A photo of a competitor’s billboard along the 101 in San Francisco lands in a startup’s Slack channel before lunch, and by the afternoon, someone is pricing the board across the highway. The company has just raised money and has a conference coming up, so the buy feels overdue. What it commits the brand to is easier to miss, because a board bought to answer a rival puts money into a market on the rival’s timeline, and the company may have no plan for San Francisco once the conference ends.
Erica Kelly, VP of Client Strategy at Evolve OOH, works with fast-growing brands facing that decision, including companies expanding into the US from abroad and US brands entering other markets. Out-of-home usually reaches her as an urgent request, arriving after a raise, ahead of a launch or the morning a rival’s board goes up, and it tends to sound like a shopping list. She answers those requests by working backward from the markets a company intends to win over the next couple of years, then deciding where out-of-home can support that ambition. Kelly believes the decision about where to build a presence comes before the decision about which board to buy.
“There’s this difference between buying attention and building presence,” Kelly says. “A lot of brands I see today are spending a lot of money doing the first thing and then wondering why they never got the second.”
Strong plans start with market choice
Kelly compares the usual buying cycle to a company rebuilding its other departments every few months. “You wouldn’t rebuild your sales team from scratch every quarter, and you wouldn’t rethink your entire product strategy every time you launch a feature, but brands treat out-of-home like that,” she explains. “They buy a billboard for launch, they disappear, they come back six months later for a conference, and they disappear again.”
Before any placement gets priced, she asks clients to settle what the company’s physical presence should look like over the next couple of years. To identify priority markets, her team weighs where the audience lives and works, how earlier campaigns performed and what has worked for competitors. New inventory still comes up partway through a plan, and Kelly weighs each opening against the markets already on the list. A horizon that long also gives a brand time to build visibility in a market before expansion makes that presence urgent.
The choice gets harder when a brand has several plausible places to spend, and the company’s stage of growth shapes which ones make the list. “A brand is going to have a very different play through out-of-home if it’s moving upstream to an enterprise buyer versus trying to get Series B funding,” Kelly notes. She expects whoever plans the buys to be opinionated enough to say “you should spend here, don’t spend here, own this, skip that,” which is the kind of discipline that lets a brand concentrate spend in priority markets.
Location shapes what the copy says
A board in the right market still has to land with the person passing it, often someone who has just looked up from a phone at a crosswalk or on a train platform. Kelly ties out-of-home’s value in that moment to trust. As more of daily life runs through screens and AI-generated feeds, she argues, brands want to feel tangible, and a large physical placement in a buyer’s own city signals a company with enough scale and credibility to take up real space there. “The strongest out-of-home takes into context where it is when someone is interacting with that ad,” she says. Depending on where people are headed, a placement can steer them toward a specific point of interest or a nearby retail location.
Kelly also reviews a brand’s full multichannel strategy before recommending a buy. She uses the existing search and social activity to understand where out-of-home fits and what the creative needs to accomplish in that location. In her experience, a placement’s effect depends on how many times someone has already encountered the brand by the time they pass it, so seeing the whole plan lets her decide what job the board should take on.
Measurement protects next year’s budget
Kelly sees a lot of brands try out-of-home in small doses, one billboard here and some wild postings there, without measuring any of it. By the time next year’s budget gets set, the money has an easy path back to performance or display. She builds a full analysis into every campaign, with deeper studies when the campaign warrants them. Those can include brand-lift research, before-and-after perception studies and changes in people searching the brand name in the markets where the campaign ran. “When brands invest in measurement and effectiveness and they’re getting those results at the end of the campaign, they’re more likely to invest in out-of-home again because they’re informed,” she adds.
Those studies describe what changed around a campaign, and connecting them to business performance is a separate and harder step. Kelly says brand-building effects can take longer to reach dashboards than responses from channels built for immediate action. That leaves marketing leaders justifying current spending before the longer-term results are visible. Measuring brand and performance spending against a single brand-equity metric tied to revenue is one way to put the slower results and the faster ones in the same conversation.
Sales teams supply a third kind of evidence. Kelly’s B2B and AI clients hear prospects mention seeing the brand in the subway or on the way to work. “While that’s more qualitative, it’s still a measuring point,” she explains. A mention like that gives the team evidence that a prospect encountered the campaign. It adds context to the formal research, and the research remains the place to test the campaign’s effect on a sale. Other marketers have described similar feedback when prospects mention billboards on calls.
The board on the 101 can still go up, and this time San Francisco has a place in the company’s growth plan that lasts well past the conference.
