Speculative art, or “spec art,” is a valuable tool for showcasing your company’s capabilities to help potential clients see creative ideas that are ready to be used right at that time. It is necessary to display the artwork in a professional way, explaining strategy and providing mock-ups and rationale behind each piece. By doing this, you help clients make an educated choice in investing in an out of home billboard campaign.

How to Create Spec Art for a Company

Step 1: Do Your Research

First, you’ll need to identify what products and services the business offers, and then you’ll need to identify what pain points and problems that those products and services solve for their customers. After you truly know what the business does and how they help their customers, you will have a great starting point in creating an advertisement that makes sense for the business system. Great advertising in general is usually a message that resonates very relevantly to the target audience, with a solution to their problem and a call to action to connect the customer to the business. As long as the customers get on the phone, message them or interact on social media, email them, visit the website, or visit the store location, we have done our job.

• Review the website to see how they are speaking to clients as a standard long term.
• Review Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to see what they are saying right now.
• Specifically look for the deals and promotions that they are running. See who commented. See what people are saying on their reviews and what helped them stand out.
• Review their image styles, and consider similar imagery or the same imagery.
• Review their brand fonts, colors, and try to find a vector logo. If they don’t have a vector logo, vectorize their logo for them in Adobe Illustrator. They will see that you took the time to do this and will appreciate it.

Step 2: Create at Least (3) Concepts

When you’re targeting a business that has never done out of home, and especially out of home advertising with your business, you’ll need to create at least (3) concepts to give them some confidence in your strategy and process. Do (5) at the most. I have done over 20 for a business once, but they get easily overwhelmed and don’t know what to choose. If you have a time where you make so many, I strongly recommend you choose and sort out the best concepts for their convenience and separate the best of the best, ranked by your expertise as a consultant.

Another strongly recommended idea to this process is to only show them the ones you want them to see. Do not show a client an idea that you think is weaker than another you made. Use it for backup and keep working on it. Having some to use as a backup helps too, because they may want to focus on a very specific category. As long as they want to try billboards, we’ve inspired them to want to do that.

Spec Art 1: General Brand Awareness

The first piece of speculative art should be a general brand awareness billboard that aligns with their marketing that has a strong headline, a clear logo, and a clear call to action. This is generally a great billboard that aligns perfectly with their brand, and likely says an already-approved headline or your suggestion on a headline that sounds the same, but is 7 words or less.

Spec Art 2: Sales-Minded Promotion

The second piece of speculative art should showcase one of their existing sales promotions announced proudly and loudly on the billboard, ensuring that the offer stands out legibly from a distance, making sure everyone is aware of the sales offer. You can take an existing offer that you found on their website or social media and make the best version of it you possibly can, or if they don’t have any content, make a good sales promotion for them based on their most popular products, and research their industry to make your messaging.

Spec Art 3-5: Powerful New Concepts

This year, we want to win awards at the OBIEs. To do that, we have to be able to provide strong concept recommendations for every client in order to get the chance to put it on the road. Once it’s on the road and it provides effective, data-driven results, we have a great chance to do that. We can only do that if we’ve done our research, and proven to the client we’ve done our research about them and that our ideas are good enough to be considered and approved. In order to get the approval, we must showcase our ability to our clients and account executives in a way that shows them that we know what we’re doing, and that they can trust in our process and concepts. By doing our research for concepts 1 and 2, we have proven our research that allows us to provide concepts 3 to 5 to convince clients to use a creative, conceptual idea rather than their general brand awareness and sales promotions.

Spec Art 3: Creative Custom Imagery

Spec Art 4: Bold Funny Headline

Spec Art 5: Strong Headline to Build Trust

Step 3: The Presentation

The Wes Frick Design Agency checklist is a 100-point checklist that covers pretty much everything in the billboard design process. If all of these things are accounted for, the design is exceptional. When you use and review this checklist or make a similar approach, you consider everything possible in the design. You can use it to your advantage and make really nice artwork.

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