What an Advocacy Billboard Campaign Taught Me About Marketing

I ran a national billboard campaign to push for federal recognition of Arab American Heritage Month. The lessons transferred almost entirely to commercial work, and not the lessons I expected.

By Pierre Subeh, published June 11, 2026, 5 minute read

A few years ago I ran a national out of home campaign advocating for federal recognition of Arab American Heritage Month. Hundreds of billboards, a small team, and a budget that would have looked modest next to a single market product launch.

I expected to learn things about advocacy. Most of what I learned turned out to be about marketing, and it has shaped how I approach commercial campaigns since.

Paid Reach Was the Smallest Part of the Result

The billboards themselves reached a meaningful number of people. The coverage of the billboards reached far more, at a cost of roughly zero.

This is the mechanic that most brands underuse. A campaign can be designed so that the campaign itself is the story. Not the product, not the message, but the fact that someone did this at all. Journalists cover the existence of the thing, and that coverage carries the message further than the media buy ever could.

The design requirement is that the campaign has to be genuinely unusual or genuinely large in some dimension a reporter can describe in a sentence. Hundreds of billboards is describable. A well targeted digital campaign of equivalent spend is not, no matter how much better it performs on a dashboard.

I now ask a specific question of any significant campaign: what is the sentence a journalist would write about this? If there is no such sentence, the campaign will only ever reach what it pays to reach.

Specificity Traveled Better Than Universality

The instinct in advocacy, and in brand work generally, is to broaden the message so it includes everyone. We tested that instinct and it was wrong.

Broad messages about diversity and inclusion produced nothing. They were agreeable and forgettable, because they said what everyone already says. The messages that moved were specific: a named community, a concrete ask, a particular month, a clear action.

Specificity does two things. It gives people who are in the group something to recognize themselves in, which is what generates sharing. And it gives people outside the group something to learn, which is what generates interest. A message broad enough to include everyone gives neither group anything.

This transfers directly. Brands water down positioning to avoid excluding a potential customer, and end up with copy that no customer feels was written for them. The narrow message that a smaller group loves will outperform the broad message that a larger group tolerates.

The Ask Has to Be Absurdly Simple

We tried several calls to action. Anything with more than one step lost almost everyone.

The version that worked was a single instruction that could be completed in under a minute without leaving the phone. Every additional decision, every extra field, every requirement to look something up cut participation by a large fraction.

Marketers know this in the abstract and then design five step funnels anyway, because internally each step feels justified. The discipline is to count the steps from the position of someone who cares about this considerably less than you do, which is nearly everyone.

Credibility Is Borrowed Before It Is Earned

Early on, the campaign was one person with billboards, which is easy to dismiss. What changed the reception was third party validation: organizations lending their names, elected officials acknowledging it, press treating it as a real effort.

None of that changed the argument. It changed who felt safe engaging with the argument. People and institutions look for permission before associating with something unfamiliar, and other credible names are that permission.

The commercial lesson is that early stage brands should spend disproportionate effort on borrowed credibility. Partnerships, associations, recognizable customers, and legitimate third party recognition do more for a young brand than another increment of ad spend, because they resolve the question the audience is actually asking, which is whether this is real.

This is also, plainly, why professional associations matter. Chapter membership, board service, and speaking are not networking pleasantries. They are credibility infrastructure, and they compound.

Timing Beat Everything Else

The campaign worked partly because it ran into an existing conversation rather than trying to start one. There was already momentum, already interest, already people looking for a way to participate.

I have since watched better executed campaigns fail because they arrived into silence. The work was stronger and the result was worse, because there was no current to join.

Practically, this means reading what your audience is already discussing before deciding what to say, and being willing to reshape a plan around a live conversation. A campaign that joins an existing conversation starts with borrowed attention. A campaign that opens a new one has to buy every impression.

Persistence Was the Actual Strategy

The part nobody finds interesting: it took a long time, and most of that time produced nothing visible.

There was no single moment when it worked. There were months of unanswered outreach, small local wins, incremental coverage, and slow accumulation. The result looked sudden from outside and felt like nothing from inside, right up until it did not.

Most marketing is like this and most marketers are structurally discouraged from admitting it, because quarterly reporting rewards the appearance of momentum. Campaigns get killed at the point where they would have started compounding, and replaced with new campaigns that get killed at the same point.

If I could enforce one change in how brands plan, it would be committing to a duration before starting and honoring it, with clear criteria for stopping early that are about evidence rather than impatience.

What I Do Differently Now

Every campaign of consequence gets tested against four questions. What is the sentence a journalist would write? Is the message specific enough that someone will recognize themselves in it? Can the ask be completed in under a minute? Whose credibility are we borrowing before we have our own?

And then the discipline that is harder than all four: deciding up front how long this runs, and not moving that date because a month was quiet.

About the author

Pierre Subeh is Co-President of AMA Orlando and the founder and CEO of X Network, an SEO and paid marketing firm whose work spans Apple Music, Häagen-Dazs, and Pepsi. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in marketing and advertising, a TEDx speaker, and a member of the PR and Media Council at the Council of Global Change, an independent international policy council that convenes at the United Nations. He writes about search, brand, and global growth at pierresubeh.com.

Topics: advocacy, out of home, campaign strategy, brand storytelling, public awareness