In fall of 2025 for a period of three months, Delve ran one of the largest out-of-home campaigns of all time to make a splash for our brand and make sure everybody in the city of San Francisco, New York City, and Austin knows who we are. We learned a ton throughout the process, and we want to share every mistake, every learning, and every success to demystify the out-of-home channel.
Billboard advertising, or as it's called in the industry, out-of-home advertising, is any advertising that somebody has to go outside of their home to see (in contrast to other formats of paid media like newsletters, ads, TV, or radio). Here is our comprehensive guide on how to plan for an out-of-home campaign, execute on it, and analyze how much of an impact it had.
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Out-of-home is how you make a brand splash. It's a we’ve-arrived statement. The only right time to do that is when you have achieved a moderate degree of PMF, you have steady lead flow, a strong pre-existing pipeline that is heavily driven by word-of-mouth, and stable processes. When you’re ready to punch past a certain number of leads, revenue, or make a massive announcement, that’s the time to go out of home.
Those hallmarks usually are seen after the Series A (or whatever the current fundraising environment is in SF :) or a company-changing product release that you’re ready to bet it all on.
Keep in mind that OOH is an expensive and top-of-funnel strategy, so your average annual contract size should be able to support the cost of putting this on. If we think about attribution purely in the sense of pipeline and closed won:
This is a crude analysis, but you get the idea. Make sure you can sell enough (even on a multi-touch attribution model) to justify the spend.
The cardinal saying is “Go big or don’t go out of home.” Out-of-home is not a channel to try a small spend of $50k and see how it goes. Out-of-home only succeeds when you create a sense of omnipresence, a moment where you take over and everywhere prospects go, all they see is you.
Kasper Koczab, the Head of OOH Media at Brex puts it like this:
I often talk to founders who want to “test” OOH by booking a single billboard and seeing how it performs. That’s not how this medium works.
If you’re confident in your product and you know where your prospects live, work, and play, the most effective strategy is to create a sense of omnipresence. It’s not enough to reach your ICP on their commute — your message should be there when she’s walking her dog or taking her kids to soccer practice, too. Frequency matters.
In a first-time out-of-home campaign, it’s all about frequency. You need to be everywhere, all the time, so they can’t escape you. Managers who want to champion your product will feel more confident when they know their VP has seen your bus ad. Top-tier recruits will feel much more excited knowing that the company offering them has their name plastered all over the city. There’s a part of the human psyche that thinks “if this startup can afford this and pull it off, they must be legit.”
Once you define exactly what your goals are, how big of a reach you want, and who you’re trying to sell to, you’ll be able to compare your goals to the cost of media. Towards the back-end of 2025, media prices are at an all-time high with a frothy AI marketplace and well-funded startups taking over almost every available media. In a congested space, you’ll need even more dollars to stand out.
A good framework is:
Great! Now we know we want to do a 2-3 month campaign in SF. To pull that off, we’d likely need a set of 40-50 panels, an anchor placement on a major highway, and a set of bus wraps. Total spend = $750,000.
Start planning early. Ideally, begin the process a few months in advance of when you want your ads to go live. Popular billboard locations and transit media can book up quickly, so you need lead time to secure the spots you want.
A good rule is to book 3-6 months ahead for high-demand markets or premium locations. For example, Times Square billboards in NYC might even require 6+ months lead time, and Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip or SF’s 101 freeway boards can be reserved several months out (especially around major events). In Austin, if you want coverage during SXSW, you’d better be talking to vendors at least 3+ months before the festival.
Besides reserving the inventory, you also need time for creative production. Designing the ads, iterating on copy, getting approvals, and then printing physical posters or vinyl (if not digital) all add time. If you’re starting from scratch, imagine that before that you’ll also go through brand-building sessions with your team, creatives design, multiple (up to 20!) rounds of feedback, and then finally arrive on something the team is aligned with.
If you’re on a tighter timeline, you may still find last-minute opportunities (sometimes unsold digital billboard slots can be nabbed weeks or even days before, at a discount). But generally, to get the locations and dates you want, earlier is better.
For example, say you’re targeting a product launch in September. You’d want to begin planning by early summer, confirm your media buys by mid-summer, and have creative finalized and in production by August so the ads can be installed on time. Some smaller formats like bus shelters might have shorter lead times than giant billboards, but just play it safe.
We started the process in April for an August 11th deployment, about 4 months out. This still made things incredibly tight.
Back into it like so:
Flight Date (Launch) → When your campaign goes live.
4 weeks before → Final creatives are due.
8 weeks before creatives are due → Creative design and production begin.
8 weeks before creative prep → Media planning and vendor selection start.
That puts you square at 5 months.
We’ve put together some great tracking spreadsheet templates to show you how to Gantt this all out. Download our guidebook at right to get access.
This is highly industry-dependent. If we look at the year:
Teams return from holidays energized, focused on executing annual plans and budgets. It’s prime time for B2B: decision-makers are back, budgets are open, and industry kickoffs like CES drive high audience concentration. Finance and accounting tools benefit from tax season, while consumer brands face the post-holiday “slump” except in fitness and self-improvement. Cold, wet weather means more drive-time and delivery ad exposure, less walking traffic.
Conference season peaks (RSA, SaaStr, Collision), boosting opportunities for geo-targeted OOH near airports and venues. Warmer weather brings foot traffic back and hybrid work stabilizes. As teams race to close H1 targets, quick-win B2B products perform well. College graduations fuel hiring and employer-brand campaigns.
Mid-summer is quiet: decision-makers and investors vacation, buying stalls, and morale-driven campaigns see lower engagement. Exceptions: travel, beverage, and leisure brands. We chose early September through early November as the strongest OOH window of the year where B2B spending restarts, the weather’s ideal, and major conferences (Dreamforce, Inbound, Disrupt, etc.) cluster. It’s the moment to drive pipeline and capture leftover budgets before holiday freezes.
After mid-November, corporate attention shifts to holidays and fiscal wrap-ups; B2B conversions dip. Consumer and retail campaigns thrive between Black Friday and Christmas, while enterprise deals largely pause until January.
Across the United States, there’s about a set of major operators that run all of OOH media. The 3 most important are:
Collectively, these three own about ~250,000 of the estimated 400,000 billboard faces in the US, or about 62%.
Additional notable vendors include:
Capital Outdoors, Reagan Outdoors, Silvercast, and a few others make up the rest of the landscape of out-of-home.
These are the classic large-format displays you see along highways, rooftops, or major city arteries.
(Examples: US-101 and I-280 corridors in SF, the Sunset Strip in LA, Times Square in NYC.)
Crown jewel pieces in a campaign - any major bulletin on the way up or down from SFO will generate the highest quality impressions and capture everyone. Anchor pieces like these really tie campaigns together.
High-impact, high-traffic urban billboards placed at major intersections, bridges, or downtown walls.
(Examples: City-32 premiere panel network,SoMa wall murals, NYC SoHo wallscapes.)
Workhorse units. These target your ICP when they are out for dinner, going to watch a game, picking up their kids from school. Pick them carefully.
Includes transit shelters, bus stops, benches, and public kiosks. Managed by JC Decaux, ClearChannel, others.
(Example: JC Decaux’s Moscone Center package with 10 information kiosks, CCO’s 3rd St Triptychs targeting YC.)
Great for specific targeting of particular accounts or geographies and for creating a consistent sense of your brand on the streets.
Bus wraps, train station takeovers, subway car interiors, and airport displays.
(Examples: Station dominations via Outfront; full-bus wraps via Intersection, bus shelters via CCO.)
This make sense when some set of your ICP commutes in from suburbs or uses the subway regularly - like enterprise middle management. If you’ve coordinated during conferences, you’ll get some additional exposure from public transit enthusiasts.
LED or LCD billboards that can rotate creatives dynamically or be updated programmatically.
(Examples: Subway station liveboards via CCO/Outfront that play your ad in a fixed set )
Digital boards are usually cherry-on-top for a larger static campaign and then used in subsequent campaigns when people are mildly aware of your brand and you’re looking for consistent performance. Since your Share of Voice is already >10% in this media, you’re not yielding as much value.
Your ideal campaign should bring all these media types together under one package to create the sense of omnipresence in the city.
When thinking about putting a campaign together, you first want to nail down your goals. Ask yourself these questions in an exercise:
Once you’ve asked yourself these hard questions - and they can change - you’re ready to go to the whiteboard and start figuring out what you want. Research your audience’s physical world habits. Unlike online ads, OOH success depends on placing messages in the real locations your targets frequent. Map out where they live, work, commute, and congregate. If you’re aiming at, say, startup founders in the Bay Area, concentrate on high-density tech corridors (e.g. SOMA, Market Street, Caltrain routes) and highways like the 101 that they drive on. Stych famously did exactly this, plotting out commuting routes and conference venues in SF, then selecting billboard and transit ad locations near those hotspots to maximize impressions among their audience
Delve did something very similar when starting our campaign. We pulled all of our customer addresses from Docusign contracts and plotted them into a map. We also aggregated in data from larger partners to figure out where prospective customers from our Dream 100 (top 100 clients we’d like to sign) are as well. We’d recently run a massive physical marketing campaign, so we had some other address data on hand. We plugged all that into kepler.gl to figure out exactly where we wanted to focus our efforts:
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Running an OOH campaign is a team effort that involves both external partners and your internal team. Key players include:
All of marketing is about standing out. How can you be really different? Billboards offer you the opportunity to be among the top 1% of companies that make it off the incessantly bombarded screen and get into the real world. Don’t think that gives you the freedom to finally spew product and feature copy all over. Your campaign is won or lost by the words you put on the billboard. Here’s how to approach it:
Be someone. Thousands of companies come out with stock, harmless, slogans cooked up in a boardroom that won’t elicit any response. Larger enterprises care too much about brand integrity to try anything out-of-the-box and already have enough recall. How can you be truly different?
You need out-of-the-box, contextualized ideas that tap into societal and cultural cues. Think about how you can use your brand, your industry keywords to devise copy that makes someone think “Ha! That’s clever.” That’s how you’ll win. It will take time, revision, and work - but it’s the only way to really win.
If your leadership is willing, make your copy or graphics a little controversial. Bland’s “Still hiring humans?” campaign famously generated incredible engagement. Recently, Friend.com took over social media with ads being defaced all over the subway. It’s your prerogative on how far you want to go, but creating an identity is much better than being invisible.
Simplicity is king. The best billboard messages are extremely short, clear, and instantly graspable – think 7 words or fewer as a rule of thumb. Drivers or pedestrians only glance for a few seconds, so you have to communicate one idea fast. This means one simple message or tagline, with text in a huge, high-contrast font so it’s legible from a distance. An industry saying goes “short copy sticks”– and it’s especially true for billboards.
Beyond brevity, out-of-home is all about sparking emotion. If you can elicit a chuckle, an intrigued eyebrow raise, or an “aha” recognition, your ad will be memorable. No one looks at billboards in pursuit of a mathematical challenge. Frankly, they’re pretty annoyed that they're being marketed to all the time. It's your job to make it as funny, as evocative, and as emotion-inducing as possible.
Now, few practical tips and hygiene for copy/design:
In summary: short, bold, and resonant. Your copy should be punchy and easy-to-digest, with a design that grabs attention at a glance. Marry that clarity with a spark, whether humor, emotion, or intrigue that makes people remember it.
Great creative connects on an emotional level, not a rational one. You’re talking to humans — make them laugh, make them excited, make them curious.
Kasper Koczab - Head of OOH Media, Brex
Attribution in OOH is famously fuzzy. Unlike digital ads, you won’t get a precise click-through or conversion rate tied to each billboard, and that’s okay. Physical ads don’t have pixels or UTM tags, so you need to embrace indirect and longer-term metrics. Successful startups view OOH as a brand awareness play that lifts many metrics collectively, rather than a direct response channel.
So how do you gauge if it’s working? There’s 3 main methods we used:
Some brands leverage QR codes or short URL’s on transit ads or billboards; just be realistic that not everyone will stop to scan a specific code or URL. It’s much more effective to use that real estate in better ways, when prospects will just type in “[company name]” into Google.
Overall, you’ll have to accept that OOH’s value is largely multi-touch and long-term. It plants seeds in your audience’s mind that may pay off weeks or months later. As one marketing leader said, don’t expect a single “ROAS” number – instead, look for a mix of leading indicators (like branded search uptick, social media buzz, word-of-mouth) and anecdotal evidence that your message is sinking in. If you see those, your OOH is doing its job even if you can’t attribute every dollar of revenue to a specific billboard.
It’s rather important however to look at it from more angles than just pipeline. You’re building brand - and that has value everywhere. You should evaluate:
Attribution will always be fuzzy in OOH, but if your brand is optimized for this channel, you’ll do well. Don’t sweat it.
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.
- Brandom Camhi, Head of Marketing at Rippling
Huge thanks to Reid from Stych for his work on this article that helped us a ton and provided a lot of useful data repurposed in this article. In addition, here were some other helpful articles that we referenced as we put together our billboards campaign and this article:
