How to Promote a Product Launch With a $4 Billboard in a 3D City

Every launch needs a place to point people

A drop lives or dies on the week before it. That's when people need to hear about it, note the date and put their name down. Most of the work happens on channels you already own: your email list, your Instagram, your X account, the Discord or Facebook group where your regulars hang out.

Those channels need something to point at. A plain "new collection Friday" post gives followers nothing to look at and nothing to share. A launch post that says "our drop is on a billboard in a 3D city, go drive past it" gives them both.

That's the job this guide gives a billboard on The Pillar. A billboard here won't carry your launch's traffic. It gives the launch a cheap, physical-feeling stage with its own link, which makes your announcement posts more interesting and sends anyone interested to your waitlist.

What The Pillar is

The Pillar is a free 3D city that runs in a web browser, on desktop and on phones, with nothing to install. Players walk, drive, fly a helicopter or a plane and glide in a wingsuit through the streets, with other players in the same city at the same time. There are loot boxes with cartoon weapons, a daily treasure hunt, and an 80-floor tower in the middle of it all.

Every window on that tower and every billboard on the buildings around it is ad space. There are 1,920 windows and 187 billboards. Windows cost $9 to $392.85 a month depending on the floor. Billboards cost $4 to $8 a month depending on how visible the building is. You rent a spot by the month through Stripe, and you can cancel any time.

A spot is a licence to show your ad, not property. The Pillar's own definition puts it this way: a window is a licensed ad pane on its 80-floor tower, not real property and not a security. Billboards work the same way.

I built The Pillar, and I also build EZDrop, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. The launch plan below works with any waitlist tool, or with a plain sign-up page.

Why a billboard suits a launch

Windows hold a logo. Billboards hold a picture, and a launch is mostly a picture: the product, the colourway, the label, the cover art.

A billboard on The Pillar sits on top of a building out in the city, where players drive and fly past. You can show your logo on it or a full-bleed banner, and billboards come in many shapes, from nearly square to about nine times wider than tall. When you rent one, the checkout shows a live preview shaped like the exact board you picked, and you drag your image around until the product sits right.

Three more things make it fit a launch.

First, the price is small enough to be an afterthought. At $4 to $8 for the month, the billboard costs less than shipping one order. You don't need a business case to try it.

It gives you something to post. Every lit spot on The Pillar has its own page with a link preview card, so your launch post can carry a link that previews properly on X, iMessage and Slack, and sends anyone who taps it straight to your sign in the city.

And the game opens at night. The city's default look is its neon night, with lit windows and glowing signs, which is a good backdrop for launch art with bright colours.

The launch timeline

This plan is for a drop with a fixed date, working back from launch day.

Three weeks out: decide what the sign says

Pick the image before you rent anything. Your best product shot, cropped wide, is usually the right choice. A single product on a plain or dark background holds up at a distance. A busy lifestyle photo turns into noise.

Decide the words, too, and keep them short: the drop's name, maybe a word or two more. The panel that opens when someone taps your billboard already shows your pitch, a pricing line and your link, so the banner doesn't need to carry them.

Leave the date off the banner. There's no self-serve editing after checkout yet, so a date on the sign will still be there after the drop sells out. "Spring Run 03" ages fine. "Drops May 15" doesn't.

Two weeks out: rent the billboard and point it at your waitlist

Open thepillar.io, head into the city and tap a billboard on a building you like. Sign in with X when it asks; you need an account to rent a spot, though not to play. Paste your store's address and The Pillar fills in your name, logo and a short pitch from your site's tags. Switch the board to full banner, upload your image (PNG, JPG, WebP or SVG, up to 400 KB) and drag it in the preview until it's framed.

The link matters more than anything else here. Point it at your waitlist page, not your homepage. A waitlist page with a live sign-up count and a countdown keeps itself current, which solves the no-editing problem: the sign stays the same, and the page behind it changes from "join the list" to "live now" to "sold out, join the next one."

Add a tracking tag so you can see what the billboard sends you, for example ?utm_source=thepillar&utm_medium=billboard. The Pillar keeps your link exactly as you type it.

Pay through Stripe. Your billboard lights up a few seconds later. Copy its share link: thepillar.io/w/ followed by the billboard's id.

Launch week: post the share link with the countdown

This is where the billboard earns its $4. Post it on every channel you use for the launch, with one plain line and the link.

• "Our spring drop is on a billboard in a video game. Drive past it before Friday."
• "We rented a billboard in a 3D city for the launch. You can fly a helicopter right up to it. Waitlist is in the link."

The preview card does the visual work in the feed. Anyone who wants a closer look taps through, lands at your sign in the city, looks around, taps the board and finds your waitlist link in the panel.

Post it once early in the week and once the day before. In between, post about the product itself, as you would anyway. Mention it in your launch email as well, in one line under the main news, since email is where your most committed customers read about the drop.

Drop day

Nothing changes on the tower, and that's fine. Your waitlist page switches to live, your launch email goes out, and the billboard keeps pointing at the right page. If you post a "we're live" update, include the billboard link again as a second reason to tap.

After the drop

The billboard stays up until the end of the month you paid for. After a sellout, the waitlist page behind it becomes the place to sign up for the next drop, so the sign keeps collecting names for free until the month ends.

Then decide whether to keep it. If you run drops every month, a permanent billboard with your brand and a link to your always-on waitlist costs $48 to $96 a year. If you only launch twice a year, release it and rent a new one before the next launch.

Where to put the billboard

Not every billboard is equally easy to see, and the price already reflects that. A billboard's monthly price runs from $4 to $8 based on how visible its building is, so the cheapest boards are the ones most likely to be hidden.

Most of the city's buildings are low, and many billboards sit on them, about twenty metres up. From a lot of angles, those boards disappear behind the buildings in front of them. The billboards on taller buildings near the tower clear the skyline and show up from much further away, including from the helicopter and the plane.

For a launch, the extra few dollars for a visible board is worth it. Before you rent, drive or fly around the board you like and look at it from a few directions. If you lose sight of it behind a neighbouring building after a few seconds of driving, pick a taller one.

Designing the banner for a launch

Some rules for the image itself.

Make the product big. Players see the board from a car, from the street or from the air, often while moving. The product should take up most of the board.

Pick the board's shape before you finish the art. Billboards range from nearly square to very wide. A square crop on a nine-to-one board shows a thin strip of your image. If you have the time, make a wide version of your launch art specifically for the board you rented.

Mind the background. The city opens at night, so an image with a very dark background can blend into the sky. A mid-toned or bright background stands out against the dark buildings.

Keep the words few and large. A drop name in thick letters reads. Small print about sizes, prices and dates doesn't, and it belongs in the panel anyway.

Check it at small size before you pay. Shrink your banner to the width of your thumb on your phone screen. If you can still tell what the product is, it works on the board.

Writing the pitch and the pricing line

When someone taps your billboard, a panel opens with your brand name, a pitch of up to 140 characters, an optional pricing line of up to 80 characters and your link.

For a launch, write the pitch about the product and the scarcity, without dates:

• "Limited runs of hand-dyed hoodies. When a colour sells out, it's gone."
• "Small-batch hot sauce, one new pepper every season. Join the list for the next batch."
• "Numbered prints from a new artist each month, 50 copies each."

Use the pricing line for the number people want before they sign up: "Hoodies $68, 120 per colour." "Bottles $14, 300 per batch." "Prints $40, 50 each."

Both stay the same for the whole month, so write them to be true before, during and after the drop.

Connecting the billboard to your waitlist

A billboard pointed at a waitlist does more work than one pointed at a product page, because a waitlist keeps capturing interest when there's nothing to buy yet, and keeps the same link useful after the drop.

If you run Shopify drops, this is what EZDrop is built for. It adds a waitlist to a product drop with a public page that shows a live sign-up count and a countdown to release day. Every person who joins gets a referral link that moves them up the queue when friends sign up through it, and verified referrals keep fake sign-ups out. It's free to start, with paid plans at $19 and $49 a month.

Together they work like this. A player who taps the billboard lands on the waitlist page. The waitlist page shows them how many people are already in line and how long until the drop. They join, get their referral link and share it, and some of the people they share it with join too. The billboard starts the chain, and the referral queue keeps it going.

Any waitlist works for the basic version, including a simple sign-up form on your store. The point is to link the billboard to a page that collects names and stays accurate on its own.

An example: a hot sauce drop

Say you make small-batch hot sauce and release one new pepper each season, 300 bottles at a time.

Three weeks out, you pick the image: the new bottle, label facing out, on a bright orange background that matches the label. The drop is called "Ghost Batch 04", so those are the only words on the banner.

Two weeks out, you open The Pillar, find a billboard on a mid-height building near the tower, and rent it for $6 a month. In the preview the board turns out to be about four times wider than tall, so you upload the wide version of the label shot and drag it until the bottle sits in the middle. For the pitch you write "Small-batch hot sauce, one new pepper every season. Join the list for the next batch." The pricing line says "Bottles $14, 300 per batch." The link goes to your waitlist page with ?utm_source=thepillar&utm_medium=billboard on the end.

Launch week, you post the share link twice: once on Monday ("Ghost Batch 04 is on a billboard in a video game. Go find it.") and once on Thursday, the day before the drop. Your launch email mentions it in one line under the main announcement.

Drop day, the waitlist page goes live, the email goes out and the billboard stays exactly as it was. The batch sells through over the weekend. The waitlist page switches to "sold out, join the list for Batch 05", and the billboard keeps sending people there until the end of the month.

When the month ends, you check the tagged visits, the waitlist sign-ups from the billboard and the view counter. Whatever the numbers are, the whole experiment cost $6 and about an hour, and you have a launch story to tell next season.

Running drops every month

If you release something every month, a billboard can stay up all year as a standing sign for your drops.

Point it at a waitlist page that always shows the next release, and keep the banner to your brand and a general line ("New run every month"). Since the banner can't be edited after checkout, a brand banner suits a permanent sign better than artwork for a single drop.

For a specific drop with its own art, rent a second billboard for that month and let the brand billboard carry on. At $4 to $8 each, running both costs $8 to $16 a month.

Window or billboard for a launch

A billboard is the better launch tool for most drops because it holds a picture. A window holds a logo, and a logo only helps a launch if your brand is already the attraction.

There's one case for a window: when the brand is the story. If your launch is the brand itself (a new label, a first collection, a rebrand), a window on the tower puts your logo on the one building every visitor sees first. Windows cost $9 a month on the bottom floor and climb from there, about 4.5% per floor.

Some brands will want both: a window for the name and a billboard for the product, for $13 to $17 a month together.

Measuring the launch

Judge the billboard on a few numbers after the drop.

Check your analytics for the utm_source you set. That tells you how many people came to the waitlist from the billboard and its share link.

Check the view counter in the billboard's panel. It goes up each time someone opens your board, starts at zero and counts real opens only.

Look at the replies and reposts on your launch-week posts. A launch post with a billboard in it is an unusual post, and part of the value is the attention it gets in your own channels.

Then compare all of it with the $4 to $8 you spent. For most drops, a handful of waitlist sign-ups from the billboard covers it many times over.

What a billboard won't do

It won't fill your waitlist on its own. The Pillar went live in September 2026 and its audience is still small and growing. Nobody can promise you a number of visitors from it, and you shouldn't plan a launch around one.

It won't replace your email list or your social channels. The billboard works because your posts point at it. Without the posts, it's a nice sign in a quiet corner of the city.

It won't handle timing for you. With no editing after checkout, the date has to live on your waitlist page, not on the sign.

For $4 to $8, it gives your launch a visual anchor, a story and a link, and keeps pointing at your waitlist for the rest of the month.

A launch checklist

• Pick one strong product image with a mid-toned or bright background.
• Decide the drop name; leave the date off the banner.
• Two weeks out, rent a billboard on The Pillar and frame the banner in the preview.
• Link it to your waitlist page with a utm_source tag.
• Write a dateless pitch and a pricing line with the price and the quantity.
• Copy the share link and post it twice in launch week.
• After the drop, check tagged visits, waitlist sign-ups and the view counter.
• Keep the billboard if you launch often, release it if you don't.

The Pillar's advertiser guide has the full price table, the billing rules and what you can and can't put on a sign. And if you want the waitlist side handled, with a countdown, a live count and a referral queue, EZDrop is free to start.