How 2 Competitor Billboard Ads Went Viral to Help AiSDR

The best-performing ad campaigns for AiSDR weren’t even ours 🙃

It’s one of every sales team’s worst nightmares. You run an ad campaign, expecting to see good results, only to discover that you drove people not to you, but to your competitor.

You essentially give them free business. And this is exactly what two of our competitors did.

Here’s the story of each one.

Story 1: Qualified billboard

After Brex’s success running billboard ads, many Y Combinator companies started to invest heavily in billboard ads in San Francisco. That’s why if you happened to be walking through San Franciso a few months ago, you might have seen this billboard.

But here’s the kicker… It wasn’t our billboard.

It actually belongs to Qualified, which sells an AI SDR named Piper.

But when you see the ad, you don’t remember Qualified (which, if you’re curious, is tucked away in the bottom left). 

And you don’t remember Piper. Instead, you remember “AI SDR”, and when you google it, you find AiSDR.

Thanks to this ad (which wasn’t even ours), we saw:

• 40% growth in organic traffic
• 60% growth in direct traffic
• 89% more demos booked from organic traffic
• 148% more demos booked from direct traffic
• 272% more demos booked as a result of a related post by Yuriy on LinkedIn
• 2 deals closed

All within days of the billboard going up.

Story 2: Copy.ai billboard

Attack ads are nothing new. Look no further than late October/early November when Americans were inundated with attack ads during the run-up to the election.

Every commercial break seemed chock-full of 3-4 attack ads (made watching football not as enjoyable 🥲). 

And that brings us to our next viral ad post.

Copy.ai ran a billboard campaign, though in their case, it was billboard space they received for free. This made the risk of driving traffic to a competitor not as painful.

Their goal was to create awareness about the potential pitfalls of AI SDRs and try to nudge people to consider Copy.ai as an alternative. The language, however, is clearly on the offensive, criticizing the concept of AI SDRs.

Yet instead of remembering the URL, people remembered AI SDR. So when they got home (or to work), they started googling and found AiSDR.

But the real boost occurred in early November when Copy.ai’s Kyle Coleman made a post on LinkedIn that shared this billboard.

The snap reaction triggered an extensive back-and-forth across several LinkedIn posts about the optics of a large company (Copy.ai) targeting a smaller start-up (AiSDR). And this led to more traffic and demos.

To sprinkle in another layer of complexity and drama, there was a second debate about the merits of basing a company’s name directly on the industry or category.

How to name a company?

It might come as no surprise, but the reason we rolled with the name AiSDR is because we sell an AI SDR service.

There are a lot of hot takes and debates about whether picking a literal category-based name for your business is a smart or silly idea. But both sides can be boiled down to this:

Time will tell if a literal name is the right or wrong choice. 

But there are several examples of companies that use a literal name instead of a creative name with a hidden meaning:

• OpenAI
• Chat.com 
• The Boring Company 
• Crypto.com
• Rent-a-Car
• International Business Machines (or “IBM” for short)
• Airbus
• Google (an intentional misspelling of ‘Googol’)

Then there are companies that chose a simple name based on a real or mythological figure (we’re excluding people who named the company after themselves… 😅):

• Nike
• Tesla
• Pandora

Seems like the simple choice worked out for them.

Naming an AI SDR

Now here’s the challenge. Most of the companies I mentioned above have something going for them, such as a famous founder (e.g. Elon Musk, Sam Altman). 

With AI still in its infancy, and most AI SDRs searching for a strong product-market fit, it’s up to AI SDR companies to pave their path. 

These are some of the names of AiSDR’s competitors:

• Artisan
• 11x
• OneShot
• Unify
• Regie
• Relevance

At first glance, it’s not 100% clear and obvious what they’re selling. And unless you’re already familiar with the brand, you won’t guess that they’re selling an AI SDR.

To get around this, many AI SDR companies follow in the footsteps of Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri by naming their AI, such as:

But how can you keep all the names straight if every company is naming their AI SDR? Especially if you’re naming your AIs differently for different functions. Does Ava really perform differently from Alice? What’s the difference between Mike and Jordan?

At some point, naming an AI starts to lose its memorability. Instead, you just get confused, asking yourself, “Is Ava by Artisan or 11x?”, “Who’s Jason with?”, or “Where’d Jordan go?”

Are we happy with the AiSDR name?

At AiSDR, we feel there’s no real need to brand our AI with a name. 

First, people already know that when they do business with AiSDR, they’re buying an AI agent that will carry out AI SDR responsibilities.

Second, our approach to AI-powered outreach is to create unique sales personas that mirror your voice, your sales rep’s voice, or your favorite sales leader. And since each persona is truly unique, there’s no need to brand the AI with a name. What would be the point?

Still, the general sentiment of many is that it’s the founder’s choice at the end of the day. And if the founder’s happy with the name, that’s all that really matters.

And for the record, our founder is happy with the name AiSDR 🙂