Member Spotlight: Butler/Till
A conversation with Jill Currie

Let’s start with a little background on your agency, Butler/Till:

Butler/Till was formed by Sue Butler and Tracy Till as a media and communications company. We’ve grown to about 130 employees and just celebrated our 20-year anniversary as a company. We handle both B2B and B2C clients across the United States. We specialize in healthcare brands, technology and telecommunications as well as financial services. We are 100 percent employee-owned, which means that all employees take not only pride in our agency but make sure that every job is done well to help us grow. We specialize in hyperlocal media, and I think the hyperlocal precision and the mass-scale impact that we have helps the brands we work with get the best return for their investment with us.

How much is Out-of-Home advertising a part of the work that you do with your clients? 

Maybe a quarter of the media spend is in outdoor. Right now, we’re seeing an increase in collaborative buys with our digital as well as traditional media teams. We’re doing more mobile geo-fencing around outdoor locations to re-target digital to those viewing the outdoor placements. We’re doing more place-based media and programmatic outdoor as well, to be able to hit that impression-base metric for our clients. While location is still important, it’s also about hitting the right person at the right time. That’s where the digital and the place-based monitors really come in, because we’re able to hit those impressions and hit those people that we need to target at the right time and in the right place.

Talk about how you use Geopath ratings in your day-to-day business.

We definitely use Geopath ratings, and the numbers really do help us, especially with the sheer amount of work that we do for some of our clients. For example, one of our clients is a large auto insurance company, and we’re able to get hyperlocal placements for their agents by being able to look at those audited numbers and have that as a match key for all of our data as we are targeting. We are media focused, and we truly believe in what this broad kind of reach mechanism of outdoor media can do. But we also look at media through the lens of data and make sure that anything, any placement that we’re making for our client, can really drill down back to that very agent that we’re making that placement for. We’re trying to bring them the most bang for their buck. Geopath data helps us make those decisions on which placement is going to be best for them.

Where do you see outdoor playing a larger role in the broader media dynamic, if any role at all?

I would like to see more attribution tied back to outdoor. There still is something to be said about the heavy lift that outdoor, even awareness or a branded TV spot, can do for your clients. In the future, I’d like to have the ability to tie back attribution to those outdoor boards, digital or static, without having to spend $100,000 on a brand study. I would be excited about the potential to utilize mobile data, like the re-targeting that we’re doing with some clients, and tie it back to the boards and show their value. This is something we need.

What do you value about your partnership with Geopath?

The reason we’re able to be so successful, I believe, and be able to do what we do for our clients from an outdoor or any other perspective, is the partnerships that we make. Whether they’re our data partners, like Geopath, or our vendor partners, it’s really about having those conversations and collaborating with the vendor partners to get the best placement for the client. And I think that is the most important thing. We’re doing a lot of wonderful things as an agency, and we’re bringing our clients wonderful options and solutions. We wouldn’t be able to do any of that, at the end of the day, if we didn’t have these amazing partnerships.