You Don’t Need a Bigger Budget to Look Like a Bigger Company

Can’t afford a marquee billboard? Good.

Mobile billboards and micro billboards punch above their weight anyway.

If you’ve been in NYC lately, you’ve probably seen Hyperagent by Airtable everywhere you look. They’re nailing OOH with billboards, subway takeovers, the works. It’s amazing, and it isn’t cheap. But founders can borrow the same feeling for a sliver of the cost.

A billboard campaign can run six figures a month, so most capital-efficient seed founders put every dollar into performance ads instead. Totally rational. When cash is tight, you spend where you can measure the return.

But the digital world is oversaturated. For bottom of funnel conversion, yes, hyperspecific retargeting ads are critical. For awareness, they feel like screaming into the void. And they don’t establish the credibility your brand needs to convince consumers to try something new. Nothing beats IRL for that.

Billboards are great, but there are cheaper ways to look bigger than you are and stay top of mind. A couple favorites…

🚚 Truckside Ads

For a fraction of the budget, put your billboard on wheels.

When people see a branded cargo truck, the vast majority assume it’s your product inside. It does more than show off your brand; it gives consumers the sense that you have a whole distribution operation.

For weeks last year, I walked past a Jones truck in SoHo almost every day on my commute. I can’t count how many friends sent me photos of them from all over the city. The campaign gave off an aura of scale: Jones has a fleet. Jones is everywhere. Jones is clearly a big deal. Not too shabby for a scaling start-up.

For a few thousand dollars a month (or much less outside NYC/ SF/ LA), you can run a truckside ad. Scale up as budget allows.

🤝 Conferences

AKA, excuses to give out clever swag.

Everything Thanks does is a branding masterclass, and conferences are no exception. But even without the budget for a booth like this, you can steal their smartest tactic: flood the event with distinctive swag that doubles as micro billboards.

Thanks gave away countless tote bags in their distinctive shade of pink during a multi-day conference. Nice tote bags, the type people actually want to keep. The effect was a sea of pink, stamping their logo onto the subconscious of everyone there. By the time people reached their booth, their reaction was usually, “I’ve been seeing you everywhere!”

It’s the same logic as Airtable’s subway takeover: saturate one place your customers already are, and you read as everywhere.

And the payoff outlasts the campaign. IRL credibility travels: amplify the photos online, add an authoritative image to your Series A deck.

You don’t need a bigger budget to look like a bigger company. Spend the budget you have where it reads as authority, and instead of just buying impressions, you’re buying the impression that you’ve already made it.