Revolut used airport ads to buy cheaper impressions

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 54:28

   Okay. You said something about helping them sell their product as well. Talk about the early days of marketing. I heard you spent nothing on marketing for the first five or seven years. Yes, first seven years, it was completely organic. Plus, COVID also hit. And in 2021, I remember our company was six, seven years old. COVID hit and our revenues went down, I think, 70%. And back then, we were not in banking business, we were still kind of, you know.

2. 55:00

   e-money with a travel card. So it was very heavily related to or related with travel business. And then as COVID hit, travel business completely gone. So we had to survive or somehow we kind of optimized a lot during that time. Okay, but explain why you decided to start spending money in marketing. Because I go to Europe and it's like, I feel like I'm blanketed with your ads. I see your stuff everywhere.

3. 55:27

   Now it makes perfect sense after talking to you. It's not like, oh, yeah, I'm going to do like a little bit here, a little bit there. It's just like once I find something works, I just, you know, essentially go scorched earth on it. Yeah, basically the way I think about marketing. So I haven't done it for six years, seven years. I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But when I started doing it, I went really, really deep.

4. 55:46

   So basically I started with who we need to hire to run a proper marketing machine. Not like here and there, but scientifically, right, where we need to invest money in marketing with a proper return. And then my idea was very simple. Who are the companies with the largest marketing spend and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spend? Where is, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies, right?

5. 56:12

   Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, performance ads, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above-the-line campaigns. Did gaming companies doing well or not? Gaming companies were the largest spending companies in the world. on marketing. So if you look at their budgets, it could easily be $1 billion plus on Google. And a lot of them are going to AppLovin. Yeah. AppLovin is going to print like $6 billion in profit this year.

6. 56:42

   Yeah, it's like amazing. Yeah, yeah. So I ended up hiring an extremely good person who started running marketing at Revolut. And then we also went... Before I let you go on, am I understanding you're studying how gaming companies are advertising, or you just wanted to know what they were spending? The idea was who are the best professionals who know how to spend money in marketing, right? And then the idea is that these professionals will work in gaming companies because they have the ledger's budgets.

7. 57:11

   Got it. So that's how I got my first, well actually second, first one. I fired. He wasn't from gaming. Probably VC's cousin asked you to hire him or something. And anyway, we went very deep into performance marketing, LTVs, payback. And then recently we also started doing, because we got the banking license, and then What we realized, or what I realized quite early on, is all about trust, right? If you're a digital banker, you don't have branches, people don't see you physically.

8. 57:39

   They trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyd's, JPMorgan Chase, and so on. Then, okay, how you build trust, how you arbitrage, effectively, performance marketing spend. Because in performance marketing spend, you pay per impression. And then there are a lot of spaces in the physical world which you can buy, which will also produce impression, but at a much cheaper price compared to the digital world.

9. 58:07

   So, for example, we bought probably now 50% of all airports in Europe, right? Like in almost 50% of airports in Europe, we now have ads, right? Again, because of simple math. How many times a year people travel, right? How many times a year they're in the airport? How many impressions we produce? How much will it cost us? There is arbitrage to performance marketing. And then similar ideas to other places in the physical world.

10. 58:34

    For example, we started now doing our equivalent of legacy branches, what we call a cult rev store, rev experience. So we set up our first shop in Barcelona. Again, arbitraging impressions in the physical world versus the digital world. because how many people pass every year our shop? What is the shop though? I mean, it's more like Revolut experience. So it's not a real banking legacy branch. You come in and then you experience all our products.

11. 59:02

    It's all done in a very modern way, like Apple type of store, but for Revolut. And then the idea is we just generate impressions for people which pass the street who come over as well. Like a lot of companies advertise in airports and it's just like, oh, it's up on the screen maybe for 30 seconds or whatever. It might be one billboard. It's like you walk, I'm walking for like two minutes and it's still, I'm like enclosed.

12. 59:26

    There's like a huge, like I'm in a cocoon of Revolut ads. How did you come up with that idea too though? Just buying full airport. I can't think of another company that I've seen do this. And I think like it's actually a really smart move. More people should do that. It's like, I may not use your services, but like I definitely know you exist and what you do. Like you essentially are aiming for ubiquity is the way like I was thinking about that when I was walking to the airport.

13. 59:47

    In my mind, we're just paying for impressions much cheaper in the physical world compared to digital world. It's not just like paying for impressions, though, because like, you know… I mean, building trust as well. I think the trust thing was actually one of the most interesting… insights. And you said a lot of interesting shit today, but like, I think there's something about the ubiquity of it. It's not just one sign saying, you know, this is Revolut and this is what we do.

14. 1:00:10

    It's like entire hallways, like you're just walking and I'm being surrounded by this. It's like, I'm telling you, I can't think of another company. This is before I even thought of having you on the show. I was just like, this is actually a really good idea. I'm not going to walk past