Instead of using traditional celebrity endorsements, Square's 'See You in the Neighborhood' campaign heroes its actual customers. This approach treats local business owners as influential figures in their own right, lending unparalleled authenticity and relevance to the campaign's storytelling.

The proliferation of billboards for highly specialized, unintelligible B2B companies along Silicon Valley's Highway 101 signals market froth. When advertising shifts from consumer brands to obscure B2B2B services, it suggests excess capital is flowing deep into the tech stack, a classic sign of a potential bubble.

To compete with hundred-year-old banks, fintech Float used billboards to project credibility and size. The physical, high-cost nature of out-of-home advertising psychologically signals to potential customers that a startup is stable, trustworthy, and a legitimate alternative.

Unlike typical consumer ads, San Francisco's outdoor advertising is dominated by niche B2B startups. They accept that 95% of viewers are irrelevant to reach a high concentration of VCs and tech talent, signaling a strategic return to immeasurable brand awareness over direct-response marketing.

Float's successful billboard campaign focused on emotional, human personas like "the receipt loser" and "the big spender." Using a portrait photographer and vibrant colors, they stood out from typical logic-driven B2B ads, creating strong brand recall.

OpenAI's initial Super Bowl ad was a high-concept, tech-centric piece. The expectation for their next ad is a shift towards showing tangible, everyday use cases, aiming to demystify AI for the average consumer and integrate ChatGPT into their daily lives, much like a classic Budweiser commercial appeals to the masses.

Marketing a defense company is fundamentally different from marketing a consumer product. Instead of a broad "one-to-all" campaign targeting millions of customers, defense marketing is a "one-to-few," hyper-targeted effort aimed at a small group of influential government decision-makers who could all fit in a single conference room.

Leading marketers confidently invest in high-cost, low-measurability channels like billboards and physical books. They understand that reaching a concentrated target audience builds brand in a way that can't be captured by direct attribution but drives long-term pipeline.

The marketing playbook has shifted from promoting products to promoting the personality behind them (e.g., Tesla is Elon Musk). A company without a founder or CEO who can act as a public "character" struggles to gain traction, as corporate messaging accounts are no longer effective in a noisy media environment.