COO @ Blip | Amazon Alum | Business Ops architect for Series A startups

Blip is the first marketplace for digital billboards on-demand. Connecting advertisers with billboard owners has turned a rigid industry into something flexible and accessible. We replaced year-long contracts and minimums with on-demand access.

Through thousands of campaigns, we kept seeing the same pattern: traditional and digital channels don't compete. When you use them together properly, they multiply one other. Most marketing conversations still treat channels separately, missing how they are supposed to work as a system.

The data is clear: when properly integrated into a full-funnel approach, out-of-home advertising doesn't just add to digital performance—it multiplies it.

Our focus is helping growth-stage companies build full-funnel strategy and understand how awareness channels interact with conversion tactics. We work with the psychological principles behind it all. When you get the approach right, the results follow.

Happy to talk if you're working through channel strategy, attribution, or how out-of-home fits into modern marketing.

RJ Schultz

Listen Labs had a $25,000 marketing budget. They spent a fifth of it on one billboard with no branding, just five clusters of numbers. 

It generated 5 million social impressions, a Sam Altman reply, and coverage in VentureBeat, Forbes, and CBS News.

CEO Alfred Wahlforss had $5,000 for one billboard. He called it "a moment of desperation." Most founders in that position try to maximize reach. Wahlforss went the other direction - he narrowed the audience to almost no one.

Plain white board. Black text: {64659, 123310, 75584, 8138, 38271}. No logo, no company name. The numbers were AI tokens. Run them through a tokenizer and they decoded into a URL leading to a coding challenge.

The challenge mirrored Listen Labs' actual production problem. Their product selects which customers from a 30-million-person panel to interview. The coding puzzle was that algorithm in miniature. Candidates were auditioning by solving the real thing.

10,000 decoded the tokens. 1,000 attempted the challenge. 430 cracked it. 60 solved it fully and got interviews.

Gabriel Petersson, an OpenAI research scientist, posted a photo on X and triggered the cascade. Sam Altman replied. A Menlo Ventures partner hit the leaderboard. The billboard was designed so that the first person to crack it would have exactly the right audience to make it spread.

Everything after the billboard - press, social impressions, recruiting pipeline - came from the design, not the placement.

Four months later, Listen Labs closed a $69 million Series B at a $500 million valuation.

Coinbase spent $14 million on a Super Bowl QR code for a similar approach. Listen Labs spent $5,000.

COO @ Blip | Adkom: recognition & recall with smart OOH

A startup with under $1M in revenue and a product its own CEO called "complete trash" plastered 50 bus shelters across San Francisco with three words: Stop Hiring Humans.

The CEO received thousands of death threats. He also had his two biggest revenue months ever.

Most people fixate on the messaging. But Artisan ran the same messaging at a TechCrunch booth and it flopped. Fifty bus shelters simultaneously tipped people from "I saw an ad" to "something is happening around me."

Artisan's team seeded Reddit with photos of their own ads before the shelters even went up. Smart amplification, but the underlying mechanic was still saturation: the same message in enough contexts that it became unavoidable.

There's a concept called a Qualified Impression: the 7th impression to the same person within 90 days. That's when someone stops seeing your ad and starts recalling who you are. 

When 85% of your target is at that threshold, you're spending on people ready to buy.

Most businesses running OOH - home services, personal injury, franchise owners - don't need death threats to hit that threshold. They need frequency and creative worth sending to a friend.

When Brex ran outbound sales after launching their billboard campaign, prospects kept saying the same thing: "I already saw your billboard."

The email got the attribution credit.
The SDR got the attribution credit.

The billboard is the reason the email got opened.

At a fireside chat a while back, Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras asked the audience to guess what the campaign cost. Someone said $2-3 million. Actual number: $300k. The audience gasped.

Jet-black backgrounds, white text: "The First Corporate Card for Startups." No QR code. No phone number.

Former CRO Sam Blond's rule: your first campaign should be under eight words and explain what your product does. Don't get creative until your audience knows who you are.

The strategy was frequency over reach. Dubugras estimated 40% of potential customers were concentrated in San Francisco. So a prospect sees your billboard on their commute, another outside their lunch spot, a bus shelter walking to their car. To them, that company is everywhere.

That frequency made every other channel work harder. Blond described the effect: "Every time I told someone where I worked - potential customers, investors, candidates - they all would say 'I see your billboards EVERYWHERE.'" …but the attribution dashboard never showed it.

Billboards are not magic. We run the largest (only) digital billboard marketplace in America and I'll tell you that directly. What Brex got right was the match between channel and audience.

That match doesn't require a Bay Area zip code. Medical device companies cluster in Minneapolis. Oil and gas firms cluster in Houston. Insurance carriers cluster in Hartford. Franchises with 40 locations in a metro have customers driving the same roads every day. Wherever your audience is geographically dense, frequency gets dramatically cheaper.

Brex spent $300K and made a city think they were a billion-dollar company. Four months later, they were. In January 2026, Capital One acquired them for $5.15 billion.

Your SDR is closing deals right now that started at a bus shelter. The only question is whether it was yours or your competitor's.

Liquid Death tested demand before building inventory. They ran social ads for "tallboy cans of mountain water that murder your thirst" to see if people would try to buy. When they did, Liquid Death spun up an Amazon listing and the rest is history.

Here's the system behind their success story:

1. They picked a sharp contrast in a boring category.

Bottled water meant mountain yoga retreats or minimalist wellness. Blue gradients, snowcaps, condensation.

Liquid Death did the opposite. Tall aluminum cans that look like beer. Gothic typography. A skull logo. "Murder Your Thirst" and "Death to Plastic."

You don't read a Liquid Death can from 20 feet away. You recognize it.

2. They designed OOH knowing your phone is the real audience.

People in skeleton costumes spinning fire at traffic lights. Murals painted on alley walls. A pop-up spa installation.

One Texas activation: 320,000 impressions because people filmed it.

The stunt creates videos people want to share, not just impressions on a spreadsheet. When you run OOH in the same markets as your digital ads, people move from "I've seen this" to "I know this brand" way faster.

3. They stacked impressions toward recognition, not just reach.

At Blip, we define a qualified impression as roughly the seventh time someone sees your brand in 90 days. That's when you're in their head at purchase.

The viral videos get you the first few impressions. The OOH reinforces it. By the time you're at Whole Foods, you grab the skull can without thinking.

4. They committed to entertainment over targeting.

They're not slicing audiences into 84 micro-segments. They're asking: "Will this make people laugh enough to share it?"

Most brands would never greenlight a "Greatest Hates" album of angry customer comments or a Tony Hawk skateboard painted with his actual blood. Liquid Death did both.

5. They stayed radically consistent for years.

Most teams try edgy creative once, then go back to normal. Or they buy one wild billboard as a stunt, then never mention it again.

The skull, the can, the name - those assets register in peripheral vision when you're half-distracted because they've been relentlessly repeated.

6. They measured the invisible things anyway.

Brands that play this game well track what moves beneath the surface: branded search lift in campaign cities, store traffic during campaign windows, social sharing of creative, and how much more efficient downstream media becomes in markets where the brand is already in people's heads.

Messier than last-click attribution. Closer to how humans actually decide.

Most brands can't hire fire spinners. But they can pick one sharp visual contrast and repeat it everywhere. Design their trucks or booths knowing phones are watching. Stack local presence until recognition becomes a reflex.

You don't have to "murder" anything in your slogan. But you do have to stop treating every impression like it matters equally.

Sports fans can smell generic national creative from the parking lot. PrizePicks built localized, game-timed OOH that used hometown pride as a credibility test.

The result: 103% lift in brand favorability in a category drowning in sameness.

The default playbook in betting is one national creative file, inventory near stadiums, and proximity as strategy. It works well enough to justify the spend and poorly enough that nobody remembers which brand they saw.

PrizePicks mapped the fan's game-day ritual instead. Fans travel, pregame, check lineups and argue about picks. They walk through arena districts, duck into bars, open their phones in the same ten-minute windows - every single time.

That whole arc is predictable and full of moments where someone is about to make a decision. So PrizePicks built the media plan around it.

Direct placements owned the venue surroundings, including a first-to-market activation at LA's Intuit Dome - a permanent, can't-miss presence that anchors the brand in the physical landscape of game day.

Programmatic DOOH added flexible reach within a five-mile radius of NFL and NBA stadiums, timed to pregame windows when urgency peaks and fans are actively making decisions. Which means the same fan gets hit multiple times across their physical journey to the game.

They built hometown call-outs and game-time offers tailored by market so the creative felt native to each city rather than dropped in from a national desk. Then they embedded recognizable influencer faces into the OOH to build authenticity and spark conversation, and positioned those same faces across social, TV, and OOH so the identity compounded across channels.

You see the same face on a pregame Instagram story, then a TV spot, then the billboard you pass walking into the arena. 

That kind of layered, repeated recognition is the principle we build everything around at Blip - because impressions alone don't tell you anything.

What matters is whether the same person saw you enough times, in the right sequence, to actually remember you when the moment to act arrived. PrizePicks executed that across an entire game-day ritual.

The metrics back it up. The combined approach drove +121% lift in message association, meaning fans didn't just see PrizePicks; they connected specific creative to the brand. Plus 3X lift in awareness, 2X lift in consideration, and 1.4X lift in sign-up intent.

Same stadiums. Same category. The difference was mapping the fans' ritual and building creative that earned its place inside it.

Spotify didn't just stream music better than everyone else. They turned your listening data into an identity, your playlists into social objects, and Wrapped into a cultural ritual that drives download spikes up to 90% every December.

Most streaming services competed on features. Better catalogues. Faster load times. Cleaner interfaces.

Spotify built a movement.

Belonging beats features. Features get you trial. Belonging gets you advocacy.

The features-obsessed narrative tells us success comes from adding more capabilities. Polishing harder. Shipping faster. 

In reality, movements give people an identity and/or a ritual.

Spotify offered both.

Here's how they did it:

Discover Weekly felt like a mixtape from a friend who knew your taste too well. That wasn't luck. They built a taste profile for each listener and refreshed it every week. When software behaves like a friend, people treat it like a friend and talk about it like one.

Then they made belonging explicit. Blend let you merge your listening with a friend's into a shared playlist, complete with a taste match score you could brag about. A product primitive became a social object.

Even the billboards recruited you. The 2016 campaign - "Thanks, 2016. It's been weird" - turned anonymized listening quirks into public jokes you were in on. It ran across 14 markets.

The message wasn't "use Spotify." It was "you're part of this big, odd, delightful culture of listening."

Because Spotify's advantage isn't technical brilliance.

It’s consistency. When product, marketing, and brand tell the same story, customers repeat it.

The story: You're part of how music moves now.

Your identity was your taste profile. Your ritual was Wrapped. And when identity and ritual are easy to share, distribution becomes community-powered.

That consistency created a flywheel. Product generates data. Data becomes a shareable ritual. Sharing dominates feeds, turning taste into identity, identity into distribution. Distribution drives acquisition.

The numbers prove it worked. Over 156 million users engaged with Wrapped in 2022. App downloads have spiked as much as 90% day-over-day when it drops. By Q3 2025, Spotify reported 713 million monthly active users and 281 million subscribers.

Today, every playlist debate, every "this is so me" Wrapped story, every friend comparing taste match scores runs through the platform Spotify built by selling belonging instead of features.

Takeaway: Turn your customer data into something they want to screenshot. Usage stats, milestones hit, money saved, time recovered, results achieved. Make it visual. Make it about them. They'll share it.

What movement could you build with what you already know about your users?

How Spotify Launched a Movement

In 2022, Notion had 20 million users, almost entirely from organic growth.

Their first brand campaign could have been a safe digital play. Instead: billboards, wild postings, hand-painted murals, and transit takeovers.

This wasn't a blind leap. They'd tested OOH with a smaller campaign in 2021. When it worked, they nearly doubled marketing spend to over $7 million and deliberately dialed down display and discovery ads. The thesis: reach people as individuals, and let those individuals pull Notion into their workplaces.

The campaign was built around real lives. A startup founder closing a key hire. A laid-off dad entering a bootcamp while raising a toddler. A college student helping his grandparents run their bakery. No feature demos. No enterprise pitch.

Camille Ricketts, Notion's first marketing hire: "During these weird few years folks were seeing life and work more blended, and we had a tool that could make them feel better about that or more in control of that experience."

Those stories needed room to breathe. Display ads couldn't hold a narrative about a dad juggling a bootcamp and a toddler, but OOH could.

And it reached people where the B2C2B motion actually works: on their commute, in their neighborhood, in their personal life.

Win the individual walking to lunch, and let them carry Notion into their company organically.

Results: 1.5 billion impressions across all channels. 345 million from OOH specifically. A Drum Award for International OOH Campaign.

OOH caught people as individuals living their lives. Those individuals brought Notion to work. The billboard didn't close the deal, but the person who saw the billboard did.

Stytch attributed over 10% of new sales opportunities directly to billboards and bus ads. One prospect told the team their CEO saw a billboard in SF and knew they were done with Auth0.

Most people who saw those ads had no idea what they meant.

That was by design.

Stytch's first OOH campaign in 2022 took the opposite approach. It was built on something universal: everyone hates passwords.

They turned five transit shelters into 3D art installations, with 25 people hand-writing 5,000 sticky notes with bad passwords across four marathon sessions. 

Week one: 83% web traffic increase, 257% jump in clicks. Shortlisted for an OBIE Award alongside Nike and Disney+.

It worked. Then in 2024, Stytch deliberately stopped trying to be understood by everyone.

221 ad units timed to peak developer conference season. Placements mapped to target sales accounts and commuting routes. Creative featured GitHub-style code diffs, CAPTCHA themes, and lines like git commit -m "auth, simplified".

If you weren't an authentication developer, you'd walk right past.

As Division of Labor put it: "Yes, it is good that the majority of people don't understand your advertising. As long as the people you want to talk to understand."

The 2024 results: 25%+ uplift in branded search. 70%+ increase in search clicks globally. A 10-15% uplift that persisted even after the billboards came down.

Twilio acquired Stytch in October 2025. The campaigns that built that brand didn't try to speak to everyone.

They made the right people feel like insiders.

Most people remember Rippling's 2020 billboard as an attention play. Clever startup, funny poem, big company overreacts.

Attention spikes and fades. What Rippling built was recognition - a specific message that lodged in memory and compounded for six years.

Rippling had raised $50 million. Gusto had raised $516 million.

Rippling rented one billboard on Highway 101. Seven words: "Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o. Work Magic." Plus a handful of bus ads.

Gusto sent a cease-and-desist. The billboard came down.

Rippling's General Counsel responded with a legal letter in rhyming couplets. It went viral. But the reason it built recognition and not just buzz is what the poem contained: one verifiable fact. Gusto's own 1,000-person workforce had migrated off Gusto's platform to Workday. Confirmed on the record.

The billboard was exposure one. TechCrunch was two. Business Insider three. LinkedIn shares four. A friend texting you the poem, five.

Within days, their exact target audience had encountered the same message repeatedly from trusted sources - none of it paid. Every exposure carried the same fact.

Rippling's CMO Matt Epstein confirmed on a podcast that people reached out saying "we are outgrowing Gusto." That's recognition converting to pipeline.

When that billboard went up, Rippling was valued at $270 million. They jumped to $1.35 billion shortly after the campaign. Today, $16.8 billion.

The billboard didn't cause all of that. But it established a brand identity - combative, playful, willing to pick fights with companies ten times their size - that has compounded for six years.

The question isn't how many people drove by. It's how many people can still tell you, six years later, that even Gusto outgrew Gusto.

Vanta was approaching $10M ARR when they put their first billboard on Highway 101, timed to hit right before SaaStr Annual 2021. Today they're valued at $4.15 billion. That billboard is still there. They leased it for a decade.

Six words: "Compliance that doesn't SOC 2 much."

SaaStr 2021 was the first major in-person B2B conference since COVID. Five thousand SaaS founders, executives, and 750+ VCs driving the same highway for the first time in over a year, primed for something that felt like the industry was back and having fun again.

And there it was: A pun on a compliance standard only the right people would get. It hit Reddit's r/Accounting with thousands of organic upvotes. VP of Marketing Sarah Scharf said it helped Vanta land their biggest enterprise customer.

As Outfront Media's SF GM put it: "For a lot of the tech firms, they have made it when they have a billboard on the 101." There's a reason. Billboards carry implicit credibility digital can't replicate. People see your brand on one and think, "they must be legit." Brex spent $300K on billboards before even launching and reported 10x performance vs. digital.

At Blip, companies come to us expecting “awareness.” What they find is a force multiplier for every other channel they're running. They don't stay first-timers for long.

Four years later, Vanta came back with "Don't SOC-block Your Best Engineer."

Thomas Cross

Contact cross@gocross.com 303-594-1694 

- Program Advisor to the University of Colorado Executive Education - Strategic Artificial Intelligence Program  
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