Looking for a new tattoo? OpenBB has you covered… literally.

Exploring unconventional ways to increase brand visibility, OpenBB's co-founder gets a tattoo of the company logo. This blog post discusses the thought process behind this unique marketing strategy.

When OpenBB Terminal started last year, I went from having your typical career as a Software Engineer to becoming a co-founder & CEO of a C-Corporation overnight. One thing that I’ve really learnt from this change, is I can no longer code for 12–16 hours a day straight as my role now involves so much more than this… and most interestingly, one of those things is marketing.

During Easter in Lisbon, I was thinking about how to increase the visability of OpenBB. An investment research platform for everyone, anywhere. Seems self-explanatory and something most of us would relate to, but the problem is reaching a bigger audience.

Due to our $8.5M funding we have money in the bank, which means we can afford to do some ads campaigns. However, I very much dislike the traditional type of ads, whether that is with Google, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube. Particularly YouTube ones, when I see an ad there I immediately think less of the product being advertised due to how intrusive these are.

That’s why I started thinking of ways to share our OpenBB brand in a non-intrusive way. In fact, I went one step further and started thinking when I personally would welcome ads.

Funnily enough, the first thing that came to my mind was when I go to the bathroom without my phone. Although there’s no ads on the back of shampoos/shower gel/soap/spray, I would very much welcome them.

It’s not like knowing the %s of ingredients that makes up cleaning products has a lot of use cases…

This brought me to the conclusion that I would only welcome ads if I was bored and didn’t have anything keeping me “too busy”. This immediately made me think of London underground ads (the most effective type of DOOH imho). I always read those ads. The main reason being that I don’t have WiFi underground and the noise is too loud to listen to a podcast. Hence, I imagined the underground looking like:

When I checked for the prices, I was looking at a marketing campaign for a couple of days in a couple of stations costing over 5 digits, which is quite expensive for the short time-span.

Therefore, I started to think of cheaper alternatives that yielded a better ROI. The next thing that passed through my mind was wearing OpenBB swag (yet to be revealed, subscribe to our newsletter to know more). However, I feel like nowadays everyone has a t-shirt with a different logo and these aren’t as noticeable as before — at least that’s my perspective.

This lead me to think: What about a tattoo? It’s a similar concept than OpenBB clothes but more powerful. In addition, when wearing OpenBB clothes with a visible tattoo, this will create a “curiosity” effect since the symbol is repeated (clothes and tattoo). In addition, I’ve not come across anyone using their body to express their brand.

Later that day I booked a tattoo slot, paid 100 euros, and got the OpenBB logo on the back of my arm as shown below,

I will let you know on my socials how many people ask about this tattoo over the course of my life.

And if you like our logo and our values, OpenBB will pay you for the tattoo.

One things for sure, now I can definitely put the gym membership as a company expense since I’m a walking billboard 😄

The first walking/running/coding/eating/drinking OpenBB billboard.