American Guerrilla Marketing
Nationwide Service
Media planning, media buying, billboard advertising, & guerrilla marketing
Case Study:
Listen Labs already had the billboard. Outfront Media’s live digital boards over Manhattan subway entrances were running — Listen Labs’ brand was visible at the exact moment New York City’s most educated and tech-forward commuter population was entering and exiting the subway system. The question was not whether the boards were well-placed. They were. The question was how to make the audience encounter the brand before they arrived at the board — to build a trail that started at their office door and accompanied them, at every level of the urban visual environment, all the way to the screen.
American Guerrilla Marketing proposed an address-targeted, three-format campaign built around Listen Labs’ own client and prospect list. The client supplied a CSV of target company addresses — the specific Manhattan office buildings where existing clients and highest-priority prospects worked every day. AGM mapped every address on Google Maps and deployed field teams to each building. At each location, a 17×60 inch rectangular banner decal went down in front of the building entrance. From there, five 17×17 inch circle decals were placed in sequence along the pedestrian path toward the nearest subway entrance — a ground-level trail walking the audience directly toward the Outfront board waiting for them. Along those same routes, 200 24×36 wheatpaste posters were installed on walls at eye level, extending the brand presence vertically alongside the decal trail on the ground below.
The person who stepped out of their building, saw the Listen Labs banner at their feet, followed five circle decals down the block with Listen Labs posters on the walls beside them, and arrived at the subway entrance to find a Listen Labs Outfront board had experienced a continuous, coordinated brand sequence — from door to screen, ground to wall to digital — in the 90 seconds it takes to walk from a Midtown office building to the subway. The feedback was tremendous.
The Listen Labs Manhattan campaign operated as a fully integrated three-format street system, each element playing a distinct role in a continuous brand corridor between the target building and the subway entrance.
At every address on the CSV target list: a 17×60 inch rectangular banner decal at the building entrance — the anchor placement that opened the sequence. From that anchor, five 17×17 inch circle decals were placed in sequential intervals along the walking path to the nearest subway entrance with an active Listen Labs Outfront board. Along those walking paths, 200 24×36 wheatpaste posters were installed on walls at pedestrian eye level — brand presence at vertical scale running alongside the ground-level decal trail, covering the full visual field of the route from building to subway.
Total campaign materials: 170 circle decals, 30 rectangle banner decals, and 200 wheatpaste posters — three formats operating simultaneously at three distinct levels of the urban streetscape. Installation ran overnight August 17, 2026, ensuring the full campaign was in place before the morning commute.
Out-of-home advertising at subway entrances is one of the highest-value placements in New York City. The Outfront live boards over Manhattan subway entrances reach a captive, high-attention professional audience at the precise moment they are transitioning between street level and underground — moving slowly, often waiting, in a context removed from the screen-based environments that dominate their working hours. For Listen Labs, whose target audience is the concentrated technology and professional services workforce that moves through Manhattan’s subway system every day, those boards were effective from the start.
The strategic problem AGM solved was the gap between the board and the audience. A commuter who encounters a brand for the first time at a subway board has had one impression. A commuter who stepped over a Listen Labs banner decal at their office door, passed five circle decals and three or four Listen Labs posters on the walls beside them on the way down the block, and then looked up at a Listen Labs Outfront board at the subway entrance has had a fundamentally different experience. That is not three separate impressions — it is a single coordinated sequence that unfolds over the length of a city block, building progressive familiarity and brand recognition from door to screen. The board is not the campaign. The board is the resolution.
Address targeting from the client’s own CSV made the campaign specific in a way that no general street program can replicate. Every banner decal landed at a building where Listen Labs had an existing client or active prospect. Every circle trail led from that building to the nearest board. Every wall poster along that route was encountered by the exact professional audience the campaign was built to reach. No placement was wasted on foot traffic that was not the target. The campaign’s footprint was not the most-trafficked corridors in Manhattan — it was the corridors walked every morning by the people Listen Labs was trying to reach.
The three-format stack covered the full vertical range of the pedestrian visual field. The 17×60 rectangular banner at grade level anchored the building entrance. The 17×17 circle decals ran at ground level along the route. The 24×36 wheatpaste posters ran at eye level on the walls alongside the same path. The Outfront board at the subway entrance ran at overhead height. From the moment a target stepped out of their building to the moment they descended into the subway, Listen Labs occupied every level of the visual environment they moved through.
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Four formats across three physical materials required a visual system that maintained coherent brand identity across ground level, eye level, and overhead digital — across the texture of a sidewalk decal, the print quality of a wheatpaste poster, and the resolution of an Outfront LED board. Every format needed to be immediately recognizable as Listen Labs regardless of surface, scale, or distance of encounter.
The 17×60 rectangle was the campaign’s opening statement: wide enough to anchor a building entrance, sized at banner proportions that signal intentionality at grade level. The 17×17 circles were directional trail markers — their symmetry readable from any approach angle, their repetition across five placements converting a single impression into a sequence. The 24×36 wheatpaste posters ran at eye level alongside the ground trail, giving the brand a wall presence at the scale where pedestrians read messaging in stride — close enough for detail, visible enough to hold from across the sidewalk. Together the three formats covered the ground, the wall, and the screen — a complete environmental brand presence rather than a single surface placement.
Every placement in this campaign was derived from the CSV. There was no general street location selection — the entire deployment footprint was organized around the specific office buildings where Listen Labs’ clients and prospects worked. AGM’s Google Maps pin build converted the address list into a navigable field deployment map, organizing the target locations into routing sequences that field teams could execute efficiently across the Manhattan geography.
At each building, the rectangular banner decal was placed at the primary pedestrian approach to the entrance — the surface the target audience crosses arriving at or departing the building. From that anchor, the field team identified the nearest subway entrance carrying the active Outfront Listen Labs board and mapped the natural walking route between the two. Five circle decals were placed at even intervals along that route. The 24×36 wheatpaste posters were installed on the wall surfaces alongside the same route — construction hoarding, building facades, and high-visibility flat surfaces that placed the brand at eye level throughout the full corridor the decal trail was covering at ground level.
No two trails were identical. Each was built for the specific geometry of its building’s position within the Manhattan grid — the specific blocks, the specific walking path, the specific walls available. AGM field teams made those decisions on-site, adapting the trail design to each location rather than applying a fixed template.
The overnight installation on August 17 ensured the full system — banner decals, circle trails, wall posters — was integrated into the streetscape before the morning commute. Listen Labs was already there when the first target audience member stepped outside.
The Listen Labs campaign created a continuous brand corridor — from office building entrance to subway screen — across every location on the client’s own target address list. The person who walked that route on August 17 encountered Listen Labs at the door, on the ground beneath them, on the walls beside them, and at the subway entrance above them. Four touchpoints. One 90-second walk. Every single one of them targeted to a pre-identified client or prospect.
That sequence is not replicable through any single-format campaign. A wheatpaste campaign alone produces wall-level impressions without the building anchor or the subway resolution. Decals alone produce ground-level impressions without wall coverage or directional continuity. Outfront boards alone produce a single high-quality impression without any of the context that preceded it. The three-format street campaign plus the existing Outfront buy created something none of those elements achieves individually: a brand experience that moves with the audience across the full length of their morning commute route, at every level of their visual field, from a building they work in to a subway they take every day.
The feedback from Listen Labs was immediate. When the audience you are targeting walks through your campaign every morning and recognizes it as being addressed specifically to them — placed at their building, on their route, at their subway entrance — the brand awareness it creates is qualitatively different from what a general street impression produces.
A digital board at a subway entrance is one touchpoint — one moment of brand exposure at a single location. The decal and wheatpaste campaign extended that single touchpoint backward along the commute route, beginning at the office buildings where Listen Labs’ targets worked. By the time a target audience member arrived at the subway board, they had already encountered Listen Labs at their building entrance, at their feet along the walking path, and at eye level on the walls beside them. The Outfront board became the resolution of a sequence the street campaign started — not an isolated impression, but the last step in a continuous brand encounter that ran from door to screen.
Standard street advertising targets geography — high-traffic corridors, dense pedestrian zones, areas where a broad audience will pass. This campaign targeted specific people at specific addresses — the companies on Listen Labs’ own client and prospect list. Every banner decal, every circle trail, every wall poster was placed in the direct path of a pre-identified high-value audience member, not in a location chosen for general foot traffic. The result was a campaign where essentially every impression was with someone on the target list rather than with the general Manhattan population moving through those blocks.
Each format covers a different tier of the pedestrian visual environment. The 17×60 rectangle at grade level anchors the brand at the building entrance — the point of maximum relevance and recognition, where the target audience starts their day. The 17×17 circle decals maintain ground-level brand continuity along the walking route. The 24×36 wheatpaste posters extend the campaign to wall level at eye height — the register where pedestrians read brand messaging while in stride. Together the three formats covered the full vertical range from sidewalk to eye level to overhead digital board. Any single format leaves two of those three tiers uncovered.
A single decal at the subway entrance is a placement, not a sequence. Five decals spaced at intervals along the walking route are a trail — a directional experience that builds progressive familiarity over the course of the walk rather than delivering a single impression at the endpoint. Each additional decal encounter reinforces the brand recognition established by the one before it, so by the time the audience member arrives at the subway and looks up at the Outfront board, they are not encountering Listen Labs for the first time. They have already been introduced, reinforced, and directed. The board is familiar before it is consciously recognized.
Overnight installation means the full campaign — banner decals, circle trails, wheatpaste posters — was integrated into the streetscape before the morning commute began. The target audience encountered a complete, established brand environment rather than watching it being installed around them. For a campaign placed at the specific office buildings where Listen Labs’ clients and prospects work, the overnight timing ensured that the first impression was the intended one: the brand already present, already part of the environment, waiting at the door when they arrived.
Any company running out-of-home advertising in a concentrated urban market — subway boards, bus shelters, street-level digital — can apply the same amplification logic. Identify where your target audience physically works and travels. Build a street-level campaign from those locations toward your existing boards. Use the physical materials to extend the audience journey backward from the board, turning a single impression into a sequence that begins at the building your target works in. The ground-level entry point makes the digital board the resolution of the campaign rather than its entirety — and that sequential experience generates meaningfully higher brand recognition than either element produces alone.
