By Alexis Hernandez-Lang
Two weeks ago, I was in Chicago, and one morning, a few days into my trip, I was walking to grab a local coffee and noticed something that immediately stood out to me: advertising felt completely different from what we experience in Fargo-Moorhead.
It wasn’t just the volume of ads. It was how brands showed up, where they appeared, and how people interacted with them. The experience reinforced an important truth in marketing: advertising strategies aren’t universal; they’re shaped by how people move through a city.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
In large metropolitan areas like Chicago, advertising is designed around people on foot.
With dense populations, heavy pedestrian traffic, and widespread public transit use, brands have an opportunity to reach audiences at eye level, literally. Throughout the city, interactive street-level billboards were everywhere. These weren’t traditional highway billboards; they were vertical digital displays positioned along sidewalks and transit corridors.
Many included movement, rotating, creative, or dynamic messaging. Major brands like Amazon, DoorDash, and Miller Lite dominated these placements, which makes sense given the investment required to participate in large digital billboard networks.
Some displays even rotated messaging across multiple languages, reflecting the cultural diversity of a larger city audience. The visuals often stayed consistent while the copy adapted, allowing brands to connect with different communities in a meaningful way.
The goal of these placements wasn’t immediate conversion. Instead, they focused on awareness, cultural relevance, and brand experience, creating something interesting enough to catch attention during everyday movement through the city.
The reason this works in Chicago is simple: people are walking.
When audiences move slowly through an environment, walking, waiting for transit, or gathering in public spaces, advertisers gain more time to communicate. That extra attention span allows for:
Even sidewalk decals and ground-level signage felt intentional. Some promoted local activities, like nearby attractions or park events, guiding pedestrians toward experiences as they walked. QR codes made sense here because they let people safely engage in real time.
The environment supports interaction.
In Fargo-Moorhead and similar Midwest communities, movement patterns are completely different.
People primarily travel by car, not by foot. Commuters travel along highways and interstates, where exposure to advertising is measured in seconds rather than minutes.
Because of this, sidewalk or pedestrian-focused advertising often doesn’t deliver a strong return on investment locally. Outside of short windows, like downtown events or seasonal markets, there simply isn’t enough consistent foot traffic to justify permanent street-level advertising installations.
That doesn’t mean these tactics never work here. They just work situationally, not continuously.
Events like the local markets or growing downtown districts can temporarily create pedestrian environments where experiential advertising makes sense. But those moments are exceptions rather than the norm.
Instead, advertising in smaller cities is optimized for drivers.
That’s why taller, large-format billboards dominate regional marketing strategies. They align with how audiences actually move through the area, consistently traveling the same roadways each day.
However, this introduces a new challenge: speed.
Drivers may only see a billboard for two or three seconds. That dramatically limits how much information can realistically be communicated.
This is where many billboard campaigns struggle to feel an impact or determine ROI.
Including QR codes, long URLs, or detailed phone numbers assumes interaction that simply isn’t practical or safe when someone is driving. While impression data may be high, true engagement is often much lower.
In these environments, simplicity wins:
The goal shifts from interaction to memorability.
Whether online or offline, advertising often reports success through impressions, the number of times people potentially saw a message.
But exposure alone doesn’t equal impact.
In pedestrian-heavy cities, advertising can encourage real interaction because audiences have time to engage. In driving markets, success depends more on brand recall and repeated visibility over time.
Understanding that difference helps businesses choose strategies that align with real audience behavior rather than trends from larger markets.
One of the biggest misconceptions in advertising is that successful tactics from large cities should automatically work everywhere.
In reality, effective marketing starts with a much simpler question:
How do people move through this community?
The best advertising doesn’t just follow creative trends, it follows human behavior.
And sometimes, the biggest marketing insight comes from simply paying attention while walking through a different city.
