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Hey Marketing Bestie,

This 1 goes out to every B2B Marketer out there. 

Especially the ones trying to Market to other Marketers. We’re a tough crowd. 

Today, we’re talking about a brand that’s doing exactly that…and pulling it off. 

They’re a CTV brand. But instead of running TV ads, they went…Out of Home.

Wait, a CTV Platform is Buying…Billboards?

Let's start with the obvious irony.

Vibe.co sells streaming TV ads. Their whole pitch is: stop spending all your budget on Meta and Google, and diversify to CTV.

So, how do they sell that message? 

They buy billboards. Wait, what?

First, it was LED trucks sending people to ChatGPT - you might remember me talking about it last fall.

Then, it was the NYC Subway and Times Square. BART stations. Signs on the 101. Taxi tops.

If that makes your brain hurt a little bit, good. That's exactly my point.

Because Vibe.co is running OOH to prove their product, and their Marketing craft, in real time.

The medium IS the message. They're showing, not telling, that if you can hyper-target a billboard to grab a specific group of Marketers’ attention…imagine what they could do for YOUR Marketing. 

October was about the stunt. What Vibe.co has done since then is how you turn stunts into a movement, and win the toughest audience ever (Marketers, duh). 

The Team Behind it All

Okay, ready to spit out your coffee?

This entire OOH program - multi-city, months-long, multiple formats, multiple markets - was built by a team of 2 people.

Senda B., their Brand & Product Marketing lead, and Zihao Wang, their designer.

They don’t have an agency, or a huge budget for production. But they do ship like their lives depend on it. 

These 2 are guided by a CEO who (and I'm quoting directly from the source here) "sits at his desk, drops an idea, and the next thing you know it's on a billboard in Times Square."

Some of these ideas are creatively unhinged. Others are strategic. Most are both. 

The Campaigns (in Order of Increasing Audacity) 

1. The "Size Matters" Billboard - San Francisco

A clean dark background, white text: "Size matters." + Vibe.co logo. It’s simple & provocative.

Note there’s not a single explanation, product description, or a “learn more.”

Just a headline that makes you do a double-take on your commute.

You’re gonna laugh, but what’s genius about this ad is the restraint. 

They trusted their audience to get it - big screen, big results - without spelling it out.

That’s gonna be a theme.

2. The Subway Domination - NYC

ICP-narrowing is the default move. But Vibe.co did the opposite.

Their NYC subway campaign showcased the huge range of brands using Vibe.co: Lyft, TerraCycle, Hairstory, Funko, Royale Clash, Devialet, Branded Bills, Babbel. 

Companies from different industries, sizes, and stages.

The message: We're not built for 1 type of business or budget. We're built to “grow with” YOU.

3. "Target Marc on TV" - San Francisco

Vibe.co put up a billboard in SF, right in the corridor where VC firms and AI companies cluster, featuring nothing but a very recognizable bald head silhouette and the copy: "Target Marc on TV."

No last name needed. Not with that audience.

Someone cracked: "finally can target marc with my hair loss startup." It went viral. 

That's earned media you can't buy. (Well, technically you CAN. For roughly the price of 1 billboard.) The New York Times said they “took the microtargeting game to another level.”

There were more scattered around SF, also making disguised references to tech leaders. “Tim” (with an apple). “Jensen” (with a leather jacket). “Elon” (with a sink).

Vibe.co’s CEO & chief Marketing stuntman Arthur Querou said: "The references were chosen because they're instantly legible to our exact audience and completely opaque to everyone else."

That's how you target specific people, even on a billboard the whole world can see.

4. "Our Lookalike Audiences Really Look Alike" - NYC

Hang this one in the Louvre, LOL.

When Vibe.co’s Zihao Wang was designing a Midtown  billboard, he cast himself. 10 times. 

The billboard features Zihao's face on 10 different people, all grouped together under the headline: "Our lookalike audiences really look alike."

Spot the real Zihao

Arthur tweeted out: "We gave our designer free creative control on our new billboard. He put his goddamn face on it. smh. I think we might have to fire him..."

The follow-up tweet after the internet's response? "Based on your feedback, he's keeping his job."

The joke (Arthur’s tweet and the ad itself) tells you about the product AND the brand at the same time. 

Ridiculous, and brilliant. Plus, it speaks in a language only Marketers will recognize. 

It's so memorable that Profound's head of Marketing saw it, reached out to Vibe.co to learn more, and became a customer.

Yep: a billboard starring a designer's gag selfie(s) closed a B2B deal.

5. Times Square Domination - NYC

And then they went to Times Square.

It was a full takeover - above ground AND underground. Screens and static ads. 

The message: "Big Screen. Big Results. Television Meets Digital Performance. Built for Modern Marketers. Trusted by over 10,000 brands."

This was a brand planting its flag in the most visible real estate on earth.

And hey, Times Square is cool. But you know what really stuck out to me? 

Vibe.co used their space to highlight their customers. Also some of the integrations they have, yes. But mostly, they talked about the brands growing with them - big and small. 

Social proof, and flexing their community.

They didn't have to brief anyone to amplify it. People just shared it.

That's the test of whether OOH actually landed.

The Results (The Honest Version)

I love how Vibe.co talks about this, because they're honest about what they know and what they don't.

What worked:

• Organic brand traffic went up 3x from January 2026 through the domination periods

• The sales team's confidence shifted noticeably. Prospects started referencing the campaign on calls unprompted.

• The "I've been seeing you everywhere" moment happened. That's the OOH signal you're actually looking for.

• The SF IYKYK billboards, the lookalike campaign, and the Times Square takeover all generated press coverage, industry DMs, and word of mouth across Marketing Slack channels and LinkedIn feeds.

• Direct pipeline impact: at least one closed customer (Profound) cited a billboard as the reason they reached out.

What didn't:

• Attribution is genuinely hard and they didn't solve it. Unless the prospect cited it, they couldn’t draw a clean line from individual placements to a conversion.

• Timing gaps hurt. Continuity matters more than individual placements, and there were windows where NYC coverage dropped between placements ending and new ones starting.

• Running too many formats at once made it hard to know what was actually doing the work.

This level of transparency is the sign of a Marketing team that knows what they're doing. 

The Bigger Play: Frequency Over Reach

Speaking of continuity: this is a coverage play, not a 1-off stunt. 

Vibe.co has been running a sustained, multi-city OOH program, for months. NYC and SF simultaneously. Multiple overlapping formats at peak density windows.

Their hypothesis (which I agree with): CTV is still an education sale. Your average Marketer isn’t on the channel. OOH like this shortens that education. 

If a performance Marketer sees Vibe.co on a billboard, then on a podcast, then in their LinkedIn feed, working with real brands…that third touchpoint converts differently than the first.

As Senda wrote in her own newsletter on the campaign: "A commuter who sees your ad 20 times at BART Embarcadero is worth more than 20 different people who each see it once." (You’ll have to look up that takeover yourself.)

Put it in Practice

The Vibe.co playbook isn’t really about billboards at all.

3 things to take away:

1. Make your medium your message. What channel can you use that demonstrates your product just by being in that channel? Vibe.co sells TV ads and buys billboards. What's your version of that irony?

2. Make your audience feel seen, not just targeted. The Marc Andreessen & the rest of the tech leader billboards were fun, but that’s not why they worked. They worked because the VCs and AI founders who drove by them felt like Vibe.co was telling them a joke, personally. They didn’t spend time worrying about whether people outside this audience would “get” it.

3. Give your team creative freedom and defend them publicly. Zihao cast himself 10 times on a billboard. Arthur defended him online. It closed a deal. A culture where weird, bold ideas get protected instead of committee'd to death, is what produces campaigns people actually remember.

Double Down

Remember, Vibe.co’s entire OOH program was run by a team of 2. 

2 people moving fast, with enough trust from leadership to take big swings & ship stuff that makes people look up from their phones. The kind of Marketing that makes other Marketers jealous.

They did the same thing here, where instead of walking you through their product, they let me write this story the way I wanted.

That's a rare thing in B2B Marketing right now. 

If you want to meet their team and start running this playbook, start here. 

See you on the big screen. 

Your friend,
Daniel