Pieter Levels Billboard
In June, 2021, Pieter bought a billboard in front of Apple’s headquarters. He used a service called Blip to do this for $24.46. The billboard got 1.5+ million views to Remote OK. This equalled 1.6¢ per 1,000 views.
The real value didn’t lie with the billboard itself. The tweet announcing the billboard went viral and got a lot of attention in the indie hacking community.
Pieter promoted the Tweet on Twitter. It got 311,220 extra views for $500 ($1.60 per 1,000 views.)
He bought more billboards around the U.S., including California and New York city. He later saw his billboard on a webcam of Times Square. He said this billboard cost 10x the others.
Blip later said that the campaign received an estimated 57,000 impressions with an average daily spend of $18.
MicroAcquire
MicroAcquire started sharing stories of successful acquisitions on billboards in June, 2022. He would share the tweets from the founders of companies that had been acquired. This meant that the billboards were focused on the founders themselves.
Times Square became a favourite location. Reilly Chase, Tim Green, Anthony Hoang, Dustin McCaffree and Joe Speiser were featured. Joe had previously been a podcast guest.
Other locations included:
MicroAcquire founder Andrew Gazdecki said the cost for each 15 minute ad was about $200.
Tools Of Titans
Tim Ferriss asked all of his podcast guests the same question at the end of each episode. “What message would you put on a billboard for millions to see?”
In December, 2016, he shared 6-10 of his favourite responses on billboards in New York City. These were spread across 80 billboards.
He said it was sincere thank you to all of his guests and listeners who joked that he should make some real billboards for Tools of Titans.
He shared a video of him standing next to one of the billboards.
Rows
Rows ran an ad on a Billboard in February, 2022. The goal was the same as the other case studies: to get attention from people talking about the billboard instead of the billboard itself.
Henrique Cruz, who is Rows Head of Growth, shared more about the campaign in a Twitter Thread.
Their advertisement hinged on their positioning as a brand closer to the consumer. They leveraged the Us vs Them narrative and created an irreverent ad. You can check out the designs here. They decided to place the ads in locations close to the headquarters of Microsoft and Google.
They sent a tweet teasing the campaign. This led to 100k impressions and 140 new followers in two days.
They booked people to go and take photos of the billboards. Unfortunately, many of these were low quality.
They edited the best photos and created a press release. After 2 days, they had features in 9+ media outlets, 300+ sign-ups and social media attention.
The whole campaign cost $1.5k. It was inspired by Pieter Levels billboard.
Mind Management, Not Time Management
David Kadavy promoted his latest book on a billboard in Times Square. He used the strategy to create a pseudo-event to get people to talk about his product.
He wrote about the experiment at How I Put My Book on a Times Square Billboard (What Did It Cost, & Did It Work?. The campaign cost $455.58 – which included spending $200 on a photographer to capture the ad. It resulted in:
- a retweet from Tim Ferriss. He had run a similar campaign.
- an opportunity to speak (over Zoom) at New York Public Library. This opportunity also had SEO benefits.
The Kanye Story
In 2018, Harry Dry created a dating website for fans of Kanye West. The idea went viral – but the signups died down just as quickly. Harry realized that he had to get the attention of Kanye himself, so rented billboards in high profile locations.
The stunt ended with him having a phone conversation with the CFO of Yeezy.
He shared more about the experience at The Kanye Story