Episode 3 of AdOmni’s Omnivision podcast features host Jonathan Gudai with AdOmni’s very own Mary Cate Thalgott and Curren Bickel to introduce JEEN AI and explore how it is reshaping the way digital out-of-home campaigns are built. They discuss the shift toward self-service advertising, the challenges marketers face in campaign planning, and how JEEN AI helps turn strategy, audience targeting, screen exploration, and market recommendations into a streamlined, conversational experience. With insights into the thinking behind the product and a look at what’s coming next, this episode showcases how AdOmni is making DOOH planning smarter, faster, and more accessible for every advertiser.
Transcript
Jonathan Gudai
JEEN AI is unlocking a new level of simplicity in digital out-of-home planning. What used to take hours now takes minutes. This is the “Omnivision” podcast, your inside look at the future of AI-powered campaign planning, brought to you by Adomni.
Jonathan Gudai
Welcome, everyone, to episode three of the “Omnivision” podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Gudai, CEO of Adomni. As you know, we created this show to share the incredible innovation that’s happening inside of Adomni, and to give you a front-row seat at how AI is transforming programmatic digital out-of-home advertising and video advertising. Our mission has always been to make digital homes smarter, faster, and more accessible. Today, with JEEN AI, we’re doing just that. And it’s also important to remember that this is a tool built for the people, by the people, by people who’ve spent almost a decade strategizing and building programmatic digital out-of-home campaigns. And I’ll also end with this: there’s no artificial intelligence without human intelligence.
And today, we’re going to dive deeply into this with a focus on the human side of taking advantage of AI. So today, I’m joined with two of our teammates. Good to see you guys outside of Slack. We have Mary Cate Thalgott and Curren Bickel.
Mary Cate
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Good to see you guys outside of Slack, too. And I guess we’re the humans behind the AI that we’re going to be talking about today. So, as Jonathan said, my name is Mary Cate Thalgott. I am our VP of Client and Business Transformation at Adomni, and I’m responsible for creating an incredible client experience with our self-service platform. So we’re going to do that with JEEN today, and we’re going to dig into how JEEN works and how JEEN really elevates our client experience.
Curren Bickel
And howdy you all. I’m Curren. I’m the product manager for JEEN AI. As a campaign strategist, it’s my goal to make sure JEEN’s infused with all the delicious flavor that brings campaigns to life. So we want to make sure that it feels like you’re talking to a human with tons of experience that gets you exactly what you need.
Jonathan Gudai
So now that you know the voices behind JEEN, let’s talk about JEEN. So Mary Cate, kick things off.
Mary Cate
So what exactly is JEEN AI? Think of JEEN AI as your built-in AI strategist. Think of JEEN as your smart companion within the Adomni platform, designed to help you create campaign strategies in minutes.
So, it’s funny, when I was thinking about preparing for this podcast, I wanted to really describe JEEN in a way that was accessible. And as I was doing that, I thought, “What would be better than just asking JEEN itself?” So I did. So this is how JEEN would describe itself: “I’m JEEN, an AI assistant designed to help with questions and tasks, especially in digital out-of-home. Whether you’re building a campaign, exploring screens, or digital marketing concepts, I’m here to make it simpler and faster.” I honestly could not have said it better myself. JEEN really summarized what it can do, and it can do a lot, and I’m excited to really dig into what JEEN brings to the table, and how to really leverage and extract the most value from JEEN on this podcast. But before we get into everything, I wanted to ask you, Jonathan, because I know that you’re the one — this kind of — JEEN was your brainchild. Where did the name JEEN come from?
Jonathan Gudai
Well, we like to say that JEEN was conceived by software engineers, but raised by Curren Bickel and Mary Cate and team. So definitely it’s a team product and solution, although I might have had a hand in some of the early ideation for it. The whole JEEN idea came about right after OpenAI did one of their early demos of ChatGPT. And I don’t know if you guys remember this, but there were a few people that were sitting at a table talking to a tablet or whatever laptop it was. Do you remember that?
Mary Cate
I don’t remember that one.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Mary Cate
Curren?
Jonathan Gudai
Well, there was this like, I think it was end of 2023 or early 2024. I don’t know. For me, it was this vivid, like holy crap moment where you were having a conversation, and I don’t know about you guys, but Siri and Alexa have kind of left a bit to be desired as far as being able to have quality, high-value conversations, and this was the first time that AI actually was responding in a very intelligent way. And so we started tinkering with AI just as an experiment at Adomni in early 2024. And at the time, I still had this initial thought that we wanted to one day be able to talk with JEEN or this AI assistant.
Mary Cate
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Gudai
So we’ve got to find a name that would be a name that you can speak with. AI is going to have a voice back, so maybe some people want it to have a female voice, some people want it to have a male voice, or a neutral voice, right? So we wanted a name that could fit a multi-gender situation. But then we were thinking, functionally, what does JEEN do? You ask questions or you make requests, and JEEN provides you with answers or fulfills those requests. So then the idea of JEEN, Genie kind of came about.
Mary Cate
Okay.
Jonathan Gudai
And so we were playing off of like, “I want to serve you to help you build the best campaign plans.”
Mary Cate
Granting your wishes.
Jonathan Gudai
Granting the wishes.
Mary Cate
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Gudai
Exactly. And you can have more than three. There’s no limits—
Mary Cate
I mean — is that the first wish? Can I have as many wishes as I want? I thought that was—
Jonathan Gudai
You know—
Mary Cate
—against Genie rules.
Jonathan Gudai
I know. Well, not in the land of AI. You can go many, many more than three.
Curren Bickel
And this genie isn’t playing tricks on you.
Mary Cate
Yeah.
Jonathan Gudai
Exactly. It’s not trying to escape out of the thing that’s holding it back.
Mary Cate
The bottle.
Jonathan Gudai
It’s just there when you need it. So yeah, we had some fun with just different names, and then at the end of the day, JEEN is really, it’s a companion. It’s an assistant, it’s an agent to help you. And if you’re a Marvel fan, Jean Grey, also one of the most powerful mutants. There was an element of that, just like we want something that’s really powerful, but also really friendly and easy to use. So now that you’ve met JEEN, let’s talk a little bit about why we built it.
Mary Cate
Okay. So the why behind this has been kind of at the back of our mind for years. So for years, Adomni has been known as this amazing white-gloved managed service company. But as the industry shifted, something became really clear. People want more self-service. And I kind of blame COVID in this. I feel like when everything shut down, people were like, “Okay, now what? I need to be able to do this on my own.” And then I think people, because they did it on their own, became more adept. So they wanted speed, they wanted independence, and they wanted a tool that they could use without needing to schedule a call or, dare I say, talk to a person.
So that’s when we decided to build that ourselves within our self-service model. So for years, we’ve been hoarding this incredible tech, and when I say incredible, I truly mean that. Of all of the companies I’ve worked at, this has truly been the most mind-boggling tech that I’ve ever seen. And we’ve revamped it to be external facing.
So we’ve taken all of the knowledge over all of the almost 11 years at Adomni and really fed it into JEEN. So one of the things that we wanted to solve for is that when we’re opening this up to more of the external client, we want to make sure that everybody could use it. And historically, a lot of our clients had been agencies. They know what they’re doing. They’re marketers. They’re going into the tech. They’re able to work out how they want to build the campaigns. But because we’re now expanding to the everyman or everywoman, we need to make it easier for people.
And I think that what we found is that campaign planning can feel complicated. It can feel overwhelming. And since not everyone is a marketer, we wanted to be able to democratize digital out-of-home strategies for everyone. Everyone can go onto their computer, and they can use JEEN to build a campaign within minutes. So we’ve seen huge growth in this. We’ve seen tons of clients coming in, signing up, and doing it themselves. And to support that, expanding beyond agencies, JEEN is just that. It’s something that everyone can use step by step to create incredible marketing-level campaigns.
When I said that JEEN does that by packaging all of our years, we’ve essentially cloned Curren within JEEN because Curren has done this for years and years and created all of these marketing campaigns. And we’ve made it into a really simple conversational type of AI. So it’s not just accessible, it’s really empowering for the end user to use it.
JEEN brings, honestly, so much to the table. I could sit here and list so many different things that JEEN can do, but I kind of want to focus on three of our key pillars. So we want JEEN to have smart strategies and inspiration from our past successes. So when we uploaded all of the information into JEEN, we referenced real case studies that would inspire new ideas. So we’re taking all of our past successes, inputting them, and making sure that everybody can have these brand-new strategies that are foundationally really solid.
And remember, all of this is generated by people. So all of the strategies that JEEN employs are pulled from people like Curren. And it’s really tailored, so all you have to do is tell JEEN your goals, your budget, and your target audience — who you want to send the message out to — and JEEN will recommend pointed venues, audience segments, and screens, not only within the US but worldwide. So the capacity that JEEN has to be able to target your audience is really incredible.
And the best part about it is that it can do it in five minutes. So there’s this huge component of time-saving automation. We can turn your inputs into launchable plans, I would say — don’t quote me on this, but please quote me on this — in five minutes or less. And maybe later on in this podcast, we can put Curren to the test. But if you think about it, for marketing, it used to take teams of people, like five to six people working together, hours to build a single campaign. Think about all the emails back and forth, all the decisions that needed to be made, and all of that’s gone. You can have one person just type in what they need within JEEN, and it will spit out their strategy within five minutes. So you and your teams can dedicate your day to doing more important things.
Overall, it also has smarter exploration, so it helps you explore screens, markets, and dayparts that you probably didn’t even think about, and we can get a little bit more into that when Curren does a demo later on.
The third and final piece is that it has great general and educational support. So JEEN can explain concepts in simple terms, which is perfect for people who are new to advertising. So like me, I came onto Adomni, and I didn’t know what DOOH stood for. So I was like, “What does that mean?” Typed it into JEEN: digital out-of-home. All of these concepts that are brand new to people are now made easy because you can just ask JEEN.
And JEEN can also provide general assistance, from writing to analysis. You can truly use JEEN for anything. JEEN is like your strategist and analyst and campaign planner added to your team instantly.
Jonathan Gudai
So your digital teammate is kind of one way that you hear a lot of people describing agents in the future. But it’s a digital teammate that’s been around for 11-plus years.
Mary Cate
Right. That has like—
Jonathan Gudai
Love it.
Mary Cate
—11, yeah, the tenure of an employee with 11-plus years, which is incredible.
Curren Bickel
It’s an expert always at your fingertips.
Mary Cate
Curren, do you want to put that to the test?
Curren Bickel
I’d love to.
Mary Cate
Could you—
Curren Bickel
Five minutes or less?
Mary Cate
Yeah. I’m going to dare you to build a campaign in five minutes or less. Are you up for the challenge?
Curren Bickel
Oh, I think I am. All right, so here’s JEEN. And let’s start building a campaign together. I’m just going to start typing in a goal, an audience, a target. So, I want help building a campaign for a holiday skincare kit sold at Sephora.
Mary Cate
Ooh.
Curren Bickel
And let’s see. And now JEEN’s going to put together an audience profile as well as some recommended venue types where we’re best to advertise to help guide our campaign and make sure we’re reaching the right people. All right, so you see here, let me scroll back up. Nice little audience breakdown. We didn’t provide one, but JEEN’s smart enough to interpret that for us in order to get us the right option. So all this makes sense. It gives you some good venue types as well as some rationale for why we’re looking at that, all tailored to the audience we’re trying to reach and giving us the right recommendations.
So you can see here, this cuts down what normally would require a campaign strategist, someone to gather the inventory, and some campaign planners. All that’s done probably in two minutes so far.
Mary Cate
Okay.
Curren Bickel
But let’s go a little further. Beautiful. All right, so now this is the classic Adomni share page. Up here at the top, you can click through tabs to see all the details. You can also share or create your campaign. But right now we’re focused on the JEEN part. You can see here, this is the strategy that we put in, followed by all the venue types and screens. Right now on the map you can see we’re kind of looking at everywhere. But let’s narrow this down a little bit.
Let’s take it to Los Angeles. That seems like a good market.
Mary Cate
Or—
Curren Bickel
—$50,000. What was that, Mary Cate?
Mary Cate
That’s a good market for Sephora.
Curren Bickel
That’s what I’m thinking. And we’ll do January. I know it’s a little late for a holiday kit, but we’ll still be selling things, backfilling all the unsold inventory. So now this is going to live update this campaign. You can see, look, we’re looking at Los Angeles up at the top. We’ve filled in our budget and our dates. And as always, you can click into any of these dots and see your screens.
Mary Cate
Wow. Can you kind of hover over that so we can kind of check that out for a second? That’s really cool.
Curren Bickel
Yeah. So these are all of the screens that JEEN recommended. You have your digital billboards, your salons, obviously, shopping malls, retail stores — everything with shopping in mind that helps us best reach this audience for this skincare kit.
And let’s add one final touch just for this campaign. Obviously, dayparting is a big thing in digital out-of-home. An ad play on a billboard at midnight is going to be worth a lot less than at rush hour. So we want JEEN to—
Mary Cate
So—Curren, would you explain a little bit more about dayparting? So it’s for the audience.
Curren Bickel
Yeah. So basically, we are going to cut off some of the hours for these screens so that it only plays during the peak times. So a digital billboard, like I said, at midnight, is worth a lot less than at rush hour. So we’re not going to play during midnight. We’ll cut things down to 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. for the morning, and 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. for the evening. And that’s going to live update here.
Mary Cate
So it’s basically meeting your audience at the best times for them.
Curren Bickel
Exactly.
Mary Cate
Also—
Curren Bickel
At the best times for them, at the best times for the screen population. Just maximizing your value, because your money’s important and we want it to go as far as it can.
Jonathan Gudai
And looking here on the left side, I see shopping mall, weekdays, 5:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Curren Bickel
Yeah. Weekdays—
Jonathan Gudai
So it—
Curren Bickel
—6:00 to 9:00 p.m. because most people are at work.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh, 6:00.
Curren Bickel
When they get off, they’ll go to the shopping mall. And then obviously weekends are when the shopping mall is really popping. So you’ve got 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. for those core hours.
Mary Cate
Hmm.
Jonathan Gudai
Very cool.
Curren Bickel
All right. And then now that this campaign’s built, we might be a little over five minutes because of all the explanation, but you can just click Create Campaign, and it’ll throw it into your account, ready to launch once you’ve added some creative and everything like that.
Mary Cate
So obviously you’ve done this before, because from looking—
Curren Bickel
Oh, yes.
Mary Cate
—at Curren’s past campaigns, that probably is where JEEN got all of its knowledge, all the past campaigns.
Curren Bickel
Yes. Many years of doing that.
Jonathan Gudai
So what you just showed us there was basically identifying you were a brand, Sephora, the market you care about, and then letting the actual intelligence of JEEN sort of come to life to say, “Here’s what it could look like.” And then your ability to actually refine that literally through a conversation-type workflow. I mean, think about how much not only time savings that would provide, like you were saying, Mary Cate, but the expertise around like, okay, I only want to show up between 6:00 and 9:00 p.m. That’s going to drive better performance because you’re being very thoughtful about when the audience is going to be in the mindset for Sephora. And it looks pretty close to five minutes to me, Curren, so well done.
Mary Cate
What was really cool about this is if you’re coming in without having a marketing background, going into JEEN and inputting your industry and/or your product, using all the past information to be able to construct that, it’s really useful for people. And especially around the dayparting, because some people don’t know when the peak times for their audiences are, and it’s great that JEEN can break that down by venue even, and just to make sure that their dollar is going longer. It’s really more of a money saver for you in the end, too.
Curren Bickel
Yeah, you don’t need to be an expert because an expert’s always at hand with JEEN.
Jonathan Gudai
That’s a great way to put it. So what else is JEEN cooking up as we think about the future? And I mean, you just showed a lot there, but what’s around the corner that you can tell us about, Curren?
Curren Bickel
Yeah. On our next episode, we’ll likely be showing you some of our audience recommendation. There are a lot of audience segments within our system, so it can be hard to choose the right one. But we’ve trained JEEN to be able to recommend the best ones to make sure it’s reaching the right screens at the right time, as well as our place-of-interest targeting. We have a very large database of POIs like Sephora. Let’s say maybe the next step in that campaign would be to build a one-mile radius around those locations for certain inventory types.
And then finally, some budget recommendation. Sometimes you don’t come in knowing what your budget is, but JEEN’s going to be able to help you find the right budget to meet your needs, depending on the market size as well as the number of screens you want. Like I said, it’s an expert and wants to make sure that you’re having the best campaign so that you keep coming back.
Mary Cate
Awesome.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, very excited to see that. Not just hear about it, but I actually want to see it in episode four.
Curren Bickel
Oh, yeah. It’s going to be beautiful.
Mary Cate
And Curren, I feel like this is just the beginning, right? JEEN is just growing—
Curren Bickel
Yeah.
Mary Cate
—smarter and smarter every week.
Curren Bickel
Yes, it is. Each update of JEEN is just a little bit more of me infused into the product. Until JEEN’s a full-fledged campaign strategist, we’ll get it trained to talk like me so it’ll feel like I’m right there in your computer, helping you along the way.
Mary Cate
Not creepy at all.
Curren Bickel
Not creepy at all.
Mary Cate
In like the best ways.
Curren Bickel
Yes, exactly.
Jonathan Gudai
That’s awesome. Very cool. Well, we look forward to the next episode and some of those new advanced techniques you mentioned, seeing those put to work. And I think that this wraps up episode three of the Omnivision Podcast. So huge thank you guys for joining us. We want to continue growing this series with useful information in a 30-minute-or-less podcast format. JEEN has such an exciting and bright future, and we’re excited to share it with all of our clients and prospective clients and partners. Until next time, keep on experimenting, and hope you have an amazing 2026 ahead.
Mary Cate
Thanks for having us.
Curren Bickel
Thanks, everybody.