Can be used to place political ads but is not limited to them
Starting with physical ads: mailed postcards, yard signs, billboards, and swag like T-shirts?
Why start here? There’s a better moat once we develop relationships with Outfront, public metros (BART, Subway), and other key players within physical advertising, and we’ll obviously add digital media as a fast follow. Digital media is less relevant than it seems among the tech, media, and political elite.
What was the last ad you remember from online (Instagram/Twitter brand advertising excluded)? What was the last billboard you saw?
Where and when?
Starting with San Francisco in April; New York, LA, and DC soon after, and the country sometime in 2025.
Financial model
Currently, a BART billboard costs ~$10k/4 weeks, and a US 101 billboard costs ~$30k-$80k/4 weeks, and a transit bus shelter ad costs ~$1k/4 weeks.
Mailing a letter costs $1 end-to-end via PostGrid et al
We’re going to charge a high marginal rate and 0 fixed rate on ads. You give me $500, I’ll place $300 of billboard ads or mailers for you.
Note that we can conceive of sending … just one letter at a time, or fractionalising a billboard and giving you 1/10th of the area of the billboard for the entire 4 weeks (not a time-based rotation like is common today)
This allows startups, concert promoters, and community groups to easily get their message out for much less than they could previously afford—they’d pay $1000 not for one bus ad, but for 10 poster-sized sections on 10 bus shelters.
This part, fractionalizing billboards, is likely more of a gimmick than a core feature. It would overwhelm customers and the billboard landlords may not agree. That said, I still want to try it out.
Meetbilly.co: Why will it work?
Currently, ad sales for billboards work like Yahoo display ads, in that they are manually negotiated over the phone.
Five years ago, it was nontrivial and expensive to generate good creative for billboards, mailers, and online ads—let alone for TV advertisements. Generative AI is changing this.
In a world in which your billboard costs $10k to design, print, put up, and take down, or in which your TV spot costs $100k to film, of course only big advertisers can bother, and the extra 15% of overhead in dealing with humans is an annoyance but no biggie.
We already have unlimited ~free ad copy (ChatGPT) and images (Midjourney, Dalle). Very soon, we’ll have unlimited ~free video. In this imminently real world, there’s no reason it shouldn’t take 1 hour and only $2000 to launch a billboard + mailer campaign for a new startup aiming to hire engineers in Hayes Valley.
So, in summary, once the fixed costs of ad creative (text, image, video) drop to $0, we should be able to have fully marginal-cost, self-serve physical ads.
Once you’ve gone through the self-serve flow to create your ad, before paying a dollar, it goes live on meetbilly.co/organisations/yimby/campaigns/yesond/creative/uuid
This page would do exactly what you’d expect — be shareable publicly, allow users to ❤️ love the ad, 😡 hate the ad, comment on it, suggest additional creative, directly contribute dollars to this ad campaign “chip in $1 to send this to one more person”, and share it with their friends
We would lean into slightly uncomfortable mechanisms of showing you pro- and anti-abortion spending in Michigan and encourage both sides to spend more
Once the platform for political peer-to-peer spending is established, the sky’s the limit. I am one of the 100 people in San Francisco that earn more than $200k USD/year and contribute 50+ hours/year to YIMBY causes. There should be not just a YIMBY group to join, but a way to buy a coffee for a fellow YIMBY campaigner, crowdfund signs and other materials, etc.
All you need is the SuperPAC construct and some accounting and tax filing, and there’s no reason why this doesn’t yet exist today.
