Late night Los Angeles during lockdown felt like you’d wandered onto a set after everyone went home.
Streetlights, neon, palm trees swaying in the wind, but there were no people to admire any of it. Just the occasional car sliding through an intersection way too fast. The air was cooler than it should’ve been. Everything sounded farther away.
I’d been working on a Tinder campaign called Put Yourself Out There, which is a phrase that reads like a motivational poster until you attach it to something real. The idea was simple in the way the best ideas are, and slightly unhinged in the way advertising requires:
People screenshotted their Tinder bios.
We put them on billboards.
New York, LA, Vancouver.
Actual billboards. The kind that don’t just exist as mock-ups in a deck. The kind you can’t close with Command-W.
And Tinder bios are their own little genre of American literature. A bio is someone trying to be funny without sounding like they’re trying to be funny. Someone trying to be honest without sounding like they’re asking for help.
We took those lines, those tiny attempts at being seen, and blew them up to billboard scale.
The campaign went live while LA was locked down. Which meant “out there” was mostly theoretical. The city was still LA, technically, but it felt like it was running in low power mode. Work continued through screens and emails and group chats, but none of it felt like it landed anywhere. It was all inside the computer. Clean, reversible, easy to pretend it didn’t matter.
One night, late, I put on shoes and walked up my street to Sunset Boulevard. At the top of the hill, Sunset opens up. Even empty, it still looks like itself: wide, glossy, slightly smug. A boulevard designed to be looked at.
And there was the digital billboard, cycling through ads over an almost silent street.
I stood on the corner and waited, watching the rotation. Like I was waiting for a sign, which, technically, I was.
Then our campaign showed up.
A Tinder bio, blown up to the size of a small building. A sentence someone typed in bed, probably in sweatpants, now floating over Sunset Boulevard.
And it hit me in a way I didn’t expect. Not pride exactly. Not joy, joy felt like an emotion we were all rationing at the time. It was more like a quiet, physical relief.
Proof that something I made had left my laptop and entered the world.
Advertising is strange like that. You spend weeks building something meant to exist in public, and then it goes live and disappears into the scenery. You rarely get to experience it the way a stranger does. It becomes wallpaper. It dissolves.
But that night I experienced it. Fully. Alone.
Which felt both wrong and weirdly perfect, because lockdown made everything communal private. Big moments got smaller. Career highs happened in kitchens. Celebrations happened in group texts. The world kept moving, but it moved behind closed doors.
So I stood there on Sunset Boulevard at midnight, watching a stranger’s bio loop through a billboard schedule, thinking about what “put yourself out there” means when the world has told everyone to stay inside.
That’s why it’s still a career defining moment for me. Not because it was glamorous. Not because it was shared. But because it was tangible. Because in the middle of a year that felt flattened and muted, something I made existed at full volume, lit up over a quiet street, whether anyone was there to see it or not.
I walked home a few minutes later. I didn’t post it. I didn’t make it content. I don’t even remember if I took a photo.
I just kept the moment to myself, like a receipt.
Like: Okay. This is real. The world is still out there. And apparently, so is my work.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Photo Credit: Steven Pahel
Love that the campaign was called Put Yourself Out There during covid. The irony.