How Vibe.co Turned Out-Of-Home Into Street-Level ABM

At some point, every performance-first brand hits the same ceiling. The CTV and social channels that drove growth are starting to return less per dollar. Competitors with bigger brand footprints keep winning deals that never made it into the pipeline. Adding more budget to the same channels doesn't solve a positioning problem, and most data-driven marketers are poorly equipped to recognize when it stops being a targeting problem and starts being a brand one. Out-of-home is coveted precisely because it solves for something digital cannot: unblockable, daily repetition that builds category authority over time.

Romain Marsal is the Vice President of Growth and Marketing at Vibe.co, the connected TV advertising platform built for performance marketers that reached a $410 million valuation following its $50M Series B last fall. Marsal joined Vibe as a founding engineer after roles in ad-tech engineering at Criteo and KMTX, bringing dual master's degrees in applied mathematics and data science from École Centrale Paris and ESSEC Business School. He moved into growth, helped 5x the company's revenue past the $100 million ARR mark, and stepped into his current VP role in March 2026. His argument is not that OOH is back, but that data-driven marketers have been applying the wrong tools to a brand problem and paying for it in competitive position.

"No other format puts as much pressure on your audience as out-of-home. The ads aren't skippable. They're in your commute, nonstop, every single day. That's why it's expensive, and that's why we chose it," says Marsal. For someone who built a growth engine almost entirely on measurable digital channels, the logic is precise. Digital inventory, however well-targeted, shares every impression with a scroll, a notification, and a competing tab. A billboard on the 101 at 8 am does not.

Two cities, one bet

The decision to go physical is always followed by the question of where to go. Rather than spreading spend across a national rollout, Marsal's team applied total addressable market analysis to identify where Vibe's highest-density customer clusters actually lived. The data pointed to concentrations of B2C e-commerce brands and AI-funded B2B tech startups in New York and San Francisco. With a finite budget, national coverage meant no coverage.

"If we invest outside of digital and want to go into out-of-home, it's because we're missing share of voice. The go-big-or-go-home approach supports that strategy. Two cities were already very expensive to make a big splash like this," says Marsal.

Choosing two distinct markets also forced a creative rethink. San Francisco's B2B tech operator density invited insider humor and vertically specific messaging. New York required something horizontal enough to land across agencies, consumer marketers, and small businesses without requiring shared context.

"In San Francisco, we knew we wanted to speak specifically to B2B tech startup operators, so we had to be more nerdy about the creative. In New York, we wanted to be understood by a very wide crowd. We had to have a generic, horizontal message that speaks to everyone," he explains. The two-city split forced precision that the team wouldn't have found otherwise.

ABM, moved to the street

Vibe took the account-based marketing logic it used in digital channels and applied it to physical space. The team mapped the headquarters of its highest-priority target accounts, then bought billboard placements directly outside their front doors, with creative that named the company whose employees would walk past it each morning. It is the same instinct behind ambush OOH activations that challenger brands use at major events, owning the physical geography your audience moves through, not just the media they consume.

"We put the HQ locations on a map of the top accounts we wanted to target, like Notion, Ramp, and Rippling. We personalized the ads based on their HQ location so that when you are a Ramp employee, you walk out and see the Ramp name on a billboard near your office," says Marsal.

Premium placements along the 101 freeway and in Times Square were selected for reach and shareability. The physical campaign was built to feed back into digital, with high-visibility placements producing social content that extended the campaign well beyond its physical footprint. That loop is increasingly how OOH buyers think about what a placement is actually worth.

Securing the inventory required a workaround. Coveted San Francisco placements routinely carry year-long waitlists. To compress the timeline from Q4 2025 ideation to Q1 2026 activation, Vibe worked with OOH managed services specialist billups, which holds access to pre-reserved inventory. Even so, execution was tight. "Our designer did a great job, because for some of the placements we had three days to ship it. We had to complete all ideation, production, and internal validation within three days. It was very intense," Marsal says.

Results, measured like digital

Marsal applied the same measurement rigor to OOH that his team uses for performance channels. The campaign generated a 4x traffic lift in both target markets. Brand lift surveys moved Vibe to first or second place among respondents asked to name the leading streaming TV advertising platform, a meaningful shift for a company whose brand had previously lived almost entirely inside digital channels.

The most direct signal came from the sales floor. "We saw a lot of influenced pipeline, and even direct inbound leads, where people on sales calls told us they reached out specifically because they saw our ads in New York and San Francisco," he says. A prospect mentioning a billboard on a sales call is exactly the kind of bottom-funnel attribution OOH skeptics argue the medium cannot produce. Vibe's numbers suggest otherwise.

The performance ceiling

Vibe had never spent a dollar on brand marketing before this campaign. Every previous investment went into CTV and social, channels that delivered efficient acquisition but left a specific gap: category authority. In a market full of well-funded competitors, efficient acquisition does not permanently shift how buyers think about a brand before they even open a search bar.

"This is the first year we are doing out-of-home, and we needed the share of voice and brand perception that only out-of-home is able to deliver. Those were the first dollars we invested into branding, because in the past we were only investing in performance marketing," Marsal says. The numbers supported the move. Digital ad saturation continues to erode returns for brands relying solely on online channels, and at a certain scale, formats that cannot be optimized away start to make more financial sense. A broader class of digital-native brands is reallocating budget toward upper-funnel channels as performance-only models show their limits.

The foundation effect

The brand is not planning a second major OOH push in the near term, and that restraint is part of the strategy. The first campaign was designed to function as infrastructure, a brand foundation that lifts the channels around it rather than a one-time awareness spike.

"The different channels that we are activating, including community, paid ads, and TV, are seeing improvement thanks to that strong foundation that out-of-home established for our branding," Marsal says. The creative assets and social proof generated by the billboard campaign continue to feed paid and CTV without requiring additional large-format spend. The OOH investment is still working.

The forward strategy leans into audience density rather than geographic scale. At Cannes Lions and Shoptalk, the room is full of exactly the buyers Vibe wants to reach, which changes what the creative can do. "Cannes Lions has CMOs and CROs from all the top companies out there, so you can really be way more product-driven because you know that if you show your product and speak about specific use cases, they will understand it," he explains. Where the New York campaign had to speak to everyone, Cannes lets Vibe speak to someone specific.

For performance marketers who still treat OOH as a legacy channel, Vibe's playbook offers a reframing. The medium is expensive because it solves a problem that digital cannot, and brands applying digital-targeting logic to physical placements are finding that the results appear in the metrics they already track.

"We know it's the only format that has that share of voice and that repeat," Marsal says. "And that's why it's expensive."