Let’s be real for a quick sec, and marketing people and CEO’s you need to hear this:

99% of people don’t care about you or your launch video. Frankly, they’re boring. To cure my insomnia, I could make a sleep track of company funding announcement videos. 

Given this, I wanted to do something unconventional when I took Blazel out of stealth. 

I came across the instagram of a Canadian rapper who made a tiny dog billboard to help launch his new album and I loved the idea of doing ‘bad marketing’ to get attention. 

I decided to poke fun of marketing and tech companies by doing a series of (clearly dumb) ideas in real life leading up to the launch. 

-We bought 5,000 branded pens, with no place to distribute them. 

-A fake expensive domain name 

But the coup de grâce was the AI billboard in Wichita Kansas and the funding announcement video. 

If you don’t live in the Bay Area, let me take a quick moment to explain that we have the most bizarre tech billboards. They make so little sense the NYT launched a quiz to see how good people were at decoding them. 

After paying $875 for the month we had two billboards in Wichita, Kansas. It read,

“Oh, another stealth AI company. Launching Thursday.”
Which, of course, makes about as much sense as the rest of the SF billboards. 

The funny part is, people went bananas for it. 

We had three strangers drive to the billboard and take selfies with it. 

We had people creating memes of it. 

People debated about whether it was real or not. 

A few guys tried to send me advice on how to actually do a good launch. 

We generated 800,000+ impressions and thousands more engagements on a budget of less than $1,000.

Shortly after, we dropped our official fundraiser announcement video, which was a parody on the whole fundraising announcement video. That also popped off and got crazy engagement and reach. Cost = $0. 

I discovered later companies are spending tens of thousands (sometimes SIX FIG) on influencers to make their launch videos look organically viral. For now, I’ll save our budget on something else.

There was a moment when I was editing footage and my husband came in and looked at it. I showed him some raw clips and he goes, “this isn’t funny.” 

You don’t need a big budget to get attention, but you do need novelty. 

I read a wonderful little book called, "Steal Like an Artist” which makes the case that stealing from one person is a crime and stealing from everyone is art. Surround yourself with worthwhile influences, like this newsletter!  

Nowadays you buy billboards IRL so the internet can see them here are my two favorite I’ve seen since our own stunt: 

This is a hiring billboard. They’re token IDs from OpenAI’s o200k_base tokenizer. You solve it by running them through a decoder, which maps each ID back to a chunk of text. ListenLabs had 400 people crack this code and made 60 engineering hires off this billboard. How’s that for culture hires? Amazing.