广告牌创意四步法：抓住目标客户到制造魔法

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A billboard might look like the easiest creative format in marketing: a few words, one image, done. But that’s exactly what makes it deceptively hard. Your one idea needs to land with your audience in a few seconds, or you’ve spent a lot of money on nothing.

I want to help you get this right, for your sake, for your company’s sake, and for the people moving through the streets of San Francisco and beyond looking at these billboards!

So, to prep for this 2-part newsletter series, I drove around SF with Maya Spivak, one of my go-to brand and billboard experts (among other things), analyzing all things out-of-home. And we of course recorded it and made a video series too called Billboard Drive-By.

In part 1 of the series, I covered how to decide if you should buy a billboard at all. You need both billboard <> startup fit and a real goal for buying OOH right now. So let’s assume you’ve got both: The channel makes sense for your company, and you’ve got a solid reason (not just “a competitor bought some billboards”). Now you have to decide what actually goes on the billboard.

Much like a homepage hero, you have limited space to lay out your positioning: at least who it’s for and what it is, and if it fits, why it’s better. Unless you’re Anthropic, Nvidia, or Apple, which you’re not.

But unlike a homepage hero, a billboard gets read at 65 mph, by people who weren’t looking to be sold anything, just trying to get from point A to point B.

This newsletter walks you through my 4-step framework for making standout billboard creative, complete with tests and checks. Plus, I’ve reviewed 5 of the billboards Maya and I saw in the wild with help from our new /billboard-creative skill trained on all the context in this newsletter. The skill is in the MKT1 MCP for paid subscribers, so before your creative hits the highway, you can run it through all the checks.

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In this newsletter:

This 2-part newsletter—with videos from a Billboard Drive-By with Maya Spivak and a Claude skill for reviewing billboard creative—helps you make informed OOH (out-of-home) decisions.

📍 Part 2 (this newsletter): What should you put on a billboard?

• 4 steps to make standout billboard creative: 1) Catch your ICP, 2) Nail the message, 3) Make it legible, 4) Bring the magic
• Billboard reviews: Baseten, Rippling, Braintrust, Framer

More MKT1 OOH content and resources:

⏪ Part 1 of this series: Should you do an OOH buy?

• This newsletter helps you figure out if you have billboard <> startup fit and a solid goal. Start here when you get your next request to buy billboards!
• It also features a full FAQ about buying OOH.

🤖 Billboard-Creative skill: We built a skill for checking billboard creative, available in the MKT1 MCP for paid subscribers.

📺 Billboard Drive-By: 11 mini-episode video series with Maya Spivak

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!

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And now, on to the newsletter…

4 steps to make standout billboard creative

Step 1: Catch your ICP

First things first, the person you are trying to reach needs to realize your creative is attempting to speak to them, immediately, before they zoom by.

There are 3 ways to do this, make sure you check the box on at least 1:

• Write copy that directly says who it’s for:
• Name the audience specifically, like “marketers”, “AI engineers”, etc.
• Write copy that describes your product in an audience-specific way:
• If you don’t expressly name your audience, explain your product in a way that your audience knows it for them.
• e.g. Baseten’s billboard doesn’t say “AI engineers,” but it does say the word “inference” which speaks to them specifically.
• Show with visual language who it’s for:
• A stylized product shot, a photo, an illustration, etc. that signals the category or crowd before they read a word. This is harder to pull off, but powerful when it lands.
• Note: Social proof is also a great visual signal of who it’s for. If peers use it, it tells you the ICP and builds credibility.

Step 2: Nail the message

You’ve caught your ICP’s eye. Now you’ve got a second to make your impression count by saying something that matters to them. Ideally your billboard covers the same things a homepage hero does: who it’s for, what your product is, and why it’s better (than the alternative). But that’s hard to do in a contained space. So which parts you actually include depend on the level of awareness, aka how much your ICP already knows about you.

There are 2 parts to this process:

2A. Figure out your audience’s awareness stage

Factor in not only the demographics and firmographics of who you want to reach (including the city your OOH buy is in), but also your ICP’s “awareness level.”

And if you aren’t sure, assume the OOH audience is less aware than you think—because many people won’t be in your ICP at all.

• Unaware: They don’t even know they have the problem your product solves yet.
• Problem aware: They recognize the pain point, but don’t know a viable solution exists. They don’t know you or your competitors’ products exist.
• Solution aware: They know solutions in your category exist, but don’t know your product specifically.
• Product aware: They know you offer a solution to the problem.
• Brand & product aware: They know you as an option in the category, recognize your logo, and if someone said your name they’d know what your product does.

2B. Match the message to that stage

The more awareness you have, the more options you have for what you can say. If your audience is…

• Unaware → problem aware: Speak to the pain.
• e.g. Vanta's "Compliance that doesn't SOC too much" names the pain, compliance is a slog, with a wink.
• Problem → solution aware: Explain the solution.
• e.g. CodeRabbit's "AI code reviews" just says what it is.
• Solution → product aware: State why you’re better than other solutions.
• e.g. Rippling’s “HR, IT, and Finance in one” copy implies it’s better than stitching together tools.