How Carvel created the first ice cream–dispensing billboard

If you thought billboards were just for looks, think again. They’re also for licks.

Carvel recently installed an ice cream-dispensing billboard in the West Village in Manhattan, serving up more than 50 gallons of soft serve, or about 1,500 servings, over the course of a seven-hour activation in mid-June. It was, according to the company, the first billboard of its kind.

“Knowing that [Carvel was] born and raised and created in New York, we wanted to find something that was uniquely [and] iconically New York, and the billboard scene definitely is that,” Marissa Sharpless, VP of marketing for Carvel at GoTo Foods, told us. “But we didn’t want to just do a billboard. We wanted to take it another step and really go big.”

And so, the decision to put a soft-serve machine inside of a billboard was born. With a full-team effort, it all came together for what Sharpless described as the “most unique way” Carvel has kicked off ice-cream season to date.

Just add sprinkles

Creating the world’s first soft-serve-dispenser billboard required a “giant team effort” from Carvel’s marketing team, agency partners, operations team, and production and brand vendors, Sharpless told us. The first step, she said, was finding a street-level billboard location that had both power and water hookups. Sharpless said she had seen other brands use 137 Perry Street for indoor pop-ups, and the team determined that the space could work for an outdoor pop-up, too, both logistically and for generating foot traffic.

Then came the question of how to actually dispense the ice cream—and whether the space could hold the amount of product they thought they would need.

“Okay, now how do we make sure we can get a fridge in this space that can hold all of the soft-serve mix that we hope to be able to go through and serve everybody?” she said. “We wanted to make sure that no one would walk away disappointed.”

With the help of the brand’s production team and vendor partners, Carvel was able to retrofit a machine and get to work building the pop-up at 6am the day of the event, which kicked off at noon.

“We had our machine vendors and our executive chefs on site to ensure the product was perfect and the machines were running perfectly; we had our field team and operations team there to help dispense all of that product,” she said. “And then, of course, we had our full staff of marketing team members and agency partners out there engaging with our guests.”

Given New York’s spate of rainy weather, Sharpless said Carvel was prepared with backup ideas, but on the day of the event, the sun came through. “We were prepared with ponchos,” she said, “but ultimately, we were going to do this rain or shine.”

To generate awareness of the event and attract visitors, Sharpless said Carvel’s marketing team focused on organic social, posting teaser content and inviting creators to come to the event. Between June 17 and June 19, there were more than 160 million potential impressions from the content, in addition to the audience of about 1.3 million from the unpaid creator content that came out of the event, she said.

The main goals of the ice-cream billboard were to drive awareness of Carvel and encourage sign-ups for the brand’s rewards program, Fudgie Fanatics, Sharpless said, but the experience also provided the additional insight that billboards could work as a future marketing strategy.

“One of the surprises that we had when we were building it out was the amount of people that asked, ‘Is a Carvel actually coming to this location?’” she said. “It’s a unique way to think of potentially teasing future locations or as a way to test and see if locations are of interest to local communities.”