The Opposite of a Good Idea: Do Billboards Still Matter in the Digital Age?
I am in a dimly lit conference room at a hotel where the atmosphere is thrumming with anticipation. Large, bright monitors illuminate the stage, casting a glow over rows of chairs filled with business executives, each eager to learn and network. My boss, a master of the art of schmoozing, whispers — “time to network,” and dives into the crowd with the ease and grace of a seasoned diplomat. I see him move from conversation to conversation, effortlessly making connections, while I linger on the sidelines, the anxiety of an introvert bubbling up within me.
Surveying the room, I watch strangers introduce themselves, each interaction a potential lead slipping through my fingers. My attempts to join conversations are awkward and stilted, but then, salvation. The announcer takes the stage, and the crowd disperses into their seats, the presentations beginning.
When it is my turn to take the stage, I feel a surge of energy rise within me and then settle as I start talking. The stage becomes my sanctuary. I have delivered this presentation what feels like hundreds of times, and the words flow effortlessly. I tell a story that seems to land with the audience, connecting their primary pain points with the solutions our product offers, all without a desperate pitch.
As the conference break arrives, the familiar dread of networking returns. Sigh!
But as I stand up and turn around, I am met with a surprising sight — a line of people waiting to talk to me. Something in my presentation has struck a chord. There are questions and comments about what I said on the stage, leading to meaningful and consequential conversations. No more small talk or pretending to be a sports fan; these discussions are about the core issues I am passionate about — our audience’s pain points and how we address them. For an hour straight, I engage in one substantive conversation after another.
By the end of the day, I have more follow-ups and meetings than the smooth-talking salesmen who had worked the room with their charm.
That night, I have an epiphany.
This, I realized, is how billboards work.
Instead of engaging one person at a time, it is far more effective to speak to hundreds, even thousands, simultaneously. This approach drives more inbound interest than deploying an army of sales reps to call individual prospects. It’s not that companies should abandon the latter entirely, but the efficiency of the former is undeniable.
In that moment, I understood the power of scale and the profound impact of speaking directly to the many, rather than the few. The power of brand recall through broadcast.
However, there is a big caveat to this strategy.
We will get to it in a second.
But first, why do so many founders and marketers dislike billboards?
There are two common refrains I have heard over and over in marketing conferences.
Billboards are expensive. You are better off spending the money somewhere else.
Billboards have no attribution, which leads to closed deals.
It is true that some billboards can be expensive depending on the location, but it cannot be further from the truth when someone says you are better off spending the money somewhere else.
As a CMO of SingleStore, I have had the fortune of telling our story on a billboard on the iconic 101N highway right next to exit 425. Here are some lessons we have learned while building our brand using the billboard as the fulcrum of our product-led broadcast strategy.
1. The opposite of a good idea
There is a well-known saying — If you follow the crowd, you will end up going where the crowd goes. If you go alone, you may end up in a place that has been undiscovered. This thinking is similar to what the legendary marketer from O&M, Rory Sutherland, professes — “Sometimes the opposite of a good idea could be a better idea.” To me, it says that if everyone else is doing online marketing and the attempts to get your prospect’s attention are no longer effective, maybe it is time to find other analog channels that are not as crowded as Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Consider the reach of a billboard. On a busy highway, it is visible to anyone driving back and forth throughout the day. This exposes your messaging not only to new users but also to repeat users and sometimes your existing customers. Sure, unlike online channel billboards are not targeted specifically to your audience but similar to speaking on the stage if your message resonates with some of your audience, they will find your business and line up to come talk to you. This brings me to the next point.
2. Don’t do billboards unless you do this
A billboard is as good as the message on it. This is the biggest caveat to consider before deciding to choose this analog medium as your distribution channel.
If the message is round, white, and bland, you may as well go back to spending that money to do other things. This is true for most things in marketing, but it is even more stark when it comes to billboards. You have 2–4 seconds of possible attention of someone speeding down the highway, and if all that the billboard says is — “We are hiring,” or worse, something that no one gets, then you may as well take that money out of your budget and give it to the BDR team.
A billboard is a canvas for your company and product’s story.
You have less than seven words, with or without an image, to tell that story. The story must be memorable and sometimes emotional to make a connection with your potential audience in less than five seconds. This is scary and risky for any marketer and, in many ways, the ultimate Olympic sport of creativity with intention.
When it comes to telling a story, I often see most marketers turn to agencies. This makes the whole proposition even more expensive and time-consuming. You go through days of explaining your proposition to a revolving door of agency employees and finally come up with a one-liner that has gone through 56 iterations and has the handprints of everyone in your company, from the marketing to the product to the sales to the customer success teams. Once the message goes live, even if it is a big hit, it quickly becomes stale in a few weeks. You are back on the drawing board, spending time and money all over again.
Early on, I learned that the best messaging and one-liners happen not in agency conference rooms but are rooted in the product and comes out of meetings and offsites when employees, product users and customers are dropping witty and snarky remarks explain what the product does for them.
You can never capture this ethos with an external agency that knows nothing about your product or your vision. I have nothing against agencies, but one of the most common questions I hear when people see our billboards and remember the message is this — “Who is your agency?” This is akin to looking at an amazing photograph in a museum and asking the photographer — “What is your camera?”
When I usually tell them that we don’t have an agency, it usually follows with a look of incredulous amusement.
So, what are some ingredients of effective storytelling with constraints?
In my experience, the two most important ones are surprise and humor. Yes, there are quite a few others, but humor is surprisingly memorable.
When humans see something funny, we like to share it with others. To share requires remembering. This is recall.
But herein lies another challenge — humor is tricky. Humor is risky. Since humor is subjective and context-driven, you can easily offend people, which could have a deathly effect on the brand. This is more true when the humor is targeted at a competitor. Sometimes your prospects and customers may be avid fans of your competitors, and poking fun of them may turn them off. This may be ok for some use cases and not so useful in others.
Finally, the image and visuals should be as powerful as the messaging itself. This is where you can bring in the surprise element.
Storytelling is an art, and the best ads have topical messages that are tightly bound to the visuals and finally, and most importantly, connected to your product.
But despite all the risks, how do you know if your message is resonating? How do you know if the billboard is helping and not hurting you? This brings me to the next point.
3. Seeking marketing attribution is a fool’s errand
In many ways, billboards are a risky bet for marketers because they are an easy target for critics. How do you answer questions like “What is the ROI on the billboard?”
My advice — Trying to find attribution for billboards is a fool’s errand. If this is the thinking behind the people who decide the budget, the path of least resistance is to not invest in billboards at all. Instead, work on targeted online campaigns where you could rely on data to see if your audience engaged with your content and if there is correlation of that engagement to subsequent conversations that led to a closed deal. However, that is rife with its own challenges and is a topic for another article.
I have been lucky at SingleStore, where everyone within the company has a strong intuition about the billboards because we constantly get direct feedback from customers and prospects who found a billboard message funny, and they end up taking pictures of the billboard that end up either on social media or passed along to each other through text messages. In at least a handful of instances, we have customers who come and tell us that they saw our billboard message once, which they found to be witty, and they decided to try out the product and fell in love with it.
Mark Twain was once famously asked to write the shortest story ever possible, and he wrote the following — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
This captures the art of storytelling through billboards. Take a risk. Be bold. Be surprising. Add genuine humor, and your message will be memorable. When your message is memorable, you will see the results in revenue.
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Thanks for getting to the end of this article. My name is Madhukar, I work at the intersection of technology (and AI) and creativity . I love to build apps and write about enterprise AI, PLG, and Marketing tech.
I am also building a course. Reach out to me on LinkedIn if you are interested to collaborate in any way.
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