September 7, 2026
By Livy Phillips | American Guerrilla Marketing
Starting an advertisement is not as complicated as most guides make it sound. But it does require that you think clearly before you spend anything. The brands that waste advertising money typically do so not because they chose the wrong platform, but because they skipped the thinking stage and went straight to buying ad space.
We have helped hundreds of brands build and launch their first advertising campaigns. This guide walks through the full process, from deciding what the ad needs to accomplish all the way through to placing it and measuring what happened.
Every advertisement exists to accomplish something specific. Before you create anything, you need to name that something. Is the goal brand awareness? Do you want more people to know that your brand exists? Is it conversion? Do you want people to buy, sign up, or attend? Is it engagement? Do you want people to interact with your brand in some way?
The goal determines everything else. Awareness campaigns use different formats, messages, and placements than conversion campaigns. A campaign designed to drive ticket sales for an event looks completely different from a campaign designed to introduce a new brand to a new city. Get the goal right first. Then build the campaign around it.
Write the goal down in one sentence. Something like: “We want to drive 500 ticket purchases for our event on October 15.” Or: “We want 10,000 new people in Brooklyn to know our brand exists.” The specificity is the point. Vague goals produce vague campaigns that produce vague results.
The second question is: who needs to see this advertisement? This is not a general question. It should have a specific answer. Not “everyone” and not “women 18 to 35.” Something more like: “Music fans aged 20 to 30 who go to shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick at least twice a month.”
The more specific your audience definition, the more targeted your campaign can be. And targeted campaigns consistently outperform broad ones on every metric that matters. They cost less per impression because you waste fewer of them on people who are not going to respond. And they convert better because the message can speak directly to the exact audience rather than to everyone vaguely.
Build your audience definition from what you actually know about your current customers. Who buys from you already? What do they have in common? Where do they spend time? What do they read, watch, or listen to? Those questions answer the audience question for most brands.
Know Who You Are Talking To
We have never seen a brand that was too specific in their audience definition. We have seen countless brands that were too vague. If you cannot describe a single person who represents your target audience, your audience definition is not finished yet.
What does the advertisement say? This sounds simple but it is where most brands struggle. The impulse is to say everything. List every feature, every benefit, every reason the brand is great. Resist that impulse. It kills advertising effectiveness.
Great advertising says one thing. It says it clearly. And it says it in a way that is relevant to the audience you defined in step two. The one thing should be either the most important benefit your audience will care about, the most compelling emotional connection to the brand, or the most relevant call to action for the moment.
Test your message by reading it out loud to someone who is not familiar with your brand. If they immediately understand what you are saying and why they should care, the message works. If they look confused or ask follow-up questions, keep editing.
Now you know what you are trying to accomplish, who you are trying to reach, and what you want to say. The medium is the next decision. Where will this advertisement actually appear?
Match the medium to where your audience spends time. If they are walking through specific neighborhoods in your city, outdoor advertising puts your message directly in their path. If they spend significant time on social platforms, social ads reach them there. If they commute, transit advertising is the medium. The question is always: where does this audience spend time, and how do I meet them there?
| Audience Behavior | Matching Medium | Why It Fits |
|---|---|---|
| Walks specific neighborhoods | Street postering, outdoor | Reaches them in physical space they already use |
| Commutes by train or bus | Transit advertising | Captive audience with time to read |
| Heavy social media user | Social ads | Follows the audience to their most-used screen |
| Attends specific events | Event advertising or activation | Reaches them in a high-engagement context |
| Reads local publications | Print or digital local media | Meets them in a trusted, relevant context |
| All of the above | Multi-channel campaign | Creates multiple touchpoints across their daily life |
Budget is a real constraint and it shapes what is possible. But the most important thing about budget is not the total number. It is the allocation. Too many brands spend most of their advertising budget on creative production and too little on distribution. A great piece of creative that no one sees does nothing. A functional piece of creative that gets in front of the right people drives results.
Allocate roughly as follows as a starting point. Creative production: 20 to 30 percent. Media placement or campaign execution: 60 to 70 percent. Measurement and optimization: 5 to 10 percent. Adjust based on your specific situation. If you already have strong creative assets, shift more budget into placement. If your creative is weak, invest there first.
For small budgets, focus matters. A small budget spread across many channels produces nothing. The same budget concentrated in one channel in one neighborhood can produce a noticeable impact. Dominate something small before expanding to something larger.
Now you create the actual advertisement. Everything you have done so far feeds into this step. The goal, the audience, the message, and the medium all shape what the creative looks like.
Bold visual. Clear, short headline. One supporting detail. Contact or URL. That is your complete creative brief for a street poster. The design should be readable from 10 feet away while the viewer is in motion. High contrast. Large type. Nothing decorative that does not earn its space.
The first frame or the first two seconds decides everything. If you do not stop the scroll immediately, the rest of the creative does not matter. Lead with something visually arresting or with a line that directly addresses the audience. Follow with the message and the call to action. Keep it short. Test multiple versions.
The essential information is date, time, location, and reason to attend. State those first. The visual should communicate the atmosphere or experience of the event. If it is a concert, the artist’s face or name is usually the lead. If it is a branded event, the experience promised should be the lead. Make it feel like something worth being at.
The campaign goes live. What happens next matters as much as everything that came before. Monitor actively. For digital campaigns, watch the early performance data closely. Are people clicking? Is the cost per result in range? Are conversions happening? Early data tells you whether to adjust or let it run.
For physical campaigns like outdoor postering, your monitoring is visual and logistical. Are the placements holding up? Do they need maintenance? Are they in the highest-traffic locations you identified? Visit the locations during the campaign run and document what you see.
At the end of the campaign, measure against the goal you set in step one. Did you hit the ticket sales target? Did awareness metrics move? Did you capture the leads you needed? That comparison is the most important output of the whole process.
Measurement Is Not Optional
Campaigns that are not measured cannot improve. Every campaign you run should generate learning for the next one. That learning compounds over time into a serious competitive advantage.
We see the same mistakes over and over. Here is how to avoid the most common ones.
No defined goal. If you cannot say what success looks like before you start, you will not know if you achieved it. Define the goal before spending anything.
Too broad an audience. Targeting everyone targets no one. Get specific about who you are trying to reach and where.
Too many messages. One advertisement, one message. Every additional message you add reduces the effectiveness of the primary one.
Wrong medium for the audience. The best creative in the wrong place fails. Always start with where the audience is, not with what medium you are most familiar with.
No call to action. Every ad needs to direct the audience to do something. Without that direction, attention generated by the ad is wasted.
No measurement plan. Decide before you launch how you will know if the campaign worked. Build measurement into the campaign setup, not as an afterthought.
For brands starting their first advertising campaigns, physical advertising formats are often underestimated. They seem less trackable than digital. They seem harder to set up. But for brands in urban markets trying to reach local audiences, physical advertising can be the fastest and most cost-effective way to build initial awareness.
A postering campaign in a brand’s target neighborhood creates physical presence in a way that three months of social ads rarely does. It signals that the brand is real, that it exists in the world, and that it is worth paying attention to. That signal matters for new brands trying to establish credibility.
We work with brands starting their first campaigns all the time. We help them define their audience, choose their locations, design their creative, and execute the campaign with the same quality standards we apply to campaigns from running national brands.
Start by defining your goal, your audience, and your message. Then choose the medium that best reaches your audience. Build your creative around your message, set a budget, launch the campaign, and measure the results against your goal.
Defining the goal. Everything else flows from the goal. If you know what you are trying to accomplish, you can make correct decisions at every subsequent step. If you are vague about the goal, the campaign will reflect that vagueness in its results.
The minimum depends on the medium. Social ads can start with small daily budgets. Street postering campaigns start in the thousands. The more important question is not the minimum but the right level to achieve your goal. Too small a budget produces no result. Better to save and run one effective campaign than to run three underfunded ones that accomplish nothing.
The medium that reaches your specific audience most efficiently. For most local brands in urban markets, that is a combination of street-level outdoor advertising and social ads. For brands with national reach goals, larger outdoor formats and digital become more relevant.
Direct response campaigns can show results in days. Brand awareness campaigns need more time, typically four to eight weeks before significant movement in awareness metrics. Plan your timeline expectations based on the campaign objective.
Not necessarily. Simple digital campaigns are accessible without agency support. For physical advertising, event marketing, or more complex multi-channel campaigns, an experienced partner is worth the investment. The execution quality and local knowledge that an agency brings directly affects campaign results.
For more on this, explore our experiential marketing.
For more on this, explore our street team activations.
A clear visual or hook, a single key message, and a call to action. For event ads, add date, time, and location. For brand ads, make sure the brand identity is clear without dominating the communication. Everything else is optional and often unnecessary.
Ready to Run Your Campaign?
Call us or email us. We’ll tell you exactly what we can do in your market and what it costs.
American Guerrilla Marketing — Los Angeles
Street-level campaigns in Los Angeles and nationwide. Wheatpasting, LED trucks, street teams, and more.
(646) 776-2770
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