Transcript of Charlie Megan, Co-Founder
We always say you can have the best billboards in Chicago, and arguably we do, but if you have bad creative nobody will pay any attention to it. If you put up your business card, your entire menu, or what's important to you but not necessarily important to your audience it's like a tree falling in the woods. You can have the best billboards in Chicago, but with bad creative, no one will pay any attention to it. Yet, conversely you can have a razor-sharp creative and that will reach your audience and will make them talk. A good piece of creative can live on for a long time.
“You can have the best billboards in Chicago, but with bad creative, no one will pay any attention to it.”
Creative is at least half the battle and probably the biggest opportunity. Even companies and brands who have been doing outdoor advertising for decades can still make the mistake of putting all of their features on the billboard, too much text, everything that's important to them that they think the customer needs to know. Eventually the customer isn't reading anything.
“Good creative is simple, but not easy.”
If you look at half the billboards in Chicago right now at least half of them meet that sort of definition. They're too busy and trying to convey too much. All you really want to do is get someone's attention to take the first step. You want them to take a look at your website and maybe pick up the phone. A lot of time’s now it's just to go to google and searching for you. So giving them a search handle can be the way to do it. It used to be that everybody put their phone number, address, and domain name. Now it’s probably best to only put your domain name.
All of that helps make better creative because in the end people will probably just google what they see and look for you if you've compelled them to act. People don't just look at your message because it's pretty or you think it's interesting - it has to be compelling. It has to make them pull the car over the side of the road or make a note to follow up with you. That's hard to do, there's an art to that for sure, but when it's done you know great creative execution is just hugely impactful.
“I’ve seen clients have successful or not successful campaigns, and it all boils down to the creative.”
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