创业公司该买湾区高速广告牌吗？四个适配检查

👋 This is a monthly free edition of MKT1 Newsletter—a deep dive into a B2B startup marketing topic, brought to you by Framer, Closing Media, and RevenueHero.

Upgrade to a paid subscription for: Full access to our new MKT1 MCP Server | 100+ templates & resources | Post to MKT1 Job Board | MKT1 Newsletter Archive | $40K+ in discounts in the MKT1 Perk Stack

Subscribe now

“We should buy some billboards.”

If you’ve been a marketer for long enough, or maybe even not long at all, you’ve gotten this request.

Some of us have gotten more absurd versions of this request: “Can we put a Beyoncé quote on a billboard?” or “Can we buy all the remaining Bay Area billboard inventory for the rest of the year (even though that’s 100x our annual marketing budget)?” Just hypothetically.

Which begs the question: Can out-of-home (OOH), or more specifically billboards of the San Francisco freeway variety, coming in at $20–50K a month, ever actually be worth it?

About a year ago, I was at lunch with Maya Spivak, one of my go-to brand and billboard experts (among other things). I told Maya she needed to make a TikTok of her commenting on billboards.

This spring, we finally hit the road with her go-to videographer, Gusto Lopez, and an Uber driver who was a great sport (we tipped him well, of course). We paraded around SF and the South Bay, with a u-turn on Treasure Island, providing billboard commentary. These aren’t going on TikTok, but they are going in this newsletter series and on YouTube. We think they’re entertaining, but you can be the judge.

After going on what OOH vendors call a “market ride” with Maya, here’s where I landed: I think these pricey billboards and bus wraps can be worth it, but a lot has to go right, and usually a lot goes wrong.

Here’s a sizzle reel of our Billboard Drive-By series:

Watch this episode & the rest of the Billboard Drive-By series on YouTube. ➜

Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at [email protected].

Framer: DoorDash, Perplexity, Mixpanel, and Mutiny’s websites are all built on Framer. From early-stage startups to Fortune 500s, Framer is the website builder I personally recommend. It works like your team’s favorite design tool, with AI-powered building, integrated A/B testing, and one-click publishing.

🔓 Offer: Get 15% off a Yearly Pro plan with code MKT15. Annual MKT1 Subscribers get 30% off a Yearly Pro plan in our Perk Stack.

—

Closing Media is a boutique agency that runs LinkedIn and Google campaigns for growth-stage startups. They know the best ways to build and scale ad campaigns in 2026 (hint: thought leader ads and video!) and have years of expertise (I worked with them in 2018!).

🔓 Offer: Reach out to Closing Media here & mention MKT1 to get $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign.

—

RevenueHero is how companies like Clay, Customer.io and Freshworks auto-enrich, route, and book meetings in seconds. And they have great data too, a recent report on 1M+ form submits showed their top customers book 88% of qualified leads - report is here!

🔓 Offer: Get the report and mention MKT1 to get 15% off if you buy before 7/31.

In this newsletter:

In addition to sharing 11 mini-episodes from our “Billboard Drive-By” video series*, this 2-part newsletter will arm you with rubrics to have an actually thoughtful response when you get or make a billboard request.

*Quick note: This was really an OOH drive-by, not just a billboard one. OOH covers all the out-of-home media you can buy, from digital billboards to bus sides and wraps to hand-painted walls to subway ads.

Part 1 (this newsletter): Should you do an OOH buy?

Whether that’s NYC subway takeovers or billboards along the Bay Area “Skyway” this newsletter helps you figure it out.

• Section 1: Do you have billboard <> startup fit?
• Section 2: What’s your goal for being on a billboard right now?
• Section 3: OOH planning & buying FAQ

Part 2 (later this month): What should you put on a billboard?

This will cover all things creative, plus my reviews of real SF billboards and more video clips!

Bonus: Chat with this newsletter in Claude with this pre-built prompt ➜

About Maya: Maya Spivak loves building and supporting beloved tech brands. After 15 years of full-time, in-house brand marketing leadership, Maya started an independent microagency called Marketing.fan where she and a small team of creatives build and execute brand marketing campaigns and promotional media strategy. Although Maya enjoys all types of brand marketing, positioning, storytelling, and experiential projects…about 80% of her business is out-of-home media buying and management. It’s what the people want!

And now, on to the newsletter…

Do you have billboard <> startup fit?

AKA: Just because you can buy a billboard, doesn’t mean you should buy a billboard

“A lot of times the earlier-stage companies try to copy the big companies. They have a bunch of awareness. For example, Figma. Most people in tech know what that is, so they can take more risks. They’ve earned the right to be a little obscure.” –Maya Spivak

Billboards (and all expensive out of home buys) often go wrong from the start at startups. Someone requests a billboard because they saw one from some other company and think it’ll work for yours. You don’t have the same audience, company stage, business model, or strengths as that company; nor do you know if it even “worked” for them. So don’t just copy a competitor or much later stage company!

OOH, like any other channel, needs to be a fit for your company across multiple variables. A billboard can be right for your audience and wrong for your business model, right for your company stage and wrong for your budget. So before you buy, check all four.

Want an example of a company that has all 4? PostHog.

Watch this episode & the rest of the Billboard Drive-By series on YouTube. ➜

“It makes you ask this question: Who would do that? And the answer is PostHog would do that. That level of gumption and daring is super cool… It’s not going to work for every company, but it works uniquely well for PostHog. And they’ve been doing this for years. It’s not something you pick up in a quarter.” –Maya Spivak

How to check if OOH makes sense for your company

1. Audience fit

You have audience fit if…

You know who your audience is, specifically. And likely your audience is either massive (e.g., Notion, where a huge chunk of people are potential users) or tightly concentrated geographically. Either way, you need the impact of this format to be worth all the money you’ll spend reaching people who don’t matter.

What else to consider:

While you can get increasingly more targeted with enrichment and signals on other channels (like paid ads, which I covered in my last newsletter), out-of-home is the same as it ever was: a blunt instrument for reaching your audience. Reps from OOH vendors will give you impression data so you know how many people drive or walk by, but that’s about it (More on how this works in the FAQ section below). The CPM for the people you actually want to reach is nearly impossible to determine.

Start by understanding who your audience is and evaluate all channels and all varieties of OOH (we have a skill for this in our MCP!). OOH isn’t just billboards, after all—you can be on the radio and on TV, and your ability to target audiences hinges on crisply knowing who they are.

Now you might think, just buy when the conference for your audience comes to town. And you can. Or you can get creative and send trucks with your logo driving around town. But this isn’t a secret, so that inventory is in very short supply.

Bottom line: If your audience is too scattered or too small, OOH probably isn’t your channel, and there are better ways to reach them.

2. Business model fit

You have business model fit if…