Dan Smith has put up 1.5 million flyers advertising guitar lessons. Now he’s on a Times Square billboard

If you’re in New York City, go out for a walk today and treat it as a scavenger hunt: See if you can spot a Dan Smith flyer.

Chances are, you can. Smith, a guitar teacher, has been papering the city for nearly 35 years, advertising his services to prospective students with simple flyers that read, “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar.”

“That was me trying to be as direct as possible,” Smith told Marketing Brew of his copywriting style. Early on, “there were a few other guitar teaching flyers around, and a lot of what they talked about was the guitar teacher themselves…That seemed really irrelevant to me. I wanted to put the focus on the student and what they could expect when they called me.”

Smith’s direct and dogged approach with his flyers has made him a notable New York City fixture and a regular pop culture reference. Last month, his flyer got a new stage—albeit with the same plain-yet-familiar Word design—with a Times Square billboard that will be up through October 12, made possible through a partnership with HP.

Promoting Smith with a billboard isn’t an act of altruism, of course—instead, Smith’s posters are a way to highlight the value of a high-volume printer like HP’s Smart Tank. When we say high-volume, we mean it: Smith estimates that he’s printed around 1.5 million flyers over the years.

When brainstorming the campaign, the creative team tried to think of people who print at a high volume, ultimately landing on Smith, a “local legend,” Laura Morris, VP of marketing for North America at HP, told us.

For Morris, working with Smith in this capacity marked a new way for the brand to be a part of culture. “The ultimate goal in marketing is to be able to find relevant places where your brand can be inserted into culture and into local culture,” she said. “We all know what it looks like when it’s not a natural fit, and it’s forced. And we know what it looks like when it is such a natural fit.”

Smith was, of course, the latter, she said. “Printing for [Smith] is relevant,” she told us. “It is his entire marketing plan.”

The Dan Smith ads are the first edition of a new campaign from HP that plans to highlight locals around the country who use HP products for their business.

“We’re trying to find those personalities and those stories in other cities around the country,” Morris said. “Maybe it’s not printers, maybe it’s our edge AI solutions. How can we actually go do more of this with more people?”

To amplify the campaign beyond the billboard, HP also tapped a local storytelling influencer, Nicolas Heller (perhaps better known as @NewYorkNico), to create a social film. The company is also using CTV and digital to support the campaign.

As for Smith, the billboard is a culmination of the shoe leather he’s been putting in to get his name out there for over 30 years.

“To be on what feels like the biggest stage in the world is a real moment that I’ll never forget,” Smith said, adding that during an initial promotional shoot for the billboard he found himself unexpectedly moved. “I was kind of cynical, like, ‘Ah, whatever.’...No New Yorker wants to go to Times Square, but there I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ I’m just infinitely grateful to everybody on the team and everybody who conceived of this.”

Even with the amplification of his story with the new campaign, Smith has no plans to retire his signature method of advertising.

“I’m not gonna stop flyering,” Smith said. “I put up flyers today.”