How CMO at Locala, Grant Gudgel, Uses AI and Location Intelligence to Power Adaptive Advertising

**Jeremy Bloom** (0:00)
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**Ari Paparo** (1:27)
Welcome to Marketecture. We're in Get Smart Fast with in-depth interviews of leading tech executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm joined today at the UTA Beach from Cannes with Grant Gudgel, who is the CMO of Locala. Grant, thanks for joining me.

**Grant Gudgel** (1:39)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Ari Paparo** (1:40)
Got your name right, right?

**Grant Gudgel** (1:41)
Yeah, you did.

**Ari Paparo** (1:42)
Okay, so you're pretty new in this job as CMO. How long have you been doing this?

**Grant Gudgel** (1:45)
I joined in March and have been kind of working under the radar as we work on our positioning, and then we announced just a couple weeks ago.

**Ari Paparo** (1:53)
Oh, great. Congratulations. Thank you. So you're new, so you could give us kind of the bright, the fresher, fresh look about Locala. Explain it to our audience if they're not familiar.

**Grant Gudgel** (2:03)
Yeah, so Locala has been around in the industry for about 15 years, started as a mobile location data provider, and has evolved over time, really built expertise in like drive to store, working with national brands who have a lot of physical locations.
So really kind of built a name in that niche, and one of the challenges with that type of campaign is that they're very, very complex. Right, if you're managing 1800 locations across a country. So we kind of became known for that expertise among retail, QSR, auto, and because of the complexity of those campaigns, we ended up building a lot of automation tools for our own ops teams to be able to better manage and deliver results on those types of campaigns, and have since built out an entire kind of platform that really is upstream from the programmatic ecosystem. So it's a planning platform that enables brands and our teams to look at what's going on market by market, both online and offline, and make campaign optimizations that sit at the planning phase, then activate through whatever channel they want to, and then measure down at the bottom.

**Ari Paparo** (3:12)
So not strictly a DSP.

**Grant Gudgel** (3:14)
Not strictly a DSP. We have a proprietary DSP, but we're agnostic as to the platform. Agencies, brands really use us as a strategy, research and planning tool to better adapt campaigns market by market and understand the business context of what's happening in the markets before it hits the exchange.

**Ari Paparo** (3:32)
So let's say I'm a regional QSR company. I have hundreds of stores. What am I doing?
What's the use case and what am I getting out of it?

**Grant Gudgel** (3:44)
Yeah, I think that because of the complexity of trying to manage that many physical locations, the kind of default mode of the industry is, okay, you know, we know what our national persona is. We know what a Jack in the Box customer looks like nationally. But the reality is you're going to have specific markets where you're lagging. You're going to have specific markets where you're leading. You're going to have specific markets where you have real growth opportunities.

**Ari Paparo** (4:09)
Yeah, right.

**Grant Gudgel** (4:10)
And what we help surface are the insights that enable them to understand, okay, where do we need to be doing conquesting? Where are we lagging in terms of online awareness versus offline awareness? And then optimize a plan to those specific market realities and output that as something that is actionable and that they can activate through the SVA.

**Ari Paparo** (4:29)
Right. And then they choose the, I want to run a campaign on their trade desk, let's say.

**Grant Gudgel** (4:34)
Yeah, trade desk, TV, social. Social. Yeah, we're omni-channel. We're also channel agnostic. So, you know, whether it's digital, out of home, CTV, mobile, audio, whatever they want to do.