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A Brex blimp flown by Buoyant flies over the San Francisco Bay.<\/p>\n
BUOYANT<\/p>\n
“How can I get one.” That, according to Kasper Koczab, is now the first question advertisers ask him. Koczab runs out-of-home media at Brex, the corporate card company, and the thing they want is not a billboard. It is a blimp, an unmanned one lifted by helium and pushed around by rotors, flying over San Francisco with a company logo on the side.<\/p>\n
The reason founders are asking is arithmetic. A Bay Area board Koczab bought less than a year ago for around $60,000 came back for renewal at $120,000 on a two-year contract, which he put at “over a 3,000,000 commitment. From single billboard. That is partly abstracted by a big pole.” It is not even a marquee placement.<\/p>\n
“Every billboard north of SF is pretty much permed out,” Koczab said in an interview, meaning the sitting advertiser holds a right of first refusal and can keep renewing. “So we have no idea when they’ll become available.” Advertisers who want a first look at what is left are planning campaigns into the second half of 2027.<\/p>\n
The market broke, so Brex went up<\/p>\n
San Francisco has almost no out-of-home inventory to begin with. Koczab counts billboards, buses, transit shelters and BART, controlled by four operators: Outfront, Clear Channel, Intersection and JCDecaux. One highway, the 101, carries the commuter traffic between the city, SFO and Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
“That’s incredibly rare,” he said. “That doesn’t exist in LA or New York City.” A city that is seven miles by seven miles is one an advertiser can plausibly blanket. That is why the 101 corridor has become the most fought-over stretch of advertising in American technology. The San Francisco Standard counted about 170 billboards along it across three counties, roughly 20 of them digital, and reported in February that AI companies had taken the corridor over during the previous 18 months with deliberately cryptic one-line copy. NPR ran its own piece on the same phenomenon in March. A single digital board near SFO was listed at $7,000 a week, which buys an eight-second slot every 64 seconds.<\/p>\n
The four-operator structure used to work in a big buyer’s favor. It no longer does. “It used to be easier to cut deals,” Koczab said. “Now every time my RFP, it’s like, oh, this just went up by 20% from last week.” One operator doubled its rates in the last week of July. He would not name it.<\/p>\n
From a $300,000 gamble to a rewards line item<\/p>\n
Brex knows the channel because the channel built it. In 2019 the company spent about $300,000 to take more than half the advertising inventory around Jackson Square for three months, according to Fortune, timed to its product launch. Cofounder Henrique Dubugras told a conference audience that year that it was cheaper than digital advertising for reaching the customers and engineers he wanted. “Brex’s own story is very much kind of rooted in billboards,” Koczab said. “Ended up getting a lot of earned media for that.”<\/p>\n
Customers noticed and started asking how it was done. Brex answered the questions, then productized them.<\/p>\n
“Every credit card offers gift cards, cashback, air miles, whatnot,” Koczab said. “But we had customers coming to us asking for, hey, can you guys fill us in on how to do billboards.” Demand was high enough that the company turned advice into a redemption category. Brex customers can now convert rewards points into out-of-home placements at 100 points to the dollar, with published minimums of 300,000 points for a campaign built around an industry event and 5 million points for a bespoke buy where Brex acts as the media agency. The public support page lists billboards, transit and airport displays. It does not yet list blimps.<\/p>\n
Card rewards are usually a way to give back a slice of interchange in a form that costs the issuer less than cash, which is why they arrive as points, miles and gift cards<\/a>. Brex is doing something else with the same mechanism. It is using rewards to sell its customers a media desk, in the same way other fintechs have started building advertising businesses on top of their own users<\/a>.<\/p>\n ‘A button inside Brex that says get a blimp’<\/p>\n The blimp arrived through the dashboard. Albie Brown, who builds software at Buoyant Aero, says he saw the redemption option on his first day.<\/p>\n “I saw there’s a button in the top right corner, I’ll never forget, that says, you know, redeem your points for a billboard,” Brown said in an interview. “And I said, Ben, someday we’re gonna have a button inside Brex that’s gonna say, get a blimp.”<\/p>\n Buoyant Aero, a Y Combinator company founded in 2020 by Ben Claman and Joseph Figura, spent years pitching unmanned airships as a way to move middle-mile cargo more cheaply than a small plane or a helicopter. The advertising business is what is flying now. Brown built a configurator for it that he calls the Brex blimp builder, with a 3D preview and a flight path over a customer’s own headquarters address.<\/p>\n Koczab, who says Buoyant’s founders approached him and that he brought them to San Francisco, thinks the tool is the part his own industry should be embarrassed about. “Most out of home companies would be envious of what you guys have built,” he said. “How easy it is.”<\/p>\n The pipeline now runs in both directions. “That’s not just Brex customers,” Brown said. “We have a funnel now of customers coming to us saying, how do I get a blimp, that we are now directing to Brex and saying, do you have any Brex points? Do you have a Brex card? Oh, you don’t? Oh, perfect. Well, I’ll introduce you to Kasper.”<\/p>\n ROI in the sky <\/p>\n Ask Koczab for the return on ad spend and he does not reach for a number.<\/p>\n “If it’s essential for you to calculate an ROI on your out of home campaign, then you just shouldn’t do an out of home campaign,” he said. “The way we approached it is, like, we don’t so much count impressions, but we are looking to make an impression. To do that, you really have to go big or don’t go out of home.”<\/p>\n He is dismissive of the measurement layer the industry has built to answer that objection. Operators and agencies will sell geofencing, mobile ad IDs and pixels on top of a buy. “I’ve yet to see that be something that people repeat,” he said, arguing an in-house team can already spot a bump in site traffic without paying a third party for the privilege.<\/p>\n What that leaves is a threshold. Koczab says he took more than 33 calls from founders in a single month and talks a good share of them out of it. A board in a weak location, bought small to test the channel, teaches the founder that out-of-home does not work. His minimum for a conventional four to six week campaign in San Francisco is $300,000. The alternatives he offers are a tight buy around an industry event, or being first in a format nobody has seen.<\/p>\n “The human brain has not evolved to take in the amount of information that we have to take in on a daily basis,” he said. “We don’t even see half the ads. When suddenly there’s a blimp flying over your head, it’s kinda hard not to pay attention.”<\/p>\n The people selling attention by the thousand disagree<\/p>\n That threshold looks very strange next to what the rest of the attention market now costs.<\/p>\n Daniel Bitton, who runs a content-rewards marketplace that pays creators to clip and post brand footage, said on the On The Margin podcast that “the average CPM on our platform is around a dollar, which if you compare that to the average paid CPM of like 40 to $80, it’s a no brainer for companies to try this.” His pitch is that distribution can be bought wholesale<\/a>, by volume, and measured.<\/p>\n