The trendiest new OOH ad buys might be on a creator’s wall—or dog

In early October, Shayla Wolfe, a high school senior, had an idea for how to pay for college. She was explaining Times Square billboards to an exchange student her family was hosting when inspiration struck: What if she turned her walls into her own personal Times Square and sold ad spots online?

So she posted a TikTok explaining the offering, showing her wall with tape separating the space into various sized rectangles with correlating prices, and inviting any brand to buy a spot.

“When I posted it, it got literally no attention at first, and I was gonna delete it,” Wolfe told us. “My brother was like, ‘Just keep it up for the night.’ And I woke up, and it blew up.”

Brands big and small found Wolfe’s video, and companies began snagging wall ads, which originally cost between $25 and $500 a pop. The low price opened the door for several small businesses at the outset, with ad buys from companies like Big Wool Balls, a laundry-gadget company, and the independent baking business Chloe’s Giant Cookies. Wolfe said she wasn’t picky at first, even accepting individual Venmo account ads, as she sees the ad wall as an equal opportunity for brands of all sizes.

In the couple of weeks since her original video, brand interest has grown so fast that she’s added five walls in her family’s home, with specialty spots going up to $2,000. Now, brands like Lyft, GoFundMe, the New York Mets, and other heavy hitters are getting in on it, and Wolfe is trying to choose brands to work with that create a more focused narrative, she said.

In other words, some of the most in-demand OOH ad spots of late might actually be inside someone’s home.

Wolfe is not the first person to sell ad space on personal, physical belongings. In August, founder and creator Vincent Seube made an offer on X for ad space on his laptop in the form of stickers; interest was so high that he turned his viral moment into an official online marketplace business called BrandMyLaptop, which allows anyone to list their personal laptop to brands (Seube takes a percentage of the profits). Before that, similarly oddball physical ads have captured the internet’s and brands’ attention: Dawson Gunn, the creator behind @TooCuteLabs on TikTok, sold ad space on the backs of his two dogs earlier this year, while Dagobert Renouf, an entrepreneur, sold ad space on his wedding tuxedo last year.

Wolfe is hoping to ride this attention wave to its crest, which she hopes will allow her to fund a college education while using the experience as a stepping stone to a longer content-creation career. In fact, she thinks being the ad-wall girl could become her niche.

“I think it is helping me become a creator that’s more known for one thing,” she said. “Like, ‘That’s the girl that sold her wall.’”

Low risk, high reward

Whether Wolfe’s creator career takes off might not really matter to the brands that have bought in. For brands like Big Wool Balls, buying ad space was more about getting in on the moment and maximizing the amount of eyeballs while attention was high, co-founder Jeremy Carson told us.

“Normally we think [our marketing] through from a paid approach, but we’re definitely always looking for different random opportunities that you can kind of hijack the attention instead of trying to create it on your own,” he said. “As a small brand, it’s hard to do that.”

He also recognizes that brand involvement can be a bit of a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” in the sense that brand interest creates more legitimacy for audiences and other, higher-profile brands. In the case of Wolfe’s wall, the New York Mets later joined the fray—and for the baseball team, the purpose was to try something new and signal support for the creator economy as a way to connect with Gen Z and millennial women, Mets VP of Marketing Trisha Donlin told us.

The stunt “speaks to the bigger philosophy of the organization, which is always taking calculated risks and challenging the traditional model of sports marketing,” Donlin said. “I can count on [more than] two hands the number of calculated risks I’ve taken that have paid off, and I think this is a low-risk, high-reward type of thing.”

Both Big Wool Balls and the Mets opted for the biggest slot Wolfe initially offered, which cost $500—big, perhaps, for Wolfe, but an extremely attractive price in Donlin’s eyes, especially when compared to other ad buys, like panel screens in New York transit hubs. With such a low cost of entry, it was easier for the Mets to overlook nominal risks, including the fact that Wolfe’s audience is likely not entirely New York-based, Donlin said.

Big Wool Balls, meanwhile, saw the opportunity as just another test similar to the paid ads it typically runs.

“At worst, you get the people who were already going to see the video that she normally gets views on, which were, several thousand,” Carson said. “You pay a good amount of money for that anyway.”

Here for a good time, not a long time

One key piece of Wolfe’s offering is a promise: If a brand buys an ad spot, they claim it for a month—and then get first dibs on renewing it the next month. For now, both Big Wool Balls and the Mets aren’t sure if they’ll take her up on it, waiting to see how long audiences are interested in the phenomenon and what kinds of returns they see.

Carson said that he has paused other forms of advertising, and has so far seen five times more organic sales than baseline—an increase over the usual three times increase he sees with paid ads. Still, he recognizes the potentially short-term nature of the entire endeavor, which is mostly the point.

“I think we knew that it probably wasn’t going to go on in perpetuity, and it’s probably going to have a relatively short shelf life,” he said. “But that’s kind of the risk you take and the point of getting into stuff like this. If it was consistent, if it was long-term, and if it was predictable, it wouldn’t be what it is.”

He hopes Wolfe finds more success, especially in funding college, and said he thinks her human interest angle helped her endeavor take off in the first place.

He also wondered how her mom feels about their family home’s walls becoming ad space. Turns out, he needn’t worry too much.

“At first, she was kind of like, ‘Whoa,’” Wolfe said. “Now she’s like all for it. She’s like, ‘Oh, come on, sell another spot.’”