The brief - Onescreen needed a piece for brands (B2B and B2C) about to make their first OOH (billboard/out-of-home) buy, who default to maximizing visibility because more impressions feels like the safe bet. The piece had to reframe that instinct as the actual source of wasted spend, then hand over a concrete framework for fixing it, without opening with a sales pitch for Onescreen's planning service.

The angle - I built the piece around an inventory vs. audience distinction: brands think they're buying ad space, but what they're actually buying (or failing to buy) is access to a specific buyer. The opening reframes "buy more billboards" as the same mistake as bidding on every keyword in your industry, then backs it with hard numbers (65% of location-based ad spend wasted on poor targeting, OOH spend hitting $9.13B in 2024) to make the cost of the default approach concrete rather than abstract. From there, the piece hands over an actual diagnostic tool: a four-part audience identification checklist (Who, What, When & Where, Why), each with its own research methods and B2B/B2C-specific guidance. The "start small, validate, then scale" close gives readers a sequence they can run immediately. Onescreen's pitch only appears on the final page, after the reader already has a usable framework.

Sample line -

"What you're really doing is buying inventory instead of buying an audience."

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