An Interview With Scott Pawloski, New EVP, Chief Revenue Officer, RMG Networks
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Scott Pawloski is the new executive vice-president, chief revenue officer at RMG Networks, which he joined only a few days before we talked on Thursday, July 17.
Although his role as chief revenue officer means that he’ll be involved with sales and the company’s finances, I didn’t feel that it was fair to tackle that topic in depth when he’d only been on the job three days – I’ll leave that for another time. Rather, I wanted to get to know what attracted him to RMG and his general views about the digital out-of-home sector and the industry in general.
“I’ve been selling advertising for a long time,” said Pawloski who recently worked as Microsoft Corporation’s advertising general manager for the Central U.S. Region. He will now oversee advertising sales for RMG Networks Media business unit, which includes over 200,000 digital video screens reaching over 100 million consumers every month.
“What interested me for the past three years and what I forecast will continue is the growth in video.
“Professional, educated audiences are getting harder and harder to reach. Business travelers are more than two times as likely to work more than 40 hours per week and their incomes are over 30% higher than the average person’s. They are always on the go, like I am myself. We are ‘road warriors’. Marketers dream to reach the traveling executives that are harder and harder to reach in an exceptionally cluttered world. They are impossible to reach through broadcast.
“Marketers are seeking channels that can break through the clutter and RMG Networks delivers this group efficiently and with scale in fantastic environments for brands. RMG frequents the air space with its airplane seat screens and airline lounges.”
Pawloski said that Sight, Sound, and Motion video is becoming more and more important in the digital media landscape, and, to him, being involved in this area was important. RMG’s network of leading airline partners (Delta, United, JetBlue, Southwest, and Singapore Airlines and others) provides what is probably programmatic the largest captive, high-value audience of its kind.
“RMG has great scale, great partnerships and is in an uncluttered environment,” he said. “On a plane, even if people want to watch or work on their own electronic device, they can’t do it until the plane reaches a certain altitude, so by then they’ve already been exposed to the commercials on the seat backs. And in an airport lounge, they are there to relax in an environment where they are receptive to what is on the screens.”
I asked Pawloski what he expected would be the biggest challenge in advertising sales.
“Our biggest challenge is explaining the many audience and engagement benefits of our new RMG Office Network (ie Regus),” he said. “While the video content, audience quality and available experiential add-on opportunities are similar to airport lounges, the environments are different. This is quite new to them and customers need to have the similarities and synergies between our networks demonstrated to them when we meet with them. We see our networks as a continuous consumer journey from offices to their business travel and back again. After we explain this, clients are usually interested.”
In terms of RMG Networks’ future growth, Pawloski sees the greatest growth source for RMG is probably streaming digital video advertising dollars.
“These budgets are typically growing 25%-50% year-over-year and with the click and viewability fraud issues this area is experiencing now, RMG’s Nielsen accredited delivery and viewability compares very favorably to most other digital video ad options.”
I asked him what new trends he’s seeing that impact the digital out-of-home advertising space.
“From a marketplace perspective, we are seeing a convergence of video media buyers from broadcast, digital video, and digital out-of-home into a single multi-platform video group. Rather than seeing silos in agencies, video, eg., can be found anywhere. This helps companies like RMG more easily demonstrate our superiority claims and should speed our penetration with advertisers who previously didn’t spend a lot in out-of-home media.
“From a technology perspective, the new 4K high-definition screens that RMG offers are starting to get traction with advertisers as they start to consider the break-out content production opportunities that this platform presents. Touch screens are also important, depending on the environment.”
And what does RMG think will be the role of programmatic media buying for businesses like RMG?
“Programmatic buying is here to stay but there are a lot of flaws in it,” said Pawlowski. “There are so many different companies and different ideas and different opinions on it and who should own it and different thoughts re the buyers and sellers.
“There’s no clarity in the space. There are still many groups who want to be in the center of the hub in the future programmatic marketplace – media agencies, marketing clients, and third-party technology companies alike – but until there is clarity in this space we will keep evolving our strategy to allow for all outcomes. At RMG, we aren’t set up for it, but that’s not to say that we aren’t interested in finding a solution.”
Pawloski, who will be traveling mainly between New York and Chicago with occasional trips to Dallas, says he’s at RMG ‘for the long haul’ and is currently looking at adding additional sales staff.
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