Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yegor 2211 days ago
I really question the effectiveness of this. Here is some anecdotal evidence of billboard advertising: We took out a single test billboard downtown Toronto at a very high traffic intersection for a privacy oriented service. The billboard cost $40,000 CAD and was up for 3 months. The billboard had a domain name printed on it (along with some custom art) which only appeared on that 1 billboard. In the 3 months the domain had less than 100 visitors. For $40,0000.

DDG probably spent many millions of dollars on this campaign, giver the amount of billboards in different countries. Even if their performance is 10x of our test billboard, it's not worth it, by a long shot. The only people that will notice these are DDG users and feel good about it, but it likely does nothing for attracting new users.
1 comments
reaperducer 2211 days ago
If you only blame the billboard for the failure, then you don't really understand billboard advertising.

Placement, design, message, color, product, and a dozen other factors go into whether a billboard message works or not. It's why big companies hire advertising agencies to do these things for them. The agencies know the nuances of making it work, just like hiring an expert to do your AdSense buy.

I used to own a web site that advertised on billboards in the early 2000's. It worked pretty well. It helped that it was very geographic-specific, and the billboards were along major roads in those geographies.

link
yegor 2211 days ago
All these factors are not going to make 3+ orders of magnitude difference required to make this even remotely worthwhile. Here is the previously mentioned billboard for reference: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0XQvm7X4AIHhnQ?format=jpg

As for your anecdotal evidence, from early 2000, this is not relevant anymore. People are looking at their smartphones while walking outside/sitting in traffic. The only reason billboard advertising still exists is because 99.9% of advertisers cannot quantify the effectiveness of their efforts.

link
reaperducer 2211 days ago
Here is the previously mentioned billboard for reference:

Now that I've seen the billboard in question, I'd say I was spot on. Especially the parts about design and placement.

link