Trung Phan Profile picture
Apr 28, 2021 12 tweets 6 min read Read on X
1/ Brex raised new funding at a $7.4B valuation.

Interestingly, the corporate card startup launched in 2018 with a very successful $300k out-of-home (OOH) ad campaign.

Here's a breakdown of Brex's OOH strategy 🧵
2/ First, what are out-of-home (OOH) ads?

There are 4 major categories:

◻️ Street furniture (bus benches, phone kiosks)
◻️transit (taxis, busses, airports)
◻️place-based (arenas, shopping malls)
◻️billboards (traditional and digital)

Billboards make up 60%+ of OOH inventory.
3/ What's interesting about OOH is that if used correctly, the cost to reach 1k people (aka CPM) is cheaper than other ad options.
4/ In OOH campaigns, there is usually a trade off between:

◻️ Frequency: How often your target demo sees an ad
◻️ Reach: How many *total* people see your ad

Brex launched to a very specific demo (startup founders in SF), so it optimized for frequency:
5/ Brex spent $300k for a 3-month campaign to "dominate" its chosen area.

"Dominate" entails:
◻️ Owning 50%+ of the ad inventory in a selected region
◻️ Capture attention quickly and be omnipresent

Brex really did feel like it was "everywhere"
6/ Brex used the "Anchor and Amplification" strategy.

An ANCHOR is a big attention-grabbing ad unit that a large % of your audience sees (eg. Brex took over the platform station next to Oracle Park)

Once you establish an anchor, AMPLIFY your message around the city w/ more ads.
7/ Choosing locations

With so many options, it's important to do "market rides" (a "from-the-ground" POV)

A well-known Brex billboard is “Money Tree”. This ad space was long devalued b/c a tree obstructed it.

A market ride found it had the opportunity for a clever creative.
8/ Creative tips #1

◻️At the start of a campaign, the message should be very direct and clear ("the first corporate card for startups").
◻️ After brand is more established, you can ad some mystery ("this will catch your 'interest'") to drive curiosity
9/ Creative tips #2

◻️ OOH happens in a flash (keep copy to 7 words or less)
◻️ Color contrast is key to make ads -- often seen at a distance -- legible (stick to primary/complementary color combos)
◻️ Don't forget the CTA (brex.com/rewards)
10/ The playbook is from a Q&A I did w/ Brex's Head of OOH last year for Trends.

Brex rolled out a similar strategy for 2 other demos: ecomm (in LA) and life sciences (in Boston)

For more biz gold, smash that FOLLOW: @TrungTPhan

11/ Read the fulls Trends Q&A here:
trends.co/articles/how-b…
12/ More OOH Resources

Geopath (for initial OOH mapping and measurement): explore.geopath.io/user/public

List of 200+ OOH ad companies: geopath.org/our-org/

Rate card for Clearchannel (an OOH vendors) to see inventory costs: clearchanneloutdoor.com/how-to-buy/rat…

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More from @TrungTPhan

Jul 28
The invention of bánh mì is a combination of climate, trade and urban layout of Saigon in late-19th century designed by French colonist.

When the French captured the area in 1859, most economic activity in the region took place along the Saigon river.

The population built makeshift homes tightly bundled by the river banks. Outgrowth from this eventually lead to narrow alleyways between many buildings that is trademark of the city (the Khmer named the region Prey Nokor then French renamed it Saigon and then it was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 after end of Vietnam War).

Over decades, the French created European street grids and built wide Paris-type boulevards in the city to funnel commerce to larger markets (also make the city easier to administer).

It was at these markets that French baguettes were introduced and traded.

Bánh mì bread is known for being flaky and crispy on the outside while fluffier on inside (so god damn good).

Two features of Saigon helped create this texture:

▫️Climate: The heat and humidity in Southeast Asia leads dough to ferment faster, which creates air pockets in bread (light and fluffy).

▫️Ingredient: Wide availability of rice meant locals added rice flour to wheat flour imports (which were quite expensive). Rice flour is more resistant to moisture and creates a drier, crispier crust.

Fast forward to the 1930s: the French-designed street layout is largely complete. Now, the city centre has wide boulevards intersected by countless narrow alleyways.

The design was ideal for street vendor carts. These businesses were inspired by shophosue of colonial architecture to sell all types of goods as chaotic traffic rushed by.

Vietnam has some of the most slapping rice and soup dishes, but many people on the move in the mornings wanted something more portable and edible by hand.

Bánh mì was traditionally upper class fare but it met the need for on-the-go food.

Just fill the bread with some Vietnamese ingredients (braised pork, pickled vegetable, Vietnamese coriander, chilies) along with French goodies (pate).

Pair it with cà phê sữa đá (aka coffee with condensed milk aka caffeinated crack) and you’re laughing.Image
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Haven’t lived in Saigon for 10+ years but ate a banh mi every other day when I did.

While there, I also sold a comedy script to Fox (pitch: “The Fugitive meets Harold & Kumar set in Southeast Asia”).

It never got made but fun story to retell: readtrung.com/p/im-making-a-…
Classic episode Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 26
the most underrated winner of the AI boom is the 15,000 person Caribbean island of Anguilla (which has a GDP of ~$320m) Image
The research team is happy to announce that we’ve played our part contributing to Anguilla’s windfall.

We also paid $99 to GoDaddy to see if we could secure one more .AI domain. Bearly.AIImage
Polynesian island Tuvalu has an even smaller population (10,000)!!
Read 4 tweets
Jun 8
someone used Veo3 to make Moses as a YouTuber live-streaming the Exodus
accent does change at end: reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/bO…Image
On-demand history vids like this in few years with Google Veo very plausible.

I previously wrote on YouTube as greatest athletics learning machine ever…could get souped up: readtrung.com/p/youtube-the-…
Read 4 tweets
Jun 8
reminder that no “asian guy and stripper” story will ever top Enron Lou Pai’s “asian guy and stripper” story Image
Totally forgot Lou Pai got the stripper pregnant.

If this story was transplanted to 2020s, Pai would probably have been a whale on OnlyFans and gotten got…anyways, I wrote about the economics of OF here: readtrung.com/p/onlyfans-sti…
Read 4 tweets
Apr 29
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) trained an AI slideshow maker called “Decker” on 900 templates and apparently gotten so popular that “some of its consultants are fretting about job security.” Image
Sorry, called “Deckster”. That excerpt was from this BI piece that also looked at McKinsey and Deloitte AI uses: businessinsider.com/consulting-ai-…

The Mckinsey chatbot is used by 70% of firm but same anonymous job board said it’s "functional enough" and best for "very low stakes issues." x.com/bearlyai/statu…
Here’s a r/consulting thread based on Computer World last year. Deckster was launched internally March 2024…some think it’s BS…some think it helps with cold start (B- quality): reddit.com/r/consulting/s…Image
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Read 4 tweets
Feb 4
Norway discovered off-shore oil in 1969. It launched its sovereign wealth fund with $300m in 1996.

It’s since grown 6,000x to $1.8T or $327,000 per Norwegian (5.5m people).

The fund owns 1.5% of all global equities but, most impressively, had a UX designer put a real-time fund value tracker on its website landing page.
Norway’s SWF roughly is 65% equity, 25% bond, 10% real estate/infra (all global).

Unsurprisingly, its largest holding is Apple ($47B, or 1.4% of the entire company).

On a related note, here is my deep dive podcast on Steve Jobs and making of the iPhone: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/caf…
Norway spared no expense on its SWF website. Look at that carousel!
Read 4 tweets

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