Share Local Media, Vice President Gahwui Kim’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on Offline Media

Gahwui, your path into offline and direct mail marketing is one that many in our community find deeply inspiring. What was the defining moment or early experience in your career that made you say, “This is the space I want to build in”?

The offline industry, especially OOH, is unique because it’s often fragmented. You have publishers, data providers, media owners, agencies, and measurement partners all operating within their own lanes.

What drew me to this space was the opportunity to connect those dots and make it easier for brands.

At Share Local Media, we’re in a position that’s both strategic and nimble. We’re large enough to drive meaningful scale for brands, but agile enough to see across the entire ecosystem and build integrated solutions that others might miss.

One of the earliest realizations I had was that while the marketing industry tends to operate in silos, consumers don’t. People don’t wake up and think, “I’m engaging with direct mail now” or “I’m seeing an OOH ad now.” They simply move through their day, interacting with brands across multiple touchpoints.

Understanding that disconnect, and helping marketers build campaigns that reflect how people actually consume media, is what made me want to invest my time in this space.

One of our biggest advantages is our ability to marry Direct Mail and Out of Home together under a unified strategy, helping brands extend reach, reinforce messaging across channels, and create a more cohesive customer journey.

Having navigated the often-digital-first bias of modern marketing culture, how have you personally championed the cause of offline channels, and what has the reception from peers and leadership looked like over the years?

The biggest challenge has always been measurement.

Many marketers viewed offline as difficult to attribute compared to digital. My approach has been to focus on proving outcomes rather than debating perceptions. By building stronger attribution frameworks, matchback methodologies, and audience-level measurement models, we’ve been able to demonstrate that offline media can perform with the same level of accountability that performance marketers expect online.

The reception has evolved significantly over the years.

What was once viewed as a supplementary awareness channel is now increasingly being treated as a core growth lever. As customer acquisition costs rise online and signal loss continues to impact digital attribution, leadership teams are becoming much more receptive to channels that offer both scale and measurable performance while keeping brand awareness in mind as well.

You’ve built deep expertise at the intersection of direct mail performance and data-driven targeting. In your view, what is the single most underestimated lever that brands are leaving on the table when they run offline campaigns today?

Channel orchestration.

Too many brands still think about offline media in silos. The biggest opportunities come when brands strategically layer channels together to create compounding effects.

Direct mail becomes more effective when it’s supported by other media touchpoints, whether that’s OOH, Connected TV, or digital. The market often focuses on optimizing individual channels when the real advantage comes from optimizing how channels work together.

Share Local Media was founded by e-commerce marketers for e-commerce marketers. How has that insider perspective shaped the way you approach client strategy, channel integration, and measurement differently from a traditional agency?

Being founded by direct marketers fundamentally changes how we think.

We don’t start with impressions or media plans—we start with business outcomes. Our clients care about customer acquisition, revenue, incremental lift, and profitability, and that’s how we evaluate success internally as well.

That perspective pushes us to build measurement systems that connect media exposure to real customer actions.

Share Local Media now powers offline growth for brands like Harry’s, Instacart, Away, and Caraway. What does that roster tell the market about where offline media sits in the performance marketing stack for digitally native brands?

I think it signals that offline media has officially moved beyond brand awareness and into the performance conversation.

Offline channels, at their core, balance brand and demand perfectly.

Digitally native brands are incredibly disciplined about measurement and ROI. These companies wouldn’t continue investing in offline channels if they weren’t seeing meaningful business results.

The broader takeaway is that the most sophisticated growth teams are no longer asking whether offline works. They’re asking how to scale it efficiently and how to integrate it with the rest of their acquisition ecosystem.

Your Fabletics campaign—which earned the Gold Mailbox Award at the 2026 REGGIE Awards—delivered a 122% lift in store traffic and a 255% surge at locations where OOH exposure and mail delivery overlapped most. What was the strategic insight that unlocked those numbers, and what did your team get right that others typically don’t?

The key insight was recognizing that OOH and direct mail shouldn’t compete for credit—they should work together.

We intentionally used OOH to warm audiences before and during mail delivery, creating multiple touchpoints that reinforced each other throughout the customer journey. The campaign strategically placed seven static and digital OOH units near stores and along high-traffic commuter routes, timed to coincide with mail delivery windows.

What made the campaign particularly unique was measurement.

We developed a proprietary OOH Matchback methodology that connected exposed audiences directly to customer transactions, allowing us to understand the direct impact of OOH on store visits and purchases with a level of precision rarely seen in the category.

The results validated that approach.

The lesson is that success doesn’t come from simply adding channels—it comes from intentionally designing how those channels interact and measuring that interaction correctly.

As we move through 2026 with signal loss accelerating online, cookie deprecation reshaping digital attribution, and consumers increasingly fatigued by screen-based ads, what is your boldest prediction for how the role of direct mail and OOH will evolve in the performance marketer’s playbook by year-end?

My prediction is that offline media will become one of the most important identity and measurement layers in the performance marketing stack.

As digital attribution becomes more fragmented, marketers will increasingly value channels that can reach verified households, generate deterministic signals, and provide incremental reach outside of walled gardens.

That’s why we developed our proprietary Matchback platform, which connects household-level media exposure to conversion outcomes, helping marketers measure true incrementality and gain visibility into performance beyond the limitations of cookie-based attribution.

I also believe we’ll see much greater adoption of cross-channel measurement frameworks that treat offline and online media as a unified system rather than separate disciplines.

The brands that embrace that shift will have a significant competitive advantage.

Finally, for the performance marketers, growth leads, and brand strategists in our community who are still on the fence about committing to offline channels, what is the one piece of advice you would give them today, drawn from everything you’ve built and measured at Share Local Media?

The most common mistake marketers make is applying outdated assumptions to modern offline media.

Today’s direct mail and OOH campaigns can be audience-targeted, data-driven, and measured against real business outcomes.

Start with a test, build a strong measurement framework, and focus on incremental lift rather than last-touch attribution.

The brands winning today aren’t choosing between digital and offline—they’re building integrated systems where each channel makes the others perform better.

That’s where the next phase of growth is happening.

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