Outdoor is one of my favorite mediums to work in. A few words, one visual, and a few seconds from a stranger who owes you nothing. Nowhere to explain yourself, no follow-up email, no second look. Most briefs treat that as the handicap. I've always thought of it as the test: if an idea needs a paragraph or a click before it gets interesting, it probably isn't ready. Except the best billboards don't use those few seconds to finish the story either. They leave just enough missing that you finish it yourself.
All three ads this week are deliberately unfinished. One left a premise running for three days and let the street interfere with it. One advertises a product made entirely of one guy's fingers. One is a hundred empty yellow rectangles waiting for someone to put a dinosaur in them. Each brand did less than it could have, and the audience closed the gap. That's still a hard thing to sell in a meeting.
Out-of-home, very much at home.
Netflix has added a listing to Sunset Boulevard: furnished living room, bay window, central air, thirty feet above traffic, tenant not permitted to leave. To promote The Last House, a thriller about a family sealed inside their own home, the streamer trapped an actor in a billboard for three days, in a robe, with a globe, a deck of cards, and binoculars. The line under the window reads "How long can you survive?", a bold question to hang over a record heat wave. And, keep in mind, Netflix would not confirm a bathroom. The actor talked to the street on a whiteboard, took push-up requests (full ones, he wants you to know), and rocked out to headphones that, he later admitted, were never plugged in.
Most advertising is a one-way street: it takes three seconds of your attention and gives you nothing to do with it. Netflix put the premise on Sunset and then left it running for three days, with the public allowed to interfere. Which changes the stakes considerably. A poster can't crack under pressure. A man in a robe might. And by day two people were driving real Los Angeles distances to check whether he had. The billboard got interesting because the world could be part of the story, or at minimum, part of the IG story.
Please hold. Your human is thinking.
ChatTJB has a context window of whatever Tucker Bryant remembers and an image generator powered by a pen. The San Francisco art project bills itself as "the leading chat interface powered by AI". Except, AI stands for Average Individual. Bryant answers the prompts himself, by hand: recipes, advice, drawings of frogs eating spaghetti or the mayor as Godzilla. A $6,000 billboard turned the bit into a hit. Within days it had taken 30,000 queries and peaked at 5,000 an hour. The least scalable chatbot in San Francisco had encountered its first scaling crisis. He recruited volunteers, then paused the site anyway. There is a $5 Pro tier that adds nothing, which he now openly begs people not to buy.
By every metric software normally celebrates, ChatTJB is terrible: slow, inconsistent, frequently unavailable, and capable of serving exactly as many people as one guy's fingers can handle. That became the feature. Ten thousand people applied to volunteer as somebody else's chatbot, which is either heartwarming or a labor-market indicator depending on your week. Almost everything we spend money on in this business is fidelity: faster, smoother, cleaner, more finished. Bryant shipped the exact opposite, and people who came for the joke stayed to send him their fiction, their personal dilemmas, their birthday plans. The answers weren't expert. But I think what resonated is the fact that someone had stopped what he was doing to think about you. Bryant compares it to asking a friend in the dressing room whether the outfit works. You don't ask because they've seen every outfit on the internet. You ask because they're in the room while you're wearing it.
Thinking inside the box.
National Geographic has opened a museum by removing the thing it is most famous for: the pictures. To launch its new Museum of Exploration in Washington, Nat Geo created more than 100 outdoor placements using almost nothing but the brand's yellow rectangle. An elevator ride becomes a 16-year trip to the moon. A Metro wall marks the height of an average wave in the Drake Passage. A bus becomes a ruler for a Spinosaurus. No wildlife photography or cinematic renderings. Just the famous border, a verifiable fact, and enough empty space for you to fill in the rest.
I have a soft spot for this because it shares some DNA with an old Google campaign I worked on. We placed questions exactly where the city could make them irresistible: "How many taxis are there in New York?" on a taxi, "How many seats are in Madison Square Garden?" outside the arena, "Who is the fastest drummer in the world?" on a bass drum. The campaign didn't explain voice search. It made curiosity happen at the precise moment the answer became hard to resist. Same trick, different asset. The yellow rectangle still frames a picture. This time, the picture is whatever happens in your head.
Hey, I'm Shachar. This newsletter is where I nerd out about ideas in culture, art, and brands that I can't stop thinking about. By day, I lead creative direction and brand strategy for tech companies.
