Brex: Billboards Still Got It

How Brex ran one of the most successful billboard campaigns for $300k

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If you made a list of marketing channels to deploy at launch, billboards would probably be somewhere near the bottom. Offline advertising, high entry costs and measure difficulties have made these ad structures go out of style over the last decade.

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That’s why it raised eyebrows when Brex, an American fintech company that offers business credit cards and expense management, invested $300k in billboards before launch. 

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This week, Case Studies analyzes how Brex built one of the most successful billboard campaigns in history.

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The Brief:

In 2018, Brex was pre-launch. They didn’t have a website to their name, much less a PR team. As they were preparing to leave stealth mode, the pressure was on to launch the brand as effectively as possible. 

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Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras gave the mandate to, “Go big or don’t go out-of-home at all.”

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The Execution:

With that direction, then-CRO Sam Blond and CFO Michael B. Tannenbaum decided that out-of-home(OOH) advertising was the perfect channel to achieve Brex’s goal. They landed here based on a few key insights:

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🌉 Location: their target market (tech startups) was highly concentrated in San Francisco 

💳 Simple messaging: their initial product offering of “startup credit cards” was easy to communicate quickly

🕙 Timing: syncing the billboards with their launch created a physical spectacle

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All these factors pointed to an opportunity to reach cost-effective awareness despite offline marketing limitations. Still, OOH advertising presents unique challenges. 

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For starters, there are very few options for purchasing your own billboards. And unlike other programmatic channels, it requires agency partners to support and strategize the media. To fulfill their mandate to go big, Brex partnered with OOH agency Clear Channel, who Blond was connected with from a past startup.

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Clear Channel executed a strategy that focused on billboards in locations with high foot traffic and long impressions like bus shelters and city boards in downtown SF for higher impact.

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The campaign went live the same day Brex launched publicly. And as the saying goes, the rest is history.

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The Results:

While direct results from the campaign aren’t public, it’s clear the $300k investment in OOH advertising cemented Brex as a legitimate solution in the startup community, virtually overnight. The company grew from zero to a $1b valuation in under two years, a meteoric rise by any standard.

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With such strong success, Brex doubled down on the channel, testing new creative and messaging in subsequent months. They rolled out future campaigns, like their 2020 Rainbow Hunt billboards and more recently Digital Out of Home ads above vehicles like taxis.

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All these efforts contributed to Brex’s valuation of $12.3b as of 2022.

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The Takeaways:

OOH advertising isn’t for every business. But there are a few insights from Brex’s launch campaign that can be broadly applied, even if you don’t have a $300k budget to deploy. 

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Here are a few lessons from their billboard glow-up: 

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1. Don’t sleep on market research

Even without a massive budget, the concept of go big or go home is vital for any testing strategy. It can seem logical to juuuuust dip your toes into new areas of opportunity but when you don’t fully lean in, you risk diluting your team's marketing efforts.

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Focus your attention and strategy on bigger tests in fewer places as opposed to smaller tests across more places.

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2. First principles > trends

When Brex tested OOH, the channel wasn’t on the radar of most startups. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t viable, just that it wasn’t popular. 

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First principles is the practice of questioning every assumption you think you know about a given problem, and not going with the crowd. By following this, Brex executed a strategy that was unique, rooted in insights, and extremely effective.

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3. Create the illusion of scale

Brex was a small company when their billboard campaign launched. But they created the illusion of a larger, more mature company than they were by running OOH ads in such a small, dense geography.

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It’s not easy to execute, but targeting your marketing to a small subset of individuals can have a compounding effect that helps solidify you in their evoked set of solutions.

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4. Trust the experts

This goes without saying, but if you don’t know how to buy billboards, hire an agency that does.

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We love in-house teams as much as anyone, but knowing when to outsource specialized marketing initiatives like an OOH media will save you time, headaches and a ton of money long term.
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