Making an ad for Times Square and what I learned

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It's 7:35 AM in Times Square, and I am crying seeing our ad on a billboard.

This is by far one of the biggest moments in my life and for Goodo Studios.

I never thought that I would have a billboard in Times Square.

What was even cooler was the fact that I got to work with my team at Goodo Studios on this project all together.

I got to work with our great client of ours, She’s Birdie, and our partner Brex, who was the one that sponsored this billboard.

Now that we do have a billboard in Times Square, I learned a lot from this process and I want to share the behind-the-scenes of what it took to make this ad from start to finish.

I will also talk a little bit about what I learned from this process and how it's changing how I create ads for brands holistically, ever since we did this project.

1. Know your specs

Not every billboard in Times Square is created equal, and it's really important to know what the specs of the billboard is. Once you see what your specs are, it really opens up the ideas of what you can or cannot do.

For us, we were dealing with two billboards - two different screens that were stacked on top of each other.

The hardest part was that they weren't the same screen size.

One was more of a vertical square and the bottom one was more of a horizontal rectangle. This posed a few different issues in terms of how we were going to sync up imagery and overall ideas, but it also opened up a lot for what we could do unlike if we had just one billboard.

Understanding your specs eliminates a lot of the different ideas that you could have going into a project like this.

2. The goals

Once you understand where the billboard is going to be and what you're working with in terms of physical space, the next thing was to think about goals.

What do we want to get out of a project like this?

When we first started throwing around ideas, we would drift away and always had to come back to "How is this helping us in our goal?"

For us, what we knew was that we weren't going to be able to convert a viewer into a customer right away in the middle of Times Square.

We wanted this to be more of a brand play and really thinking about it from a top-of-funnel perspective. By thinking about it in that way, it really allowed us to be anchored in our decision making because we knew the goal was to give 10 seconds of inspiration while also being practical about what the brand does and what the product does.

Especially in a project like this, it's very easy for everybody to have an opinion. But if you're not aligned on your goals, then there's just a lot of talking back and forth.

We've been working with Birdie for such a long time, so it was easy to understand what were their goals for a project like this, and then making sure that all of our conversations went back to aligning with the goals.

3. Just get started

At a certain point, you just have to get started.

I mean, a lot of times in a project like this because there's a lot of opinions and a lot of ideas, it's hard to make a decision right away. You also don't really know how things are going to look until you start to see them in the space.

One of the things that we really tried to do was make sure to had a bias towards creating and then making decisions.

Instead of shooting down a lot of ideas and not really being clear on what to create, we would start with a proof of concept.

We could see the idea alive and then decide from there what we want to keep, change, what do we like, and don't like, and then iterate and create and iterate till we get to the final product.

Even though this product is for women, the first iteration was my hands because I went into the studio just to shoot a quick mock-up of a few different ideas, sent it over to our editor Adrian, who then created a few proof of concept that we could work off of for a meeting.

We actually transposed the ad onto a mock-up of Times Square, so we got to see what it would look like on the 2 screens in the space. This allowed us to have some better conversations because now we weren't talking in theory, we were actually talking about a reality.

What's really hard about a project like this is that there is no true data to make decisions the same way that you have for Meta, TikTok, or YouTube. We had to focus on what are the core things that we want to represent the brand and the product.

Utilizing the things that we know from our performance creative, what are some elements that we know that we need to have - whether that's in terms of visuals or in words.

For us, we knew that we wanted to have our ideal customer/ideal user on the billboard, and that was going to be a young, mid-20s woman. Luckily, our creative strategist, Sabina, who was on the project, is that ideal customer.

We wanted to have somebody that is cool, hip, and young. And so part of that was actually the nails since the fingers and the nails looked great, because that is what's going to be holding the birdie. I actually paid for Sabina to get really cool nails that were this branded blue.

And then we were able to get a really cool shoot a bunch of this second concept with great nails and with some updated ideas.

Then at that point, we really started to see what we had - but there were a few things that were missing. We had shot the initial concept with Sabina in our studio, thinking that we wanted it to be more of a white backdrop and to have more focus on the birdie. But once we actually saw it in the space and really saw it on the screen, it felt like it was too bland.

We wanted to do was make sure that we were showing the outside element because we know that people are using this product when they're outside and we want to show that that environment - even if it's very subconscious and in the background.

So we've reshot the footage to be outside and it turned out a lot better.

Because we were dealing with two screens, we wanted to utilize one of the screens to be text. Specifically, when we first had it, it was just focusing on the message on a white backdrop and very basic. But we really wanted to play with colors and add other kinds of elements to the text.

We tried a bird flying across the screen. We tried colors changing. And one of the interesting things was that originally I didn't think that the changing of colors would work - I thought it was going to be super flashy. I said out loud, "I don't think this is going to work," but "let's try it and see."

Once we actually created it, I loved the changing colors. And I actually thought, it was a way better version and way more impactful and not busy at all. So we actually went with that version.

And it's just a great lesson.

You can disagree and say it out loud, but also it's good to try things that you disagree with because you actually might disagree with yourself in the future.

So we finally got our finished ad. We had nixed the bird flying across the screen, and it was done.

What I learned

Focus on the details

The level of detail that goes into creating an ad that you know is going to be stretched and blown up to huge sizes really makes you start to think a lot about every detail in the ad.

Even knowing that millions of people in Times Square are going to see that also kind of changed the energy towards the ad.

The interesting thing is that a lot of times on Facebook and YouTube, millions of people see our ads every day, and yet you don't have that same kind of feeling or impact because it's just not in the physical space.

But by having an ad in Times Square it made me really think a lot about how we approach the level of detail in our ads for everything we create in the digital world. It's really helped me and my team be way more dialed in than ever before.

The environment of an ad

I really thought about the environment around the ad and not just creating the ad, but how does ad fit in with the environment around the ad.

This was also one of the first true top-of-funnel ads where it was more of a brand ad vs. it being a performance ad.

I really enjoyed this process of trying to boil down the essence of the ad, the essence of the product, and the brand within 10 seconds and doing it in a way that was interesting, inspiring, but also still impactful.

I think that brand and performance creative doesn't have to be different.

I think that they can work together.

I just think that the environments in which brand ads are in usually are very different than performance ads, and I think that they do need to have different elements that are in each of them but all should still have a performance lens to them.

With the brand asset, and specifically with this ad, we still want to make sure that it was clear what does She's Birdie do and what do they offer to people.

This is one of the coolest experiences by far, and going out to New York City to actually see the work in person was an incredible experience.

A lot of times when we're working with clients, we might see the ads online, we might have friends text us saying, "Oh I saw your ad" or "Did you make this?" but actually seeing it in a real-life space on one of the biggest stages not only in the US, but in the world, is a pretty amazing thing.

And I am so grateful for all the support to help Goodo Studios get to this point.

I will see you next week.

Until then, keep creating!

Matthew Gattozzi

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