How to Capture Attention Instantly - The Billboard Test Explained: (Micro-Lesson)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

Today I'm going to talk about a mental model that Dave introduced me to when I first started at exit 5. And that mental model is called the Billboard test. The billboard test is best used when you're reviewing a piece of copy. It could be an advertisement, a social media post, an email, you know, something like an ad creative, also like a design or video, something where you need to quickly grab the attention of your audience. And the billboard test is exactly what it sounds like. If someone was driving by your ad or your copy at full speed on the highway, would it catch their eye? And the reason I love this is because it's representative of how people behave in regular life. For example, when someone is scrolling through social media, you know, they're scrolling through their feed super fast or they're if they're on TikTok, they're scrolling, you know, video by video and they're really only stopping for the things that pique their interest right away. Same thing. If somebody is, you know, skimming their email inbox trying to clear it, they're going through it super fast. The average attention span is somewhere around, I think it's around 8 to 10 seconds. But I think you really only have a split second or so to pique someone's interest enough to earn the 10 seconds of the average attention span. And then within the average 10 seconds of attention span, then you have to earn the next 60 seconds or the next couple of minutes. Okay, so how do you put the billboard test into practice? So the next time you write a social post, create an ad, create an email, video, image, whatever it is, think if someone was driving by this at full speed, would it stop them? And to understand if it would stop them, you have to understand what makes a good billboard. And I broke it down into three things. Number one, it has a clear and concise message. So the message should be understood in a couple of seconds, as that's the amount of time people are spending reviewing your thing. It uses bold, readable fonts, and it also uses minimal text, ideally seven words or fewer. And it also focuses on a single compelling idea or call to action. It's not trying to stuff a bunch of things into one message. It's a simple, clear and concise short message. Number two, eye catching visuals. So most billboards use the good ones, use high quality imagery or some kind of striking graphic with, you know, bold colors or contrast to really stand out. Or they use something that is, you know, super creative or invoke some kind of emotion. So eye catching visuals is a. Is number two. Number three is some kind of memorability through creativity. Right. A billboard ad copy needs to have some kind of lasting impression. So it needs to be creative. It needs to kind of be unexpected to the average person. That's how it stands out. So you can do that by using humor, you can use wordplay, you can use, you know, striking design that is unique, something that is unique to the elements around it. So in a billboard, you know, sometimes they'll use the local area and they'll. They'll do a play on that. Well, the same thing in your marketing is can you use where the message is being seen as a creative way to make your thing stand out? All right, so that's what makes a good billboard. And you can use those same elements to critique your own work and make your marketing stand out using the billboard test. All right, catch you guys next time.

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