Eric Shafer on Why a Grocery Store Coupon Still Out-Hunts Digital for Local Business

Eric Shafer has been a high school economics teacher, a ski instructor, a flight instructor, a web entrepreneur, and an enterprise IT leader at Shell and Halliburton. Today he is Chief Transformation Officer at IndoorMedia, the Houston company that has been putting local businesses on grocery store register tapes and shopping carts since 1989. He joined a decade ago to transform the company through technology, and he has been doing exactly that ever since.

In this Beyond the Brief Conversation, Eric explains why a targeted print coupon behaves more like a digital ad than a dinosaur, why the local business owner is the hardest customer in America to find, and how a new loyalty program and 36 years of tribal knowledge are shaping IndoorMedia’s next act.

A winding road to transformation

Q: You’ve taught high school, instructed skiing and flying, built a web company, and run enterprise IT at Shell and Halliburton. How does that path lead to a print advertising company?

Eric: Gosh, people will know I’m old. I graduated with a computer science degree back in the ’90s and went directly back to my old high school in Houston to teach economics and computer science. I was trying to find myself a little bit. But I had this burning itch to be an entrepreneur; it was in my family’s history, and I couldn’t shake it. So I started a web development company in 2001 and ran it for seven or eight years.

When the opportunity at IndoorMedia popped up just over ten years ago, I came over with the idea to transform the company through technology. We overhauled the financials, rebuilt the website, and rebuilt the sales portal so our reps across the country, who are almost all remote, can see what’s going on and feel more attached to the company.

Sharks, not dinosaurs

Q: Print advertising gets dismissed as a dinosaur. You call your register tape and cart ads sharks. Make the case.

Eric: Dinosaurs are dead because they got too big and fat. Newspapers are too big, too much content, too much stuff. This is a targeted ad, printed with no extra stuff, placed in your hand. It’s a shark, 100% fit for purpose. And it already has so many characteristics of what digital does. It has attribution, because it’s a coupon. It has geotargeting, because it’s at that grocery store, and grocery stores pull customers from about two and a half to three miles. You can drop a pin and draw a circle. That’s your market.

For register tape, the best customers are local businesses with a high rate of return: quick-serve and fast-casual restaurants, nail salons, dry cleaners, and auto care. Cart ads are almost always a brand ad, so Realtors, urgent care, insurance, and lawyers. That product is all about becoming a local celebrity. You’re everywhere, so when someone needs a real estate agent, you’re the one they’ve seen.

The hardest customer in America to find

Q: Your prospects are millions of local businesses. What makes them so hard to reach?

Eric: If you ask any pilot, the single hardest thing to do is fly solo in instrument conditions. You’re flying through the clouds, managing the radio, managing the fuel, keeping the plane level, talking to air traffic control, watching the map, all yourself. That is the local business owner. They are that close to where the rubber meets the road every single day.

And they’re phenomenally hard to find. If I were looking for the VP of procurement at Procter & Gamble, I’d find them on LinkedIn in ten seconds. Finding somebody who owns two hamburger joints is a real struggle. Our filler ads on the products themselves and our paid thought leadership bring in leads, but honestly, it’s our sales team. We have just over 400 reps, most of them old school, and they just call. New reps will hear, “You’ve called me nine years in a row. Why aren’t you on now?”

Loyalty Shark and the next act

Q: What’s coming next for IndoorMedia?

Eric: We just launched a loyalty program we’re rebranding as LoyaltyShark, because we’re going all in on shark versus dinosaur. It’s not tied to the point of sale, and it doesn’t reward how much you spend. It rewards the number of times you come. For a business that sees a customer once or twice a month, getting them to come a second time is a 100% increase in revenue on that customer. It’s insane.

We’re also expanding our first outdoor product, CustomerCorral advertising, from a 27-store pilot in Denver to 144 stores, with plans to go nationwide. And we’re finally centralizing 36 years of tribal knowledge and deep-diving into our verticals like never before. I brought in a group of STEM interns, and we dissected thousands of our pizza ads, offers versus renewals versus redemptions. The offers became a tool belt, not one size fits all. A BOGO makes sense for family dinner, but if I ask my buddy James to lunch, splitting a BOGO seems kind of intimate.

Mentors, a movie set, and a side of improv

Q: Who has been particularly influential along your journey?

Eric: My first real mentor was the CFO at Valerus, the gas compression company where I ran US IT. Until then, as long as there was one win in a deal, I didn’t care. He taught me to value the win-win. And I wouldn’t be at IndoorMedia without our owner Doug Ensley and his daughter Ashley, our COO. Every job is only as good as your boss, and I haven’t met better bosses. They’re my personal Shark Tank. I pitch an idea, they ask me tough Mr. Wonderful questions, and then they say, “You realize this is a risk? Okay, go do it.”

Q: Finally, a little-known fact about you?

Eric: I’m a professional ballroom dancer, because I danced in a TV movie with Sally Field. I did the Viennese waltz around her for about four hours one afternoon and got a haircut and sixty dollars. And about four years ago I started doing improv. That grew into a group called Comedy Injection. We had 300 people come listen to Dr. Hotez talk about immunizations, and then we did improv based on what he said.

Eric Shafer is Chief Transformation Officer at IndoorMedia, headquartered in Houston, Texas. Since 1989, IndoorMedia has connected local businesses with nearby customers through advertising on grocery store register tapes, shopping carts, and cart corrals in thousands of stores nationwide. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn and learn more at IndoorMedia.com.