Geopath Member Spotlight | Skies Above Media
A conversation with Glyn Williams, CEO of Skies Above Media

What led you to work in the OOH industry?

Like a lot of people in this industry, I just kind of fell into it. In 2002, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to work for an ad agency. I thought that sounded fun, and was soon introduced to Jack Sullivan, who ran Starcom Chicago at the time. We met at a bar and talked for hours, but I still had no idea what the job was. He asked me to come in and meet a few more people. Later that day, I was offered a job. It wasn’t long until I fell in love with the industry while working on a campaign for a client that made them say, “Wow, that’s really cool!”

When I got into the industry, I said I would do this until it didn’t interest me anymore. About 23 years later, I am still going strong.

A brief background about your company.

We started just over 35 years ago as Mahlmann Media. When I acquired the company in 2021, we rebranded it to Skies Above Media. We own, operate, and manage about 100 sites, primarily in Los Angeles, as well as Detroit, New York, Palm Springs, and the California Central Valley markets. We emphasize large formats such as wallscapes, barricades, and bulletins that deliver on the high standards we set for ourselves. We believe in quality over quantity; we only want powerful, relevant, and meaningful ad spaces for our clients.

Current Company Goals or Initiatives

We’ve evolved immensely since I first came into the business in 2019. Our goal is to keep growing with the right media in the right places that make sense to us and where we feel our clients see the most value.

Have you noticed any trends developing in the OOH industry?

Digital and programmatic gravitate toward the top of everyone’s list of trends over the last 5 years, but I think a lot of that is purely transactional toward delivering against agency and advertiser demands for smarter, faster, cheaper buys. I believe that it’s a valid need to respond to, but we just have to be sure we’re staying true to the “power of wow” that OOH delivers, all while still answering what the client wants.

As an industry, we have to cater to the changing landscape and listen to our clients’ needs to make the media more appealing to buy. This includes ease and speed to market, accurate and usable data on the front end, and attribution on the back end that proves what does and doesn’t work in OOH.

I like the recent dialogue we’ve had around OOH’s role in the “attention economy.” It’s a powerful way of reinforcing what makes OOH important. There is no bigger format of advertising in the world. It stops people in their tracks and makes them look up. We have to harness that impact, measure it, monetize it, and then sell attention.

What trends do you predict developing over the next 10 years?

I have a lot of hope for what lies ahead of us. As mentioned, I am very hopeful that the energy around the attention economy bears fruit. I think the biggest spenders in OOH already know this resonates with many advertisers who have only dipped their toes in the water.

And of course, I have to talk about AI. I think it can be used to streamline many processes that are super clunky in the OOH world, but if it’s not implemented well, there will be some negative impact on the buyer-seller engagement flow. Really, we have already started to see AI in the form of automation on the platforms that agencies use. Take that a step further and imagine AI auto-populating basic asset information into an Excel grid RFP template.

I am hopeful AI can streamline at a minimum of 10-15% of my sales team’s time so they can reallocate that time toward more actual selling instead of just data entry. Ultimately, we have to ensure that we don’t lose ourselves along the way and just become robotic. Not everything about OOH can be drilled down into an Excel spreadsheet. We will all lose if clients stop seeing the overall value OOH delivers.

How does Geopath membership help your day-to-day business?

Geopath means so much to us in a lot of ways. First, it’s simply table stakes for inclusion in many of the individual agency media buying processes. Post-COVID, sellers are more and more disconnected from their agency buyer clients. So, it’s harder to stay top of mind when a planner receives a client brief, and they go to market with their RFP. Media planners use Geopath as a resource for knowing who has what inventory in the market when sending out their RFPs. Then, when an agency buyer is selecting and negotiating the inventory, if they have two highly similar assets, and one is Geopath audited and the other is not, they’re more likely to select the one that is audited.

Second, the data points are super important both in terms of replying to the client brief and chasing down proactive dollars. We place a huge emphasis on relevance in our sales process – digging into why a certain location matters to the advertiser, whether that’s audience-based or location-based.

Do you have any examples of a time when Geopath data helped improve a client’s original buying plan?

The best example we have of this is the work we have done with Geopath to micro-analyze the impressions based on specific viewing angles or cross reads.

One of our perms has some road construction going on around it that will block some traffic for about a year. Naturally, the client was concerned about how that would impact their ad visibility and wanted to monetize that impact with a price reduction. I respect that it’s the right thing to do, but we want to be sure it’s fair for everyone. Geopath helped us understand the road closure’s impact on the impressions. Using this information, we then negotiated a discounted rate for the client. Sure, we took a hit on our revenue, but they asked for an even bigger discount than where we landed because the data showed us the way.

What’s the best career advice given to you?

I’ve had so many great leaders and managers in my career that it’s hard to pinpoint specific advice, but I think every little piece of guidance I had along the way was encapsulated in a book called The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday. I read this book in 2020 while I was trying to run the company through the pandemic and engaged in tough negotiations to buy Mahlmann Media.

Control what you can control; everything else is noise and drama. Keep composure through the darker days and let the light in where you see it. Trust the process. The best solution you think of is often the third one. Nothing is a failure if you learned from it. Always stay moving, make forward progress every single day, and take the win.

I keep it at my desk and thumb through the dog-eared and highlighted pages often. I have probably bought this book 15 times. I give it to everyone who works for me or anyone who says they’re going through a tough time at work.