Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:09

Hi everyone. I would like to have you meet Brittany Yarborough, the director of strategic partnerships for Atmosphere TV. Atmosphere is the number one streaming TV service for businesses, playing in 50,000 plus locations worldwide. This technology is a free service that can have a positive impact on your business and your bottom line. Brittney, welcome.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 0:34

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:37

So can you show? I mean, everybody kind of understands TV and you know when you go into these businesses and you see TV, odds are pretty good that you're watching Atmosphere. So can you talk a little bit about Atmosphere and how your program works?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 0:52

Yeah, so we are essentially the first world streaming TV service made exclusively for businesses, kind of how we were started. Our two founders, our two brothers, john and Leah Rezeg and they walked into a bar, saw Judge Judy playing and which we all love, judge Judy, but they had. They saw that playing, couldn't understand what was being said because there was closed captions on and they thought we could do something for businesses to actually have engaging and entertaining content up on the screens. Another thing or reason why we started was because a lot of people we see are I forget the term that we call them internally, but people are nowadays just glued to their phones. They're used to looking down and engaging with what the content is within their phone, and so we wanted to take what was in these people's phones and put it up on screens and businesses to get people engaged in conversation with each other, laughing at what's up on the screen. And that's a little bit of the roots of why we are who we are and what we do With that being said, we are not only a streaming TV service.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 2:01

We also offer in-house marketing solutions. So we actually help, like you just said, we help with increasing that bottom line by letting business owners actually put up advertisements of if they're now hiring, if they have a LTO, if they're running a promotion or trying to upsell a product. You can actually use that and put it up on your screens and actually make money off of your TVs.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 2:27

I mean that is so cool because you think about it. Just having TV isn't necessarily ideal, because one of the things you do is the programs that are on the screen. They're there for purpose, they're short format, they're designed to. You don't have to necessarily hear the words for it to make sense so you can have the audio off and people can enjoy themselves. But I also see it as hey. If you want people to stick around and continue to buy more stuff, like in a restaurant or a bar, have the entertainment of the TV. If somebody is somewhere where they're going to have to be in a waiting room and wait, the TV is great, because then they're just calm and peaceful and they're not sitting there wondering how long they've been waiting. So there's so many reasons. Then you guys added all this stuff about putting in their own ads or advertising things on the screen. So it's really truly business for TV and you're not going to have ads for your competitors running.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 3:29

Exactly, yeah. So what we do is non-competitive ads within our customers' venues and, with that being said, whenever we get a client onboarded, we actually give them a classification geared towards what type of business they are. So if you're a restaurant, you're not going to see a restaurant up the street marketing inside of your place, and we do that to protect our customers.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 3:54

Excellent, and so this content. What's the cost for everything?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 4:01

It is free, so $0. We are exactly. That was. Another big thing that we saw, too, with a lot of our clients was that it's little things, little subscriptions here or there, little fees that you have to. You don't even think about like music headsets, anything like that. It adds up for customers or operators, and so having this solution be free to our business owners was a huge part in developing out this company and it's just proven to be substantially, honestly profitable for us. We are an ad supported company, so with those advertisements that we do run within our channels, that's how we get paid as a business and it seems to be working so far for us.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 4:50

Right, and so you guys talk about three things a lot Engage customers, improve profitability and control the remote. Can we break those three down?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 5:01

Yeah, so remind me what the first one was.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 5:04

Engage customers.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 5:06

Perfect. That's probably my favorite one, so I know I touched a little bit on it earlier. But creating short form, engaging content that they're used to seeing your customers, they're used to seeing this in their phone. Having it up on the screen has, we've seen, has a way of just having everybody come together laugh at what's going on up there. And also we, our goal is to get their eyeballs up on the screen. So when you run your in-house promotion it's actually effective. So that's kind of the goal with that. We also touch base on its non polarizing content.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 5:41

So unfortunately, a lot of content nowadays is or I should say, news and stuff like that is, it can be depressing and not a lot of people. They want to escape that, especially when they're going out to go to dinner, go to lunch or maybe go bowling or some type of entertainment form. They're trying to escape that, and so we've created channels that are non polarizing, that are meant to make people actually boost their happiness, which, in return, they take that feeling that they have from watching this content, engaging with people around them, and they associate that with our businesses that we're actually streaming in. It's not us ourselves. I actually am probably the best use case for this.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 6:24

Back in the day we started with one channel, Chive TV, and they had sent out with Roku stick devices out to a bunch of bars and restaurants in the Texas area. And I was in my hometown, in closer to Houston, Texas, and my family and I I could remember exactly where I was sitting at. I had a fish and chips with a blue moon that night and I could tell you exactly what I was watching on the TV and it's because we had such a great conversation that night we were dying laughing at what was playing. I went home, researched the company a year later, applied for a position. I've been with them ever since. So that just goes to tribute the fact that I had such a great experience with my family based off of the content that was playing, which sounds silly because it's just one little change and it's free for businesses, but it really does make an impact.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:15

Oh yeah, well, when you talked about that, people are watching this short form stuff on their phone which I know because I have kids and I see it and my oldest one's 24 and I'm still seeing it, you know, like their faces buried. And by taking that exact short form stuff and putting it on the screen, not only are they watching it, but also I think you know, if everybody's kind of looking around, it does kind of pull them out of being by themselves, to being a little more of a group, you know, yeah, and especially if several people are laughing about it or stuff, they feel a connection while they're in your space.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 7:53

Oh yeah, it's honestly one of my favorite things as an employee of the company is going out into the wild is what we call it and it going to a restaurant or going to a bowling center and seeing it playing up on the screen, and I just watched everyone's reaction around and I see people who don't know each other and they're engaging in a conversation, laughing at what's happening, and it's truly impactful, in my opinion.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 8:19

Well, so how do you guys I know we've talked about this a little bit, but how do you guys focus on improving profitability for companies?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 8:27

Yeah. So with that one, which I think we may touch base on a little bit later, of one of the case studies of one of our clients really those LTO promotions with that in-house marketing feature, we have seen such a dramatic impact on businesses being able to put up an LTO promotion, being able to put up, hey, I'm now hiring, so they're not having to outreach or pay a third party for recruiting, they're actually being able to just advertise that within their TV and people are scanning codes and actually applying for positions with them. Another one was one of I was in sales prior to the position I'm in now, and during COVID right in the middle of it, if not the beginning somebody called us here in Austin, texas. It was a restaurant and at the time they had limited seating in there and so they were trying to think of ways to increase ticket sales. And so this customer was like I just went out and got a bunch of cheesecakes and started selling dessert and I've never done that before and that is the number one selling product on my thing and he had attributed it to running an advertisement that he was now having dessert serving it and so stuff like that.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 9:40

It's just, it's incredible we also offer, like I said, the how we're paid as a company through our ad support or ad network. We also offer those advertisements that you can run within a business just up the road from you if you wanted we have. We like to say that we're a national network on a local basis. So, as a business owner and my parents are actually a customer of ours with their screen printing and embroidery shop they can run advertisements at the local restaurant up there showcasing or advertising that they're a screen printing place right up the road and increase foot traffic for them. So there's several different ways that we can help businesses increase profitability and it's been a game changer for some of our customers.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 10:31

Right, well, and, and you know, when you the company's name is atmosphere and you think, oh well, this creates an atmosphere in your business. But you know, it really hits me that it creates the atmosphere that you want and it is not dependent on employees or anything else. You're creating that living atmosphere. Because I look at if you have a picture on the wall or you paint things a certain color, you rearrange your place a certain way, that's not living Like. When I consider music and TV, fire, water moving around, like that is life and it brings life to a space and the atmosphere that you're choosing to have. And I know that you said to, and we probably want to talk about this later, but if a company is a large enough company, you can actually make custom channels just for them, correct?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 11:24

Yes, I'm glad that you mentioned that we, with a lot of our franchise or that we're working with so that corporate level or parent company, we are able to actually help them with brand consistency, one of the number one things that I hear when I'm going out to conferences or trade shows and I'm speaking to people they in the franchising committee or in the franchising world they always are like how do I have that brand consistency throughout all my franchisees? How do I know that if I go into this location it's going to look exactly like this one over here and that you get that same feeling? With our white label channel, we contribute that to that. We can actually play our content and we actually will work closely with the franchise or and we are doing it right now on developing out what channels fit their customer base or their target audience. Mostly, we're curating content forum and then putting their their logo on that screen.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 12:24

Another thing that we can do too is again with that in-house advertising. We can really customize it to where either franchisee can go in. If you are an operator or an owner, you can go in to your portal, create your own advertisement, but if you're also a brand or a franchisor and you want all your franchises to have the same message, or you're about to release this LTO or one time special and you want to make something that everybody has to have the same branding on, you can do that too, and then we have like a little in their portal, the franchisees portal. They'll actually go in and they can see it, the advertisement itself, and it's as easy as clicking it and then it shows up on your screen within seconds. So that's something that we really like to pride ourselves on and something that our main focus is right now is really helping our enterprise grade clients and helping them with that brand control and brand consistency.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 13:20

I could see as a brand going well. We could always also say that franchise XYZ is accepting new franchisees. Contact us here. Here's a QR code or whatever so you could have. You could be finding new franchisees in all your locations.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 13:37

Exactly. So that's where I feel like that. Oh sorry.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 13:43

No, go ahead.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 13:44

I feel like that's where you get your franchisees from right. Is there like their big what do you call them? Like big components, or they they're just big supporters of the brand, so might as well advertise to them and then give them that thought of like, oh I love this brand so much, I want to be a franchise owner of it and give them some more information from your screen. I like that idea.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 14:06

Right, well, and control the remote is the last of the three. Tell us about that. I mean, we've already kind of discussed some things how you can go into your portal and stuff. But I may be a deeper dive.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 14:19

Yeah, so one of the biggest things that we hear when talking to business owners or operators is we don't have any idea what's going on, because we're not always in the business. We're probably running around going to the bank, running errands, and that's one of the biggest concerns that they have is we can't guarantee what our GMs or DMs are going to be putting up on the screen. With that being said, we have a feature where you can actually go into your dashboard or your portal and you can actually control what's being played on the screens in your businesses without even being there. So that's a feature that we show and then also it will. We have this feature, too, that's on your internal portal, where you can revert it back to a certain channel if you want to.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 15:08

That's excellent. So we talked about numbers and we talked about a case study. I just love metrics. Can we share that case study and any metrics that would go along with that?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 15:21

We can. So we did a case study with a QSR concept. They owned about 72 locations, and, with using just atmosphere itself, with the in-house ad solution, they were able to hire eight managers, and actually let me back this up a little bit and start overhead and then go down into the mid and gritty so, with this client, they were able to achieve a 39 basis point net income improvement, so that it was a significant increase in their bottom line, and keep in mind, this was prime time during COVID, when a lot of places were closed or they had their dining area closed and they were just doing drive-through. This was like around the time when they had just started opening it back up for them, and this is when we did this case study. With that, though, they were able to increase their net income by $347,397.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 16:23

And I'm hoping we may be able to put this up on the screen or share it after We'll see with that, breaking it down a little bit, they were able to increase their sales by running an LTO and special campaign and they were able to increase sales by $110,963. With that being said, it was funny. We worked with them and we were like, let's see what happens here. Let's only run an advertisement on your screen, within your four walls, about this LTO and let's see if this increases ticket sales. And it did. He did not advertise this promotion or this LTO anywhere else, not outside his business, not on a piece of paper or a clean what are they called that they put them up in the screen, a clean wrapper that you stick to the wall I can't think of the name of it, it was only on our screen and we also would turn it off and you would see the dip in sales and then turn it back on and you would see the increase in it. So that was a super interesting one for us to see the way that affected his campaign and was able to increase the sales for him. The second one was retention and company culture. So during COVID, a lot of labor shortages was happening and he was actually improved his retention of his employees by $79,920 by putting up on the screens. Actually, with that in-house advertising he would put anytime somebody would like do a Google review, or they had another system that I can't think of the name of, but it was like a review site. If somebody, if a customer, would put a review in with an employee's name, he would put it up on his screen and he would say hey, tim is doing such a great job because this customer said this is in this and he actually had employees who would go and take selfies with the screen behind them and they were so proud to be working there at this QSR establishment. So that was an interesting one and it's always great to make your employees feel good and also feel a part of the brand and again, that's another way to get an employee to a franchise owner down the road.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 18:33

The next one was guest satisfaction. He was able to increase this by 24,298 dollars is what he dwindled this down to. This also came with the entertainment and the engaging content itself. This QSR in particular. We did have a white label channel forum, so it was branded with the corporate logo. Had that brand consistency within there. Again, this was able to just increase guest satisfaction. Keep them in there longer. He was like I actually had people sitting down. This is a fast food establishment. They're sitting down and they were getting up and they were going and purchasing more food just so they could sit down and be entertained again and just keep watching what was on the screens. So that was very interesting to hear. Specifically for QSR establishment, it was definitely interesting.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 19:24

The next one, which is one that we talk a lot about with our clients, is cable cost. So he was actually able to increase his EBITDA, or bottom line, by 81,216 dollars by cutting the cost of cable. Another thing that he did was, with that money that he saved, that also was able to put back into the labor and the wages of his employees, which I find very admirable. But you found ways to cut a cost and then kind of mitigate or help support his employees during a time. That was very hard and I thought that was very admirable. That last one I think I've already touched on, was the recruitment fee. So rather than having to go out and hire a third party to find people for them or recruit employees, they were able to just put up on the screen a QR code saying now hiring, come work with us. And again, like I said, they hired eight managers within just advertising on their screens.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 20:26

It seems weird that a company would put would pay money, you know, like, let's just say, normal cable. They would pay money to potentially have their competitors advertise in their store in front of their people while they're enjoying their service. Let's just say I have a bar. I'm going to pay cable money every month to put advertisements for other bars inside of my bar or restaurant or whatever it is. That seems crazy when you really think about it. It does and it's a lot of ads. The other thing is you mentioned LTO and I'm assuming that's limited time offers. So these businesses are sharing limited time offers that they're expecting to get a result and because that was the only place they were able to test it and measure it and that was really cool. And, yeah, just think about using the cost that they were spending on that cable and giving that back to the employees is going to stick.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 21:24

And I liked what you said about posting consumer reviews, because not only do the employees feel good because they're getting this high five from customers publicly at the place, but the other thing is is when I'm a customer and I'm either there eating, waiting, whatever's happening, and I see positive reviews about the place and I see the person that is right now across the room from me. I feel a connection to them. But also you're guiding people, because other people like, oh, I should leave a review, that's what we could do while we're here. It's leave a review too. So you're inspiring more people and more positive reviews. Because if you let natural reviews only come, people naturally usually review when they're upset, because that's the only time that they feel, you know, they feel more ambitious because they're like it's personal. But if you get positive reviews, that would be the way to go, and the way to inspire more of that is to show it so that it will grow. Yeah, Very cool.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 22:23

I love everything that you guys are talking about here, so I also assume that different programming affects audiences differently. So, depending on you guys have like, was it 60 channels currently.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 22:36

Yeah, so we recently looked at like our top performing channels and I think right now we have in total we did have 60 channels. We dropped that to about 50.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 22:48

With our top producing ones, but we have, we like to say we have a different channel for any mood or any vibes. So whatever you're wanting to feel or given your target audience, we can actually gear it towards who's coming into your establishment. We did also do an extensive our content team is so awesome they're, they're so great at their jobs. They did extensive research on what audience I give an age and sex or gender, what they were watching most and what they actually wanted to watch, and with that we were able to curate playlist as well. So we have like a restaurant and bar playlist.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 23:26

We have a they're behind me now so I can't think of the names of them but we have so many different ones automotive Salons and just different, different playlists so you don't even have to think about it. You can set it and forget it. So that's something that we did to kind of help some of our Restaurants or not even restaurants our customers just alleviate that pain of having to decide what channel was best for them right, so somebody's interested, we can obviously Click on the link next this video and get in contact with you guys.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 24:00

What is the the kind of the process of somebody working with you, like, say, say, I go over, I click on the link, I go over. What's a process from like day one to where I actually have Atmosphere playing at my location?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 24:16

Yeah, so it's as simple as if you click the link, it's gonna take you to a sign up page. So you have two options. If you can sign up on your own and we do ask for again, this is a free service. All that we ask is that you're streaming our service within 40 hours of a month, so that's about two to three hours a day, which is not not much, but that way we're able to play our advertisements and make our money.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 24:41

With that being said, you go onto the sign up page, you fill out that form and then you're actually connected to a customer success manager and they're gonna be there with you every step of the way to make sure, from the time that you place your order and we ship out the device to you, which right now we are currently on an Apple TV device, but we are actually in I guess it's out of beta testing now and we have it in about 2000 venues when we created our own device looks very similar, though the same size. It's like a hockey puck size, very tiny. You actually just put it up to the back of your screen and you have two cords and electric cord and then one for power, and it's as simple as plugging it in and playing it but, like I said, you will have a dedicated team and dedicated to your account to make sure that it's a smooth transition throughout the whole way.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 25:32

Awesome. I like what you're doing because I I visited a QSR the other day and I know that you can put this in any business. I don't want to just say Qsr, because this could be an. Any type of brick-and-mortar could utilize this. But I was in a Qsr and they they had taken I don't know if it came from corporate or that location, but they had a bunch of old it looked like dubs from VHS of old commercials from the 70s that were kind of faded and had a lot of static and they were playing these ironic commercials from the old days and I don't know if it was helping, but I mean, we're kind of laughing at it. I definitely like all the new modern stuff that you guys do. So how long does it take to implement? We kind of know the steps. How long does it take?

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 26:19

Yeah. So we like to say, once you place your order or if you want to talk to somebody on our website or on the link to the side, you can Actually talk to a representative as well to help you, talk you through the steps. But, with that being said, I say anywhere from five days From the time you sign up to the time we ship out that device to you. Once we get that device to you, it's in mirror, it's a matter of like I'll, I'll be nice. By this 10 minutes I'll say it's super simple to just get it connected and get it up and streaming.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 26:56

Right, so you're gonna hook this up to your existing TVs that are already there. If you don't have existing TVs, you're gonna have to install those in advance.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 27:03

Yes, we also can get this plugged into a matrix system as well, so you can have it playing on multiple TVs, if you'd like some matrix system, or just directly into the TV as well. Both work.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 27:16

Well, awesome, well, Brittney, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. It was a great conversation. I just encourage anybody to go ahead. Click on the link, check it out. https://Franpro. vip/GoAtmosphere Definitely way better than paying to have advertisements from your competitors show up in your store. All right, thank you very much. I appreciate you, Brittney.

Brittney Yarbrough (Atmosphere): 27:37

Yeah, thank you so? Much.