I help founders get ready and connect with investors • Seasoned entrepreneur • Building tech startups for 25yrs (zero→£mil ARR, twice)

With 30 years in startups, I now run the Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days. www.gipity.com

𝐌𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲... 👇

1968 BC (Before Computers): Born into analogue world

1982-86: Discovered computers! Vic 20, BBC micro, ICL 2900 mainframe & more

1986-89: Computation degree, UMIST (University of Manchester, Institute of Science & Technology)

1989-99: IT consultant/project manager: Logica, IBM, Reuters, Bankers Trust & Deutsche Bank

1994-97: first side hustle: scuba diving instructor & own London dive school

1996: published first website & first ever disk-mounted website on a UK magazine cover

1999: developer/project manager at 2 early London digital agencies

1999: vision/architect/investor. created first UK under-a-tenner domain name business, Easily

1999: built+launched early/successful dot-com: domain/email/web hosting ISP

1999-2001: ceo. managed growth from 0 to 2,000 daily domain sales & 30+ staff in under 2yrs

2000: invented the web-based DNS dashboard for domains

2000: created early no-code solution for one-page websites: £100k ARR

2000: highly commended "Entrepreneur of the Year": European E-commerce Association E-business 2000 awards

2001: 64th in Sunday Times "Top 100 pre-IPO e-businesses in Europe" E-League

2001: ran one of the first successful web affiliate schemes, generating 40% of rev

2004: hit 400,000+ domain registrations, 30,000+ websites & 40,000+ email accounts

2004: 3,500 commission earning affiliates & word of mouth to 100,000+ customers

2004: negotiated successful multi-million pound dot-com exit/sale of Easily

2002: vision/investor. launched one of the first ever B2B mobile text marketing services: SMS Expert

2007-11: early digital nomad: B2B Saas startup from beach/desert

2007-19: ceo. ran leading text marketing B2B Saas: zero to multi-million turnover

2007-19: cto/architect. developed 850k lines of code & supported 1mil daily transactions/API calls

2020... consultancy/advice/support for early-stage tech startup founders

2022... helping hand-picked founders find the right investors

• 2018: vision/architect/investor/cto...
Clickacall: instant video calls from anywhere with single click
Nearevo: proximity discovery for internet of things
Scan+Click: contactless business cards
Secly: personal online security

• 2021 l2o: supporting next generation of startups
• 2022 Venture Cards: all startups, in one place • connecting the right founders and investors

• 2024 The Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days

Steve Procter

Can someone tell me why so many founders still think investment is for building version one of their idea?

Fundraising is for scaling your idea after proving you can convince customers and the market.

Luckily with AI you no longer need to raise to launch a startup. So all that energy-zapping, pitch-decking nonsense can wait until much later.

Just build and get selling. That's all that matters.

How do we get this across to founders who still think angel investors hang out on street corners throwing money at passers-by?

Launch your MVP in 30 days | 30yrs in startups (exited. 0→£mil * 2) | Replit ambassador + expert AI builder

Why is the startup circus still spouting this sort of guff? "As a founder, chase velocity and go crazy for the scale fast mentality. Chase down investors like your life depends on it. If you see one in the street, rugby tackle them."

Founders need to feel free to ignore it, and realise they can be a very profitable and successful business without jumping on the investment treadmill and pretending they're the next Lovable.

Let's support them with more realism. Not ridiculous scare mongering that puts off a lot of people from ever starting a business, because they think anything less than £100m ARR is failure, or hear that not raising is wrong.

Let's encourage founders to build MVPs fast, get out there and start talking to customers and selling.

And then cheer them when they reach revenues that a VC may turn their nose up at, but are life altering for many people.

I'm re-watching Billions, and a line hit me like a thunderbolt yesterday:

"Audience is moat". That's it. Let it sink in. Nothing else matters.

If you want to spend 12 months building what you think is the best app ever, but never show it to anyone, then you are wasting your time.

Put together v1 of your MVP - fast! Then get out there and show people.

Spend 100% of your time growing and talking to your audience.

Stop worrying your idea isn't completely new. Let's be honest, very little is truly new any more. The whole world is a wrapper. You can sit and listen to armchair advisors who blindly preach "wrappers bad". Or you can JFDI.

If your offering has the potential to improve people's experiences, make processes and operations more efficient, create access to new audiences, lower prices, or bring other benefits, then you've got a thing people will buy.

Or you may have just figured a way to reach a particular market that others haven't spotted, or can't be bothered with because it is too niche for them.

Get started ASAP, build v1 fast, and spend all your time demonstrating it and talking to potential customers. This is the only way you will learn if you're onto something with potential.

As a potential founder, if you spend all your time looking for an elusive magic startup idea that is 100% unique, you will still be waiting for the right opportunity 100 years from now.

The only moat left is speed. So just get on with it already!

The UK has some incredible tech entrepreneurs and visionaries, and we seem to have no problem starting things. But something is off when it comes to turning our ideas into businesses that dominate globally. Matthew Syed in The Times recently outlined a bigger theory which, in my mind at least, sums up much of what is wrong with tech and innovation in the UK:

"Sir Alex Ferguson, the Man U manager said that the secret of his success was instructing his players not to go all defensive after scoring.

The psychology is significant: teams are bold, risk-taking and creative when seeking to win a match, but they sit back and worry about mistakes when trying to protect a lead. This creates the right conditions for the thing they most fear.

Ferguson told his players the best way to gain three points from a position of 1-0 up is to go out and score again.

This is doubly true in the ferociously competitive world of geopolitics. I look at Vietnam, America and Poland and see bold nations seeking to win, to drive forward, to try new things and fail, and to learn along the way.

Then I look at the UK (and, for that matter, much of the EU) and perceive an old nation that was once the envy of the world but is no longer striving to win but desperately trying not to lose, a very different thing.

Process has replaced progress, the classic symptom of what Weber called the bureaucratisation of a polity. This is action designed not to maximise innovation but to minimise mistakes."

Launch your MVP in 30 days | 30yrs in startups (exited. 0→£mil * 2)

Come on founders! Stop thinking about growth as a bolt-on for your startup's shiny new app, with its "perfect" lines of code hand-polished by unicorns. Distribution isn't a later problem, it's the whole flippin' game.

The best product is the one your audience can't stop talking about, and will help you shape if you get it in front of them early.

As an example, look at the new Clawdbot AI platform. The founder pushed it hard inside X, and then watched the world ignite. People are going nuts for it, and you can't open social media without being bombarded by "how I use ClawdBot" posts with thousands of comments.

But here's the thing - ClawdBot is far from finished. It's really only a proof of concept and a big set of tools for techies to try things out.

But the guy who created it is now getting feedback from tens of thousands of real users about what works and what doesn't.

Many of them are huge fans and ambassadors for life. You simply can't buy that kind of audience and following early on.

If you have an idea, build version one of the MVP - fast! Then spend 100% of your time out there, telling the world, and getting feedback.

Tech is easy to replicate these days. So maybe the new startup play is...

Build audience → sell your service → grow clientbase → sell your business FAST

If you're planning a new startup in 2026, don't try to guess the next trend. Everything is now happening, all the time, to everyone, everywhere. The signal hasn't disappear, it's drowned. So as a founder, just go with the vibes.

Do what you know, in a space you understand and are known.

It has as much chance of being the next trend as anything.

What matters is speed and having an audience.

Vibe coding for serious business ideas is over. A 2025 phenomenon. Sure, continue to have fun creating hobby apps - everyone should try this. But for real startups, this is the year AI-assisted dev tools move back into the hands of experienced builders, and without the silly price tags of traditional development agencies. As a founder, this will let you put your focus back where it should be - on sales and growth. Welcome to 2026.

In 2026 there will be two types of people using AI to help build your app:

1. smoke & mirror snake-oil developers who still charge 5 and 6 figure sums, convincing you they are doing traditional development. They don't realise you saw behind the curtain in 2025 and know the truth

2. amazing experienced developers, who bring their expertise in the whole software lifecycle (architecting, planning, design,...). They will show you a new world where solid MVPs and other apps are affordable for everyone

Make sure you choose wisely, my founder friends. And welcome to 2026.

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

Ramp showed how digital OOH works.

Their co-founder, Eric Glyman, posted a screenshot of a billboard someone had mocked up in Slack. Someone else replied "Let's do this for real?"

8 hours later, it was live on Sunset Boulevard.

"Slack to skyline in 8 hours."

Traditional OOH is powerful for saturation and memory. But it wasn't built for this kind of speed. Digital OOH is.

A $32B company moved like a $32M one.

A company of that size executing with that speed is rare.

And this speed feeds the flywheel: OOH becomes content. Content becomes social proof. Social proof amplifies the original announcement.

Before social, billboards were confined to geography. Now a single placement can reach millions through screenshots. But only if the creative is sharp and deployment is fast enough to ride the wave.

Ramp turned a Slack line into a skyline asset in one workday.

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Open Water Scuba Diver

Private Aircraft Pilot

Concentrations in Market Analysis and Strategy

COO @ Blip: to thousands of digital billboards straight from your computer

At Blip, we transformed the billboard industry by creating the first true marketplace connecting advertisers with billboard owners.

We eliminated year-long contracts, minimum spends, and complex negotiations—making out-of-home advertising as straightforward as digital marketing.

But opening up billboards was just the beginning.

Through thousands of campaigns, we discovered something even more valuable: traditional marketing channels don't compete with digital—they amplify it.

What most marketers miss is this: the struggle isn't with awareness or conversion individually, but with creating an integrated strategy that amplifies both. The companies seeing exceptional growth understand that channels don't operate in isolation.

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.

In one controlled study, combining billboard exposure with Facebook campaigns increased conversion effectiveness by 729% versus Facebook alone.

My mission is helping growth-stage businesses move beyond the diminishing returns of digital-only marketing through understanding the psychological principles behind effective awareness campaigns.

I focus on:

→ Developing full-funnel marketing frameworks to drive measurable growth
→ Producing qualified impression metrics that trump traditional reach & frequency numbers
→ Leveraging psychological principles to create integrated channel strategies
→ Optimizing marketing investments based on attribution insights

Open to conversations with marketers, growth leaders, and anyone interested in understanding how out-of-home can transform your current marketing ROI.

Billboards, Reinvented

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

Manish Pandya

A startup spent $1 million blanketing subway cars with ads for an AI companion you wear around your neck. Within days, riders were defacing them with markers and spray paint.

Then Heineken showed up with one billboard.

The company was Friend, an AI pendant that listens to your day and texts you back. Riders responded with graffiti: "AI is not your friend," "surveillance tool," "stop profiting off loneliness."

Heineken's response: a bottle opener shaped like the pendant. Seven words: "The best way to make a friend is over a beer."

Most brand "takes" fail because they're just cosplaying as commentators. Heineken didn't announce a viewpoint about AI ethics. They defended real-world socializing using the simplest possible proof.

But the real reason it worked: they punched the idea, not a person.

"AI friends are pathetic." "Tech bros are lonely." If Heineken had gone there, they'd be punching down. Instead, they aimed at a cultural misfire while defending a truth already theirs to claim.

The line did all the work. One object. One sentence. One brand truth. OOH rewards recall.

"AI friend" is abstract.

"Beer with someone" is concrete.

Heineken planted one thought at the exact moment people were ready to receive it.

You pass a billboard showing a darkened building with a single lit window glowing yellow in the shape of an arch.

Just two words below it: "We Deliver."

That billboard is everything most brands get wrong about this medium.

Large format OOH has no sound, geographic targeting only, 8 seconds at 65 mph, and weird angles; but the real constraint is cognitive bandwidth. If your brand can't compress itself into something people recognize quickly, you're paying for impressions that don't exist in human memory.

McDonald's solved this decades ago.

They turned the arches into a modular visual system where every execution is just a different way of drawing the same shape.

In 2018, Cossette's Toronto team cropped the golden arches into directional arrows with "On your right" and "Next exit" for McDonald's Canada. The Follow the Arches series won the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes.

To your brain, these aren't new ads. They repeat a pattern already burned in.

Most brands write visual systems that only work at one resolution, and they rebuild from scratch for each environment.

McDonald's arches work at any size: 40 feet on highways, reflections on shelters, implied fries on retail screens. The shapes repeat everywhere until recognition becomes automatic.

That's why they can delete the logo, remove the name, and still pull people off exits. They've already done the hard work upstream. 

Consistent packaging, architecture, advertising teaching the world a tiny visual language. And by the time they crop the logo or turn windows into arches, the pattern is already there.

A plumbing company in Georgia ran billboards alongside Google Ads. Branded search spiked. CPC fell. Conversions improved.

Then they paused the billboards.

Within weeks, every metric declined.

Most dashboards are built around the click. But the click isn't the beginning of the customer's thought process - it's the LAST step.

Aaron Services discovered what made their clicks cheap: People already knew who they were.

That's preloaded recognition: when users have already encountered your brand before they search.

So when they see your Google Search ad later, they recognize you, and this changes user behavior in predictable ways.

If Google believes users are more likely to click and convert on your ad, it charges you less per click.

Here's how they did it:

1. They reduced the tax for being unknown

Aaron Services built recognition that made people more likely to choose them before the search ever happened. That recognition rewrote the economics of EVERY auction they entered.

2. They turned generic searches into branded ones

The cheapest click in any category is often branded search - higher CTR, higher intent, less competition.

While billboards ran, Aaron Services watched branded searches climb. "Plumber near me" became "Aaron Services plumber."

When boards paused, branded volume dropped with it.

3. They measured billboards as a catalyst, not a closer

The team wasn't expecting immediate phone calls - they were aiming for name recall (funny enough, they got more of both).

The question becomes not "Did this board drive sales?" but "Did this board reduce what we pay to get conversions elsewhere?"

That's a *very* CFO-friendly question.

Billboards existed to make the closer work better.

The click gets credit, but preloaded recognition is what made the click cheap, and more likely to convert.

Anthropic put a bright orange billboard directly across the street from Meta's Seattle office. Simple copy. No gimmicks. Just a giant rectangle every Meta engineer sees on their commute. That's surgical.

Picture it.

You're an ML engineer at Meta. You drive in every morning, thinking about the models you're shipping.

Then you see it.

Bright orange. Impossible to miss. Claude. Right there, across from your office.

Just: here's our product, here's what it does, we're hiring people like you.

The digital-obsessed startup playbook says reach developers with thought-leadership blogs, Discord communities, promoted tweets.

Anthropic just bought a giant rectangle on your commute.

Why does this work when "developers hate advertising"?

Developers don't hate ads. They hate being sold to in the wrong place with language that wasn't written for them.

The Claude board passes both tests:

- Right place: outside the building where you ship ML models all day
- Right language: simple, product-oriented, engineer-first

The data backs it up. OOH produces the highest ad recall of all major channels. People need roughly 7 exposures before they act. You can't install an ad blocker on your drive to work.

That board is doing the two jobs that matter: product credibility and hiring visibility. Anthropic opened a Seattle office and is hiring aggressively from that exact talent pool. The billboard touches them twice a day.

The oldest playbook still works.

McDonald's doesn't put paragraphs on billboards. They show you the fries. That's it. There's a reason McDonald's is McDonald's. Billboards aren't mini-websites. They're memory machines.

You know the franchise ads I mean.

A billboard trying to squeeze in the brand story, the offer, the app, the QR code, the phone number, and a paragraph the lawyer insisted on.

The designer fought hard for the gradient. 
The CMO fought hard for the tagline.
The driver going 60 mph saw NOTHING.

McDonald's looked at that playbook and did the opposite.

One image. One product. Maybe a price. The arches. Done.

If your billboard can't be understood in 3-5 seconds, it might as well be blank. That gives you room for about 6-8 words. One visual, not a collage.

The brain is a bouncer. Too many faces at the door and it lets none of them in.

McDonald's trick isn't creative brilliance.

It's seeing what everyone else misses: you don't win the highway moment by "explaining." You win it by being the one thing they can't NOT think of when they're hungry at 6:12 p.m.

Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow, calls that "mental availability." Being the brand that springs to mind first when a buyer hits a category moment.

Marketers have talked about the Rule of 7 for decades. People need around seven exposures before they act. At Blip, we measure this directly. 

When the same person hits their seventh impression, behavior changes.

Each time someone drives by a simple, consistent ad, the brain does less work:

"I've seen that color before."

"I remember that line."

"I know that logo."

Familiarity increases liking and recall, when the stimulus is simple and consistent.

Change the line every flight, redraw the visual every quarter, hide the logo until the end, and you make it harder for the brain to connect this exposure to the last six, and you're paying for seven impressions and getting one, really.

Those golden arches print money not because their billboards explain more.

But because a hungry driver at 6:12 p.m. doesn't need to think.

Apple doesn't write 'ads,' it writes muscle memory. Stand on any street corner and look up at an Apple billboard. You absorb it.

One image, a few words, a logo.
___

I used to stare at dashboards full of impressions thinking I was winning.

Cars passing signs. Eyeballs. CPM.

Those numbers looked great, but the pipeline didn't move.

Then I started asking a different question: when someone sees you, do they actually know it's you? Do they remember why you matter?

That's recognition, and recognition compounds.

At Blip, we created a metric to track recognition. Instead of only counting any impression, we started also counting Qualified Impressions: the 7th time the same person sees your message within 90 days.

One small shift in how we measured.

Here is what we had to unlearn:

——

1. "More impressions = more results"

Your dashboard can look great while your pipeline quietly stalls. You're counting how often an ad was served. You're not counting whether anyone remembers you exist.

2. "Billboards should tell your whole story"

Drive any highway and you'll see boards crammed with name, tagline, services, phone, URL, social handles, credibility badges. At 60 mph, nobody processes any of it. You're not informing anyone. You're just decorating the sky.

3. "Creative needs to change constantly"

The mere-exposure effect shows people choose what's familiar. The forgetting curve shows they forget you fast without reinforcement. Seven impressions is where you stop being noise and start being an option. Change is fine, but be consistent.

4. "Reach matters more than frequency"

I'd rather hit 40,000 of the right people 8-10 times than 400,000 random people once. One builds qualified impressions. The other feeds your dashboard and starves your funnel.

5. "Simple = lazy"

Apple's 'Shot on iPhone' ran on 10,000 billboards across 25 countries. Same structure every time: huge image, tiny line, Apple logo. One idea, repeated until it becomes part of how you see the world.

___

Attention is cheap. Memory is scarce.

Apple doesn't chase impressions. It compounds recognition.

Same codes, same message, repeated until choosing them feels like instinct.

If you want to understand how stubborn habits are, watch people in a drive-thru.

Most don't read the menu. They reenact it.

The car pulls up, the window slides open, and a script they've run a hundred times just plays. Same combo, same drink, maybe a small tweak. The whole thing takes less than thirty seconds.

There's a gap that should matter to anyone in media:

46% of Americans say they'd consider eating plant-based to reduce emissions. 53% have tried plant-based meat. But actual receipts barely move.

That gap is usually framed as a psychology problem or a product problem.

It's also a media problem.

If all your messaging lives in documentaries and viral videos, you're putting all your weight on the moments when people are abstract and aspirational. The real bottleneck is five minutes later, when they're hungry and on autopilot.

That's why PETA's Taco Bell campaign caught my attention.

They're placing billboards directly across the street from drive-thrus in Indianapolis, Kalamazoo, Florida, Georgia, New York, and other markets.

The message?

"Would It Kill You to Get a Bean Burrito?"

By the time you see that board, you've already decided to eat fast food. PETA is only fighting for one micro-choice: chicken burrito vs. bean burrito.

Same play with Domino's. Joan Jett on a billboard near Ann Arbor (Domino's HQ). Giant cow billboards outside Louisville locations. They even bought Domino's stock so they can attend shareholder meetings and file resolutions for vegan cheese.

The billboard is the sharp end of that funnel.

The alternative is already on the menu - just swap beans for meat. The board is physically tied to the decision - you see both in the same glance. And the ask is small - "get the bean burrito" beats "overhaul your diet."

The data backs this up. 43% of people who see a directional OOH ad visit that business within 30 minutes. Recall jumps to 71% when ads are placed right outside stores.

—

This playbook works beyond vegan advocacy.

Beverage brands pushing low-sugar options outside convenience stores. Transit authorities highlighting bus reliability at intersections.

The point is to treat inventory near point of purchase like an extension of the menu, not just a canvas for brand campaigns.

OOH is one of the few tools physically embedded in the moment when someone is hungry and slightly impatient.

That's where the real decisions happen.

British Airways won the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes with a billboard that said "Because this weather sucks." Not "seamless connected experiences." Not "reinventing travel."

Blip is a company that lets you buy digital billboards on-demand the way you'd buy Uber rides.

And after billions of flips we have seen more creative than most people ever will.

After a while, you notice a pattern:

Most ads are written for a creative review, not a rainy Tuesday commute.

They sound great in a conference room. Nobody remembers them a week later.

That's a problem.

The visible metric everyone chases is impressions. Did people drive past this screen? Did a million pairs of eyes technically have line of sight?

But the invisible metric that actually moves your business is recognition:

Do I remember who you are when I'm finally ready to buy?

There's an old idea called the Rule of 7: people need to encounter a message around seven times before it sinks in.

Modern research keeps proving it. Purchase intent jumps once you hit that 5-7 exposure range, not at the first impression.

We built our business around this. We call it a Qualified Impression: the seventh impression delivered to the same person within about a quarter.

That's when awareness stops being a vague feeling and starts becoming a real buying option.

Once you see the world that way, you judge creative differently.

If someone is going to see this headline seven times, does it get truer each time, or more annoying?

"Because this weather sucks" gets truer. By the fourth wet Monday you start nodding .

"Reinventing the future of seamless connected experiences" ( 🙄 ) doesn't improve with age.

British Airways ran 500 lines like this. Each one tailored to a specific location. "Warm gusts of wind that don't come from tube trains" only works when you're standing next to a tube train. The physical context carries half the weight.

That’s copy built for repetition.

TAKEAWAY:

Most media is sold on impressions.

But impressions measure who could have seen your ad, not who remembered it.

That's why we built Blip around Qualified Impressions.

Not "how many cars drove past this screen."

But "how many people saw this message enough times for it to actually stick."

Once you buy media that way, you start demanding creative that deserves to be remembered.

Not clever lines that win internal approval.

Human lines that get truer the more someone sees them.

British Airways understood this.

500 billboards. One Cannes Grand Prix. Zero mentions of "seamless connected experiences."

If your ad can't survive the seventh impression, you're not buying awareness.

Most companies ignore billboards entirely because you can't attach a UTM to them. Notion didn't; they invested in awareness and now they own the mental real estate you're renting by the click.

Online, most of these companies are sharp. Attribution models. Multi-touch funnels. CAC/LTV dashboards.

But mention brand and they freeze up. For them, Marketing is all about looking backwards for attribution.

Notion chose OOH for top-of-funnel, and here's why it's smart:

1. OOH drives online action better than TV, radio, or print

Nielsen found out-of-home ads drove roughly 4x their expected share of online activations per dollar spent. Billboards make people Google you.

2. Frequency beats reach

Effective frequency research puts the sweet spot at 5-7 exposures. Your target customer passes the same boards 40 times a month. You don’t need to reach everyone once. You need to reach the right people seven times.

3. The creative is a system

Notion's partners describe building "a rich system of communication tools" that flexes to different stories without losing the core look. One template. Infinite variations. McKinsey found strong B2B brands significantly outperform weak ones on growth and profitability. 

_______

Notion is buying the one thing your retargeting pixels can't touch:

The mental real estate that decides which tab opens first when someone finally needs a new tool.

Rare Beauty put up three billboards last August. Scratch-and-sniff. Scan the QR code, request a sample through Shop, but only if you could prove you were standing there. No screenshots, no forwarding links. Show up or miss it.

You cannot explain smell through pixels. Digital can describe bergamot and vanilla, but it can't deliver the product. So most brands default to pretty visuals and hope customers find their way to a tester later.

That's expensive hoping.

Rare Beauty went extreme to solve it. You don't have to go this far. But while competitors chased impressions, they turned three street-level placements into demo units. Gave up cheap scale to gain something most brands never measure: confirmed readiness. 

An impression delivered to someone provably close enough (and motivated enough) to try.

Four places where Rare Beauty chose harder over easier:

1. They Made the Billboard the Product

Instead of showing the bottle, they made you smell it. Scratch-and-sniff at street level. Ashley Murphy (VP of consumer marketing) was explicit: fragrance notes are impossible to communicate digitally. Sampling is the only lever that matters. They chose operational complexity over safe execution.

2. They Geo-Gated the Flow (Even Though It Killed Scale)

Scan the QR, open Shop app, request your rollerball - but only if the app confirms you're standing there. One scan, one action. Most brands would open this to anyone with a link. Rare Beauty locked it down. They traded reach for intent.

3. They Mobilized Community Instead of Buying Strangers

They partnered with TYB to create a challenge for existing fans: hunt down the boards, redeem your sample. It was about converting people who already cared enough to go on a mission. They chose smaller audiences with higher intent.

4. They Measured Trials, Not Impressions

Their KPI was samples sent. Hard count of people who completed the action. They gave up the comfort of big awareness numbers to commit to a metric that could expose whether the campaign worked.

Scratch-and-sniff is overkill for most categories. The logic underneath isn't.

Digital boards with a short landing page URL to sample direct response. Proximity-based offers. 
Retargeting people who engaged. 
Measuring conversions and foot traffic lift, not impressions.

A campaign designed to prove something instead of just perform.

Not every brand needs this. But it's interesting how few even consider it.

Performance teams will say "cold traffic doesn't convert." They're wrong. What doesn't convert is asking strangers to buy before they know who you are.

Cold traffic works fine. You just can't start the conversation with a sales pitch.

It's like asking for money on a first date.

The reality is that most buyers aren't in-market right now. LinkedIn's B2B Institute calls it the 95-5 rule: roughly 95% of potential buyers aren't ready to buy today. They're out-market now, in-market later.

Google's research on the "messy middle" shows buyers don't move linearly from trigger to purchase. They loop through exploration and evaluation until they feel ready.

We at Blip have been forced to think about this more literally than most digital teams have. You either become familiar, or you don't.

So we built a model that stops you from treating strangers like customers:

0-1 impressions = AWARENESS

2-5 impressions = TRUST

6-7+ impressions = CONVERSION

Nielsen found 5-9 exposures drove brand resonance increases of up to 51%. Familiarity is manufactured through repeated contact. Conversion asks land differently once that familiarity exists.

Skip these steps and you pay an impatience tax:

1. You pay it in efficiency. Costs rise because you're trying to extract demand from people not in buying mode.

2. You pay it in backfire. MIT research found personalized retargeting ads actually hurt conversion when consumers haven't narrowed their preferences.

3. You pay it culturally. Your team concludes cold traffic doesn't convert. Then you retreat into retargeting pools that saturate and can't scale.

Build awareness. Then educate. Then convert.

You don't win cold conversion by perfecting your close. You win it by earning the right to close.

Stop asking for money on the first date.

For years, DOOH was the 'dumbest' channel in the media plan. Great creative canvas. Real physical reach. But when finance asked "what did they actually buy?" the honest answer was always "we don't really know."

That has all changed.

Walmart's ad business hit $4.4 billion in 2024. Growing 27% year over year. That's not experimental money. That's "this is a core business" money. And it means the pipes finally exist to prove what screens actually do.

'Walmart ads' means screens inside the store, and smart brands use them alongside traditional OOH in the following way:

1. Start from the store, not the board

- Which stores matter for your category volume?
- Which SKUs or basket behaviors are you trying to move?

Then overlay OOH supply around those stores. Your OOH footprint becomes the physical wrapper around retail demand.

2. Define your audience for the retail media

- Build "category buyers last 6 months"
- Or "lapsed buyers who haven't purchased in 90 days"
- Or "shoppers who purchased SKU X within category Y"

You don't guess which demographics might drive sales. You ask the retailer to show you the people who actually do.

3. Use OOH for authoritative frequency

Most digital channels optimize for low-frequency clicks. OOH builds repeated exposure in a geography.

At Blip, we found performance inflects around the seventh exposure to the same person. That's a qualified impression.

Not the first impression to seven random people. The seventh impression to one person.

4. Close the loop

Modern OOH buys connect to device graphs. You observe devices passing near screens, build an exposed audience cohort, and sync it back to your funnel as a retargeting pool.

Now the retailer knows who saw your boards. You retarget them onsite, offsite, in-store. OOH creates recognition. Retail media captures intent and transaction.

5. Measure sales lift with better data

- Incremental sales per exposed household
- Basket size lift
- New buyer penetration
- ROAS and contribution margin

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Check out the hundreds of new retail media locations available on the Blip platform. 

2026 is your year.

59% ad recall. 31% top of mind. +18% purchase intent. Four weeks. Sony's LinkBuds Fit launch with Olivia Rodrigo didn't try to win the spec war; they won the memory war instead.

The numbers show exactly how:

Headphones are a category where “sameness” is the default. Everyone has ANC. Everyone has spatial audio. Specs don't differentiate fast enough to matter.

If you sell into a blurry category, ad recall is the prerequisite for everything else you want. If people can't remember who ran the ad, they can't buy the product later.

Sony's mechanism: Borrow attention from a celebrity partnership. Force repetition in the physical world. They ran a four-week NYC transit campaign - branded trains, station vinyl, bus placements - then measured it with control vs. exposed.

59% ad recall. That's 1.5x MFour's benchmark. Among ad recognizers: +11% favorability, +17% consideration, +18% purchase intent.

Don't confusing attention with recognition. Attention is cheap. Recognition converts later.

Lots of ways to create the spike.
Saturation creates the memory.

When someone calls your OOH campaign "top of funnel," they're being polite. What they mean: we'll never know if it worked.

Tinder rejected that premise entirely. They ran billboards like performance media and counted downloads, not vibes.

OOH is a physical channel with digital expectations. That mismatch makes it vulnerable to the most common lie in marketing: substituting exposure for outcome.

Reach and impressions can be directionally true and operationally useless.

Tinder refused that deal. OUTFRONT partnered with StreetMetrics for real attribution: exposed vs. control. Result: 79% more likely to download. 1,045 attributable installs. This wasn't OOH as "awareness wallpaper." This was OOH as an install machine.

And the effect stacked over time. By flight end, the exposed group had 3x more downloads than control.

Most people don't install an app from one ad. They install because they saw it enough that the idea stopped feeling new.

We call this "recognition vs. attention" - repeated exposures to the same person until you're plausibly influencing action.

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You don't copy Tinder's creative. You copy their measurement posture:

1. Run an Experiment, Not a Sponsorship

Exposed group. Control group. If you can't describe your test in two sentences, you're narrating, not measuring.

2. Pick One Outcome You'll Defend

Downloads. Trial starts. Store visits. One primary metric.

3. Use Independent Measurement

Third-party attribution, a unique url, etc., not a case study written by the seller.

4. Plan for Frequency, Not a Cameo

This is where recognition vs. attention plays out. Repeated exposures to the right people beat one impression to many.

5. Define "Worked" Before You Launch

Cost per incremental install, lift vs. control, etc. Hold yourself to it.

Reach is easy to report, but outcomes require rigor. 

Run it like a channel, and measure it like a test.

Brand preference usually moves in single digits, but La Colombe moved it 302%.

Not awareness. Not consideration. Preference - the metric that actually predicts whether someone will pick you over the incumbent.

Most CPG marketers fight on two fronts at once. One is the brand that owns the shelf. The other is the behavioral incumbent: habit. And in beverages, habit is the real monopoly.

You can buy distribution and still lose because you never become the default "I need a drink" choice.

La Colombe's challenge: people knew them as a café, but ready-to-drink is a different purchase muscle.

So they ran DOOH in LA and Philadelphia with one line everywhere: "World's Frothiest Latte."

That line matters more than it looks. "Frothiest" is sensory, specific, and odd enough to stick. 

Most confuse attention for recognition. Attention evaporates. Recognition is when someone recalls who you are and why they should care. At Blip we call that critical exposure point the first 'Qualified Impression': the exposure after which a consumer is ready to act. 

That is usually the 7th meaningful touchpoint, and it’s when things change.

So La Colombe started broad, tightened mid-flight to weekday commute hours. Same spend. Better timing. Same recognition-focused message up in the sky within five miles of every 7-Eleven, Walmart, Wawa, ShopRite, and CVS.


Results: +40% awareness, +65% consideration, +302% preference, +62% purchase intent.

More than half of exposed consumers linked "World's Frothiest" to La Colombe. First in message association in their competitive set.

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Why isn’t everyone using OOH to repeat a message so cleanly that the brain can't file it under anyone else?

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