👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Best of Lenny’s Newsletter | Hire your next product leader | Podcast | Lennybot | Swag When I see billboard ads as I drive around the Bay Area, I often wonder about the ROI behind these investments. As someone who’s always worked on product-oriented growth, I’ve never had a chance to understand the logic behind advertising out in the real world, and what kind of impact startups see from these levers. So when I came across Reed McGinley-Stempel (CEO and founder of Stytch) sharing his experience of running billboards for his startup, I immediately pinged him to see if he’d be up for expanding on his lessons. Not only did Reed share many in-depth details (and numbers) from his company’s experience, he also reached out to marketing leaders at basically every other startup with billboards in the Bay Area for theirs. Below, you’ll find a synthesized set of lessons about how to successfully leverage billboards to grow your product, including insights from Ramp, Notion, Vanta, Rippling, Canva, Brex, Writer, Bland, Statsig, and Stytch. With every post in this newsletter, I try to offer the most definitive advice on a topic, and I believe this is that for billboard advertising. Reed McGinley-Stempel is the co-founder of Stytch. For more from Reed, follow him on LinkedIn and X.
Every two years, our team at Stytch runs a large out-of-home (OOH) campaign in San Francisco—physical or outdoor advertising such as billboards, bus ads, airport takeovers, or cyber-truck wraps. “Is it worth it?” is one of the most common questions I get from B2B SaaS founders and go-to-market leaders. It may seem counterintuitive to advertise modern software on a medium as old-school as a bus ad. But we’ve found the real world to be one of the most effective channels to grow and establish our brand. The value and strategy vary widely depending on the company or product profile, so to give you a holistic perspective on when and how to run a successful OOH campaign for a B2B software product, I asked leaders at Brex, Ramp, Notion, Vanta, Rippling, Canva, Writer, Bland, and Statsig about their lessons from running similar campaigns.
Huge thanks to Michael Burke from Bland, Brandon Camhi from Rippling, Lisa Ferragano from Canva, Elizabeth George from Statsig, Kira Klaas from Notion, Kasper Koczab from Brex, Cody Morgan from Ramp, Andrew Racine from Writer, and Sarah Scharf from Vanta for sharing their insights in this piece, and to MB, Gedney, Aiden, and Robert for their help on the Stytch side. Evaluating ROI: How can I decide if it’s “worth it”?When I get asked this, SaaS startup leaders and founders are often thinking about sales pipeline and revenue. These are important, but the ROI question for out-of-home is much more nuanced. Stytch’s most recent OOH campaign ran for a month in San Francisco in April 2024. For that campaign, we bought 80 bus ads, 130 bus and transit shelter ads, eight billboards on SF city streets, and, yes, three billboards on Highway 101. We used those billboards to sell our B2B SaaS product—in our case, authentication APIs—but also to communicate what Stytch is and establish our brand among the city’s high concentration of software engineers.
And it worked! During the campaign, we saw a more than 25% uplift in branded search traffic and an over 70% increase in branded search clicks globally (social media is powerful!). We also sustained a 10% to 15% uplift after the billboards came down. Further down the funnel, more than 10% of our sales opportunities created since the campaign have explicitly cited billboards or bus ads as a factor in exploring Stytch. And employees have posted hundreds of pictures to our internal #billboard-spotting Slack channel (on average, 2.1 per employee)—so it’s pretty good for team morale too! It’s important to remember that billboards and other OOH spots are broad-stroke mediums, so they work best for high-level brand awareness, rather than immediate pipeline generation. For B2B businesses especially, the reality is that only a fraction of your ideal customer profile is actually in the market right now. An OOH campaign aims to make your audience feel something now so that they remember your brand in the future. If the following traits match your B2B SaaS company, an out-of-home campaign is a no-brainer to my mind:
Unlike with digital demand generation (think: Google Ads), where there are tracking pixels, UTM tags, and a clear view of money in versus money out, attribution for physical ads is murky and imperfect. You may never get a big final number to share in your board presentation, and that’s OK. Instead, brand awareness from OOH affects a range of metrics up and down the funnel, which combine to make the investment worth it. I heard from other startup leaders about the impact they’ve seen from their campaigns:
To quote Brandon Camhi from Rippling, “With out-of-home advertising, you should make the investment because the logic makes sense. While you should try to get a directional read on OOH impact, you also have to use your best judgment around where your audience is and what message they respond to. Intuition can carry you far in marketing.” And for Stytch, and almost every other company I spoke with, the logic is there when you want to grow brand awareness, you have the money to invest now to see impact later, and you believe you can create a compelling enough message. Making an impression: How do I ensure my campaign is memorable?It’s important to acknowledge that the value of out-of-home is contingent on making a lasting impression. Kira Klaas from Notion offered a great framework for how to think about what makes OOH advertising memorable:
In other words, you need either a lot of placements, a killer message, or a mix of both. A single billboard can work, but for it to work, it has to be extremely resonant—so resonant, in fact, that it goes viral. Here are two examples of extremely resonant billboards: Vanta’s SOC 2 billboard garnered thousands of upvotes on Reddit (running an ad with any upvotes on Reddit is an achievement; getting 1,000 upvotes organically is next-level) and helped them land their biggest enterprise customer.
Bland’s billboard demo video garnered 25 million views, tens of thousands of phone calls, and hundreds of qualified leads.
For Michael Burke from Bland, the key to virality was sparking some controversy and then seeding virality with a clever video too:
And for Sarah Scharf from Vanta, the most essential elements were simplicity and humor:
More likely, though, a single billboard won’t have a Vanta or a Bland outcome. And so a more immersive campaign, where users might have two to seven impressions in a city on a given day, is more likely to leave a lasting impact. In practice, what that means for us at Stytch is that we:
One of the brands I’ve seen excel at having a holistic approach to OOH and online marketing is Notion. According to their former VP of brand and marketing, Kira Klaas, their success has a lot to do with taking full advantage of what a physical, in-person advertising format has to offer and leveraging it further on digital channels:
At the very least, if you buy a billboard, share it on social media, a lot.
Cody Morgan, VP of demand gen at Ramp, offered this advice:
Put all together, combining ad frequency and resonance leads to good recall—and nice boosts to metrics across the funnel. Getting tactical: So how do I actually do this?At this point, we’ve talked about the “why” of out-of-home advertising. But there’s quite a bit of tactical work required, so I want to touch on that too. Here are a few grounding questions when you’re considering how to approach your campaign:
Right placesFor out-of-home, it’s not enough to know who your ideal buyer is; you have to understand their physical habits—where they live, where they work, and how they move back and forth. For us at Stytch, we knew we wanted to target software engineers and tech workers, and we found that those people were heavily concentrated in San Francisco, or would at least visit for conferences. We mapped our target Sales accounts, typical commuting routes, and conference venues, then picked ad locations to maximize impressions near those locations.
Lisa Ferragano, Canva’s Americas brand media lead, echoed this approach to targeting:
Right placementsOnce you’ve decided on a geographic location to target your ICP, you also need to think about individual placements. In out-of-home advertising parlance, that’s your “media.” At Stytch, we were fortunate to learn from the best in Kasper Koczab, who leads OOH at Brex. Here’s his advice: 1. Mix different types of ads to maximize both resonance and frequency.
2. Every placement is different. Consider the viewer experience for each ad.
To demonstrate why thinking holistically about placements matters, here are two examples of billboards partially blocked by trees. Which one is more compelling?  Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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When and how to run a billboard campaign
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