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How This Former Nickelodeon Host And Sales Pro Built A Multi-Million Dollar Holding Company

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Sean Halter is the managing partner of Connectivity Holdings, which wholly owns or has investments in a range of companies providing media, creative and digital services to major brands. In addition, Halter is the host of a podcast series called The CMO Suite, which interviews national and global CMOs, CEOs, and VPs about all things marketing- and business-related; the second season kicks off February 25.   I caught up with Halter in Tampa, Fla., where he is based.

Micah Solomon: How does a guy named Sean Halter, known both as a sales pro and as the guy who poured slime on kids and threw pies on adults as a Nickelodeon host, evolve himself into being the owner of a holding company?

Sean Halter: I came through media sales, working for various media companies for nearly 20 years. From there, I built one company, an [advertising] agency, Connectivity Strategy, which I still own. From there, we found that we had needs in the programmatic and biddable media  as an agency, we might have a client saying, "Hey, we want to make sure that there's digital as part of our campaign."

We determined that if, instead of getting this through a vendor, we built our own more transparent biddable media company, it would help our agency and likely be of value to other agencies as well. So that was my next adventure: a company called YouConnex, in the biddable media space. We also raised some additional outside capital as part of that to grow that company faster.

From there, we built or bought into three other companies within the sales funnel. We've got two more acquisitions or buildouts in our planning for this year as well. One of those will be a podcast network with multiple business/marketing-related podcasts that will all be part of that network. The second one is a subscription model business in the digital space.

Solomon: Yeah, yeah, yeah...before I ask you to explain to my readers what biddable media is, I expect they want to hear more about the Nickelodeon thing I just threw out there.

Halter:  In my 20s I was assistant host for an on-air show called Think Fast and toured the country as the Host of a show called Game Lab.  It's true that I was best known for throwing (nontoxic) slime at kids and pies at their unsuspecting parents. In reality, my life has come full circle; my showbiz chops from that era of my life were certainly helpful when I was in sales and are really coming together this year with the CMO Suite in building my companies' brands.

Solomon: Okay, now: Can you take a moment to explain what "biddable media" is?

Halter: Biddable media is any form of media that you're bidding on in order to secure the media. You're using a bidding platform to bid like you would on the stock exchange. That kind of media is becoming more and more prevalent, and more and more media companies offer up their media, mostly in the digital space through platforms like The Trade Desk and Google and Amazon's programmatic platform. Rather than a traditional media buyer, whose job is to call and talk to a person and negotiate, "I need this best rate on this piece of media. You'd better give it to me," biddable media's all done transactionally, just like you do stock trades. There are billions of dollars that run through those kinds of platforms now.

Solomon: One last thing: I’d love to hear about your podcast enterprise, and any insights you have for all those people out there who are also dying to get their feet wet in podcasting.

Halter: Building a podcast allows us to talk to other industry experts, allows us to be able to build content that then we can push out to many of our existing, as well as new, customers and clients. Now they're hearing new content, but not always directly from us.  What we've frequently seen out in the market when people are building podcasts is that they often want to talk about themselves; it can be hard to get the audience to care about that. The smarter thing to do is to interview people who audiences do care about, in our case business experts who have navigated the same kind of challenges–and opportunities–now being encountered by our clients and other businesspeople.

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