, it doesn’t feel like they’re being advertised at, they’re like, “What is this?” And that change in response is something that is a big advantage we have to catch people at the right time.

Chris Dreyer:

So I think that’s really intriguing. And I saw on the demonstration that I did that the drivers were doing handouts so they have something to take away. So they have that artifact, maybe it sits on the desk or on their refrigerator at home. Circle back to what you said about saturation, which I see this as well and I’ve heard other large PI advertisers talking about TV, how you’ve got to be one of the top three advertisers, otherwise you’re diluted, you’re lost in this sea of PI attorneys advertising. How many cars do they need? Every market’s different, what’s your recommendation for the PI to get the most success? How many cars are they looking at? What’s the investment ranges look like?

Greg Star:

We have clients that just put 100 cars in every city and they just blanket the city. We have a client that puts 200 cars in the city and you really blanket that city. But for other firms that might not have that budget, what’s really helped is packaging cars with events. So let’s say there’s a city like Nashville, a client might not have the budget to do 100 cars, but they can do 15 or 20 cars and just send those cars because Nashville has a ton of events, it’s an event city. So you can just send cars to all the concerts, all the sports games. Now I think what would be great is you put 100 cars and you do the events, but we’re talking for budget range. But you can be more strategic by packaging events with the campaign so there’re activations around it.
So you might say, “Hey, for six months, let’s just get every concert that’s in Nashville and we’re only going to do 10 cars.” But people are going to be seeing that because there’s going to be thousands of people going to these concerts every week. So it’s just about being strategic and trying to make the most of your budget. We have law firms that spend a lot of money with us, but we also have law firms that spend, and I don’t want to act like this isn’t a lot of money, but $20,000. The average law firm will spend between typically 40 to 100K with us. But I guess average is not the right number because we have ones that are spending a lot more, I guess the median is a better number for that. But that’s the range we’d recommend to really do this in the right way, we work with law firms of all sizes.

Chris Dreyer:

There’s also some other things that you guys do. Some of these are very intuitive and when I read the word I have a general understanding. But I just want to run through some of the benefits that you have that maybe, say, buses or some of these other forms don’t. So the first one is swarm. Maybe we can just do a quick hitter on each of these. What is swarm?

Greg Star:

Swarms is when you send a bunch of cars, typically four to six to a specific event at a specific time. So there’s the Raptors game and that game starts at eight o’clock, we’re going to get five cars there at around 06:30 so that they’re driving around the stadium ahead of time when everyone’s walking in. That’s what a swarm is.

Chris Dreyer:

Perfect. And then a targeted IQ?

Greg Star:

So that’s when you buy a bulk of hours and we send the cars not necessarily to big events, but to local areas and zip codes where your target demographic goes. So that’s the example I talked about with Placer of, “Here’s where they go for happy hour. Here’s where they go for entertainment locally. Here are the zip codes where your demographic lives and the areas.” So over the course of a campaign, we’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to block out 30 hours for having cars driving in these very specific areas that your demographic has.”

Chris Dreyer:

So could target IQ be like, say, you’re a divorce attorney, you want high net worth, is it like, “Let’s target the DoorDash and GrubHub that are serving this subdivision and really hit that subdivision.”

Greg Star:

Yeah. The main line of PI like, “Hey, we want cars at the Starbucks here, at the coffee shop here that everyone goes to, the shopping centers, the malls.” That’s what target IQ is. We had a client that swarmed the, I don’t know if you’re familiar, but King of Prussia Mall is one of the biggest malls in the country and we had clients that sent cars there and did swarms as well there, but it was that kind of thought process.

Chris Dreyer:

And then digital retargeting. I was really curious about this, we have a few clients that use your services and I started to see some retargeting, but I’m not sure how it works, if it’s like a mobile geo-fencing or how does the digital retargeting work?

Greg Star:

Yeah. So we work with a company called StreetMetrics and what they’re able to do is we’re able to capture device IDs of people who are around the cars, typically between 30 to 50 feet, and then we can send digitally retargeted ads to their phone. So it’s a great way to get an additional touchpoint. So if someone sees a car at a mall and then later they get an ad to their phone and typically they have a higher click through rate because they’re a little softened, they’ve seen the cars and they’re seeing the ad again.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. And I want to dig into this, Greg, because me being in the digital marketing space and we don’t do pay-per-click, but we’ve seen AdRoll, we’ve seen Google Ads don’t allow retargeting for PI attorneys for whatever reason they have, I know there’re other providers. So does this retarget to Facebook? Is it Google? What kind of networks are you retargeting to?

Greg Star:

There’s a whole list of apps, like ESPN, CBS, so it’s not on social media, it’s not Facebook. But yeah, there’s a whole list of different apps, it’s thousands that it can come across too.

Chris Dreyer:

The final one I had on the add-ons, the web lift and footfall attribution.

Greg Star:

Using the same technology with StreetMetrics, we can have our clients put a pixel on the website and then we can tell based on the pixel, how many people saw a car then went to the website. And we can do a study comparing how many people saw your car ad went to the website versus the other medium of advertising there and you can do a comparison. “Does advertising work?” Is a very tough question that you get from a lot of people because one KPI is calls, but it’s not so simple as, “Let’s just and get calls.” There’s a mix and a system you need to get. So these are other ways to track that this is gaining traction and getting website. But ultimately calls matter and our biggest clients have seen people call in from seeing the cars and having those interactions and that engagement. But the web lift is just another part of that tool.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s what it’s all about is when you find something that works, scaling the bullets before bombs, and that’s an amazing component.

Greg Star:

That’s a good question-

Chris Dreyer:

And I’ve got a-

Greg Star:

… I’ve never heard that.

Chris Dreyer:

Well, I stole that from John Morgan, Morgan & Morgan, so I don’t want to claim it was my own. I’m putting my PI hat on so I’m asking you all the questions if I was going to hire you is like, “Okay, this sounds amazing. I’m already doing billboards and radio, but maybe you’ve already got a client and is my car going to be swarming the same football game? And so here we are, they’ve got 20 cars at the game and I’ve got 20 cars at the game.” And maybe that’s not saturated, maybe when you compare it to TV and radio, but I know exclusivity is a huge question that we get asked every day, so I just want to hear your thoughts on that?

Greg Star:

Yeah, PI firms love their exclusivity so we have some exclusive options. We have certain packages that essentially you can still have that saturation. So for example, we’re offering a stadium swarm package where it’s like, “Hey, swarm every home Eagles game and send your cars there.” We’re limiting the amount of advertisers that can just participate in general. So one, if you were a legal firm, you’d be the only legal firm that does it, but then two, you’d be only one of three total advertisers that does it because that saturation point is a big selling point for us.
So yeah, that’s something that we are mindful of as we continue to scale and grow the product is you don’t want to lose that novelty. But the good thing is there’s also more than enough events to go around. If you’re in LA and one advertiser has the Rams, you get the Chargers and then there’re the Lakers and then there’s the Kings. There’re enough places to do swarms and there’s certainly enough opportunities for cars that I think a lot of advertisers can still get a very good bang for their buck even if they’re in the same market.

Chris Dreyer:

I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, I think this is fantastic. I do want to highlight one of the things that happened, and of course we all can’t predict COVID, but I heard one horror story where this individual bought 200 or 300 buses, I don’t know the exact number, and then COVID hit and it’s like, “Okay, they’re parked in the parking lot and they’re not running.” But DoorDash and GrubHub and a lot of those were still active.

Greg Star:

Very active. Yeah, COVID was a thing, but we just tried to act with the best intentions for our clients, we were like, “Don’t take a short term approach, think of the long term.” And so what we did is we gave for the months of, I think it was… Mid March, that was not fun. But then April and May, we gave our clients free months of advertising. So if you were advertising with us in April and May, we just wrote that off and said, “You’re going to get advertising in June and July if your campaign was set to end at that point.” So we added months to them, we just wrote that off because no one knew what was happening and the way you treat clients is, if I was in their shoes and we’re trying to get the most value and create a long term partnership.
But yeah, necessity is the motherhood of invention and so the way we came up with the swarm idea and the target IQ was one of our clients was like, “Hey, everyone is just going to Home Depot in the grocery store, can we send cars there?” And we were like, “That’s a great idea. This actually can be a thing.” So that actually in the long run, I think, helped us grow better as a company. What better way to advertise in the community than with people of the community? And the word of mouth that comes from that and the long term touchpoint that comes from your neighbor having their car app for a certain person, it just carries through longer than just the advertising element.

Chris Dreyer:

How can people get in touch with Carvertise? What’s the best way to reach out to get more information about your business?

Greg Star:

Yeah. Our website, Carvertise.com, you can request a form. My email is Star@Carvertise.com. You can email me, I’m very accessible. And yeah, just follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, we’re giving updates, showing what’s happening so just follow along.

Chris Dreyer:

Like Greg says, “All advertising works, but not all advertising works equally.” Whatever your budget, be strategic with your ad placement and get creative. By tapping into unsaturated markets, you engage in advertising arbitrage, the quality of your impressions increases and you get the most from your spending. If you need visibility and saturated markets, stand out with complimentary ad channels like Carvertise that will help keep your firm top of mind.
I’d like to thank Greg Star for sharing his story with us and I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, I’m Chris Dreyer. If you like this episode, leave us a review, we’d love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.