Most small businesses already do out-of-home advertising. They just don’t call it that.
You see it every day: a magnetic decal on the side of a plumber’s panel van, or a realtor’s billboard at the off-ramp you take home. You haven’t called them yet. But the next time your water heater dies, or you decide to sell your house, one of those names is going to come back to you. That’s what out-of-home advertising does.
Since April 27, 2026, Quo has been doing the same thing at a larger scale. Billboards outside Madison Square Garden and along Dallas’ many, many highways. Subway ads in Manhattan. Walls and buses in Chicago and Los Angeles. Digital kiosks on the Santa Monica boardwalk.
It’s the most we’ve ever spent on a single marketing campaign, and the first time we’ve put Quo into the physical world this way.
Here’s what we learned from getting it off the ground.
Why we decided to start out-of-home advertising
Out-of-home had been on our marketing team’s radar for a while. We had people on the team who’d run it before at other companies. Tori Murray, Quo’s Senior Director of Growth Marketing, has seen it work at a city level and kept bringing it up as a channel we should consider when the timing was right.
Then came the rebrand. Eight months ago, we were still OpenPhone, and we had a real internal debate about whether to launch our first OOH campaign at the same time as the new Quo name.
We decided against it. A billboard is an expensive way to explain a brand name from scratch. Before investing in OOH, you want online reviews, press coverage, paid social, and word-of-mouth to build name recognition first. So we gave the rebrand time to settle in. By spring 2026, with the rest of the paid mix returning well on investment, it felt like the right moment.
The case for OOH gets made over months, not in the meeting where you pitch it. Quo’s marketing team runs in a regular rhythm with finance. We have monthly visibility on what we’re spending, what it’s returning, and what’s coming next. Our approach to channel investment is simple: keep funding the channels we know work, then layer test bets on top. OOH was a bigger test bet than usual, with the rest of the ad mix built to amplify and reinforce it. So when we walked in asking for a much larger investment, finance already had the context to make a call.
Still, approval wasn’t easy. Not that it should be. If you’re going to put real money on a channel you’ve never used, somebody should be asking hard questions.
For a small business, the same rule applies. Out-of-home usually isn’t the first place to put your marketing money. It makes sense once your other channels are working, and once you know what you want the ad to do.
The creative: Make the glance count
Out-of-home has a cruel constraint: nobody is sitting with a coffee and reading your billboard. They’re walking to the train. They’re changing lanes. They’re late for a flight. You get a few seconds, maybe less.
After interviewing multiple agencies, we hired a Los Angeles agency called Day Job to help us develop the campaign. They stood out immediately based on how they think about visual impact and copy in constrained spaces. A month after bringing them into the fold, they came back with eight concepts. The two we couldn’t let go of were “money on the line” and “always say hello.” We asked them to merge the two.
The minute I saw “Always say hello with Quo,” they had me at hello. (Ideally we create an ad that people will remember even 1/5th as long as old lines from Jerry Maguire). It’s a simple line that does two things at once. It tells people how to pronounce our name. “Quo” on its own gets read every which way; sitting next to “hello,” it doesn’t. And it reframes our old “never miss a call” line into something more positive.
Both ideas show up on the final boards. “Money is on the line” is the headline. “Always say hello with Quo” is the constant sign-off. The double meaning in the headline is intentional. Money is at stake, and it’s literally on the other end of the phone line.
Photo ℅ Day Job and Quan Media Group
The contextual copy is my favorite part of the campaign. The sign-off stays constant, but the headline shifts to fit the surface.
- On the subway: “Missing a customer call is worse than missing your stop.”
- In the airport: “Don’t let money fly away.”
- On the side of buses: “Don’t let customers pass you by.”
- On a highway billboard: “Don’t send money to voicemail.”
Each line is written for the place where it’ll be seen.
We also pushed our brand louder than we usually allow ourselves to. Our bright yellow is normally an accent color. Used as a flood color on a website, it’s a lot. On a billboard, where you only get a glance, that’s the point. Some of the boards still use a white background with yellow accents. The digital boards at Madison Square Garden go all the way: full neon, edge to edge, fitting for Penn Station at rush hour.
For a smaller business, the lesson is the same: match the message to the moment. The side of a van, the sign outside a job site, the sticker on a front desk, and the billboard near an exit ramp all have different jobs. Don’t write one generic line and slap it everywhere. Write for the place where someone will see it.
Four markets, 97 million impressions
Our media buyer for this campaign was Quan Media Group. That means they helped decide where the ads should go, negotiated with the vendors, managed the practical requirements for each format, and helped get the finished files live everywhere.
From the outside, OOH campaigns can look deceptively simple. You make the ad. You book the board. The board goes up. But there’s far more to it. Every surface has its own specs, deadlines, vendors, and production requirements. If you’re a small business buying your first billboard or transit ad, this is the part to take seriously. Make sure you know who’s responsible for getting the ads live, by when, and in exactly what format.
We chose four markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas. The logic was straightforward. These are cities where people move through the same corridors every day: subway platforms, bus shelters, highways on the way to work. Someone sees Quo on their commute Monday, then again on Tuesday, and by Friday it’s familiar. They’re also places where a lot of our existing customers already are, and big metros carry a multiplier from people passing through. Someone catches a board in an airport or on the way to a meeting, then takes that memory home with them.
Photo ℅ Day Job and Quan Media Group
The number we’re projecting is 97 million impressions over four weeks. Our other paid channels, like TV and audio, still account for most of our impressions.That makes OOH an important additional layer, not a replacement for the rest of the paid mix.
That layering only works if the other channels pull their weight. Our ads, email marketing, the website, and sales conversations all have to reinforce the same idea. Otherwise, you’re asking one board to do too much.
For a small business, the same logic holds at a smaller scale. If your yard sign offers free estimates, your Google Business profile should too. If your billboard runs a specific offer, the person answering the phone should know the details.
How we’ll know whether it worked
As you can guess, OOH is harder to measure than digital. We built four separate measurement approaches into this campaign before it launched:.
- Overall site traffic, top-down and by market. Are new visitors increasing during the campaign window? And inside New York, LA, Chicago, and Dallas specifically, are we seeing more trial starts and paying customers?
- An updated onboarding survey. Our standing “How did you hear about us?” question got a new OOH response option a few weeks before launch, so we’d have a cleaner benchmark to read against.
- Marketing mix modeling. Our MMM partner measures the incrementality of every dollar we spend, by geography. They’ll run a pre-and-post analysis on the four markets we lit up.
- Reveal, an OOH measurement partner. They geo-fence each ad and track website visits and app installs inside those areas during the campaign window.
We’re watching the numbers weekly, but the real retroactive read won’t happen until July.
Most of this is overkill if you’re running a single ad. What still applies: pick two or three signals before you spend the money. That might include:
- Calls from a certain area code.
- More direct website traffic.
- Additional quote requests from a specific town.
Customers saying they saw your truck. None of those will be perfect. That’s fine. You’re not trying to attribute every conversion. You’re trying to avoid flying completely blind.
What we’d tell a small business
You probably pass examples every day: a poster with a phone number and service area, or a sticker on the door of a coffee shop. The most effective version is often a surface the business already owns — a truck, a window, a front desk — used consistently.
Every one of those is OOH, and every one is doing the same job our boards at MSG are doing. My teammate Tori frames it this way: “Putting yourself out there in ways that people see as they’re going about their day, that remind them consistently — oh yeah, this guy’s out there, I should look into this,” she said.
The scale shifts, but the principle doesn’t. Pair your message with the right surface. Put yourself where your customers already are. Decide what you’re going to measure before you book.
A vinyl decal on a panel van and a billboard at Citi Field are both real out-of-home. What separates them is what you can afford to repeat, what your customers will see in practice, and what you can learn from each one.
Out in the wild
For our team, the campaign has already taken on a life of its own. Colleagues are posting sightings in a “Quo in the Wild” Slack channel, and the OOH flight overlaps with the launch of our biggest commercial yet. The two campaigns have different jobs, but they’re part of the same larger push: getting Quo out of the purely digital world and into people’s daily lives.
For now, our boards are out there doing their job, in four cities, day after day. Somebody walks past one on the way to lunch and doesn’t think much about it. Six months from now, when they finally need a better business phone solution, the name they half-remember is the one we put on the side of the wall.
That’s what out-of-home buys you: a place in someone’s head, weeks or months before they need you. That’s the bet we’re making.
