Do the exact opposite of what the majority of the "AI billboards" are saying.
Job done.
It’s maybe got slightly more extreme recently, with an even larger percentage of them being inscrutable to me as someone who both works in tech and has a decent grasp of current industry trends.
I’ve never really got it — if even I don’t know what you’re advertising (or often, who is advertising!), how does this help your sales?
Making their sales peoples job easier, in particular, can be a lot cheaper than getting the marketing on its own to sell someone on you. They want you to go "oh, yes, FooBar Inc, I recognise that name" instead of your reaction being "who?!?".
A lot of marketing without calls to action fall in the latter two categories. In that case they don't need to tell you who they are. They just need you to notice that they're there enough that they seem like a player that is a good choice. You don't even necessarily want to come across as caring too much about explaining who you are - you just want to portray the silent confidence of someone buyers should already know.
(I have no idea whether the specific billboards you're talking about succeed at this)
Advertisers target the people likely to see the ad and spend money on the topic. Billboards are extremely geographically restricted, so local interest dominates. This isn't really news.
And yes, they are annoying.
They must work, because they're buying the ad space for about three relevant people.
While you can generally restrict new ones, you can't eliminate existing ones without basically paying out the lost revenue+etc to whoever is running it.
[Billboards stop targeting you at all.]
Ads no longer influence us to buy things we don't need! This is terrible!
Just take the win.
But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you.
It's a dumb example, but in Pittsburgh the football stadium was renamed from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium.
Of course, "Three Rivers Stadium", the name of the previous building, was best. It's not a name that tries to sell you something. But if you must sell something, "Heinz" is extremely good: it sells products for everyone, and it has historical roots in the area. Of the people, for the people.
But Acrisure? I've looked it up a few times and I still can't remember exactly what it is. Business services or insurance or something like that. And I'm sure that both Acrisure and the Steelers don't really care that I don't know what it is, because it's not really for the vast majority of the 65,000 people who show up on a Sunday to cheer for the team.
That's...weird.
I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I watched a YouTube video about a startup that wanted to land a major client, figured out the CTO's commute, and put up billboards along the way.
Then they called the guy and he told them "I see your ads everywhere." They had an in.
The economics likely make sense when a contract is easily worth tens of millions of dollars. They're trying to create the perception that they're established in the mind of one person.
ak_t•40m ago
gdulli•36m ago
pstuart•20m ago