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

In this episode, we’re delivering another B2B marketing lesson in under 10 minutes.

Matthew Carnevale, Marketing Manager at Exit Five, introduces the "Billboard Test," a mental model to evaluate whether your marketing copy can grab attention in an instant. Inspired by how billboards must captivate drivers at full speed, this test helps you refine your ads, social posts, and emails for today’s audience.

Matthew shares three key elements of the Billboard Test—concise messaging, eye-catching visuals, and memorability through creativity—and explains how to apply them to make your marketing impossible to ignore. By the end, you’ll know how to capture attention and hold it, even in the busiest of feeds.

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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 5,000+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.

The billboard test
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[00:00:00] Today I'm going to talk about a mental model that Dave introduced me to when I first started at ExaFive, and that mental model is called the billboard test. The billboard test is best used when you're reviewing a piece of copy, uh, it could be an advertisement, a, Social media post, an email, um, 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 [00:01:00] on scrolling, you know, video by video. And they're really only stopping for the things that peak 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 eight to 10 seconds. But I think you really only have a split second or so to peak 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.[00:02:00]

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 is 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 contrasts to really stand out.

, or they use something that is, you know, super creative or invokes some kind of emotion. So eye catching visuals is [00:03:00] 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. Uh, 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.