Eleven boards beat forty

A client came to us with a plan for forty boards across Skopje. It had been priced, it was affordable, and it covered the city the way a map covers a country — evenly, and without telling you anything about where anyone actually goes.

We booked eleven instead, all of them on two corridors, and spent the difference on holding them for twice as long. The reasoning is ordinary once you say it out loud: a person driving to work does not see forty boards. They see the four that are on their route, and they see them twice a day for as long as the campaign runs.

Reach counts how many people saw the campaign once. Frequency counts how many times the people who matter saw it. A category nobody thinks about until they need it — insurance, clinics, tyres — is not won by being seen once by everyone. It is won by being the name somebody already half-remembers on the day they start looking.

The forty-board plan would have delivered a larger number in the post-campaign report. It would also have been forgotten by the second week, because no single person would have encountered it often enough to keep it. The eleven boards were still being mentioned in the client's own sales calls two months after they came down.

This is not an argument for small budgets. It is an argument for spending them narrowly. The question a plan has to answer is not "how many people can this reach" but "how many times will the right person see it", and most plans are built to make the first number look good.