Smokeball - the G.C.O.A.T

Outdoor ads? At the bottom of your funnel? Are you mad?

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Brand awareness…but nobody said which brand.

Normally when you’re running an ad campaign, you’re advertising yourself. Firstly because that’s what looks good from a ROAS perspective, but mostly because that’s what makes sense.

Smokeball flipped this concept on its head. Instead of buying media to advertise themselves, they chose to celebrate their client - G.O.A.T Legal - instead.

Here’s a pic.

Why it’s great

As I mentioned before - conventional wisdom tells us that outdoor advertising is a top-of-funnel channel, and therefore we should make our money work as hard as it can for us, since every impression is precious.

Normally, this means that we need to optimise our creatives and placements such that it is reaching our brand’s target audience, and is as recognisable and as memorable as possible. In other words, we want to make sure we’re selling ourselves as clearly and as quickly as we can.

In this instance, Smokeball has kind of bent the rules a little. 

Instead of buying outdoor media all over the city and targeting legal professionals on their work commute over a long period of time, they found one key account they hoped to get the attention of, and they pushed all of their budget towards getting their attention - and celebrating them for being a great client (or, the greatest client of all time, in fact).

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Outdoor ads for Guerrilla Marketing

You don’t often think of Guerrilla marketing in the context of small budgets - and part of that is because of the messaging around it (guilty).

I'll take some liberties to simplify here, so before you come at me with your pitchforks, hear me out.

The big challenge with outdoor is that you either need a large enough budget to saturate a geographic region - or - you need to do something clever enough on a small enough scale that you can get away with a small budget.

This Smokeball campaign is in the latter case.

The takeaway here is - you don’t have to use outdoor ads purely as a large-scale brand awareness medium at the very top of your funnel. You can also use it as a tool to bolster your client relationships on a small scale if you want to. And this is what Smokeball here has done beautifully.

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