Chew on This: Neuro Gum’s Social Out of Home Success

March 11, 2025

Would you buy a pack of gum off TikTok?

For fans of Neuro, the answer has been an emphatic yes. After turning down a million-dollar offer on Shark Tank, the functional gum and mints brand leveraged TikTok – and particularly influencer content – to grow into a category leader. The brand’s profile grew even higher last fall when Steve Aoki invested in the company, right as it was preparing to launch two new products, Spearmint and Wintergreen flavors of its Energy & Focus line.


When you’re already doing $7 million a month in revenue, new SKUs come with high expectations. To ensure their successful launch (and maybe not have their newest investor throw another cake at them), Neuro staged a week-long takeover of TikTok Shop’s homepage, supporting it with the brand’s first-ever out of home advertising campaign, tapping into the phenomenon we call social out of home, or #sOOH.

Social out of home is the synergistic relationship between people’s real-world exposure to OOH and their activity online. That relationship has been well-documented, most recently in research by The Harris Poll finding that a majority of consumers are more likely to engage with ads that have social media elements incorporated into the creative. The study also concluded that OOH ads featuring influencer endorsements or placed in iconic locations each drive increased engagement and enhanced brand affinity for approximately two out of three people.


Neuro took an “all of the above” approach. Its digital out of home campaign included two of our most prominently placed DOOH canvases: The Cube and The Summit at 2 Times Square – the first at street level right behind the red steps and the second 20 stories up and visible for ten blocks. Iconic location, check!

Advertising in Times Square was only one tactic. The campaign also ran in subway station platforms and mezzanines on our Liveboards, the creative smashing together quick-cut edits of content created by Neuro’s TikTok partners. Influencer endorsement, check!


Inside the subway cars themselves, Neuro utilized our Livecard MAX digital transit media format. Livecard MAX is a multi-screen experience combining square screens at eye-level right next to the doors, catching attention as passengers enter and exit, and four-foot-wide, landscape-oriented digital canvases at the top of the car – perfect for staring at the whole ride to avoid accidental eye contact. All of the transit creative included Neuro’s social media handle and a QR code linking to the TikTok Shop. Social media elements in creative, check!

That QR code came with a “scan to save” call to action, promoting the 40% discount the brand offered on its new products. Another smart move by Neuro, as discounts like those are the most engaging and most useful content in digital out of home ads (SOURCE: The Harris Poll).


What else did this campaign get right? Frequency! Since the TikTok Shop takeover only ran for five days, getting Neuro’s message across and subsequently driving activation was extremely time-sensitive. That’s why we placed their media in some of the busiest spots in the city.

In addition to Liveboards in subway stations like Grand Central-42nd Street, Hudson Yards, and Times Square/42nd Street/Port Authority, the media mix included a Livescape of eleven synchronized side-by-side screens in the corridor connecting Times Square and Port Authority. To get a sense of the level of busy, the Times Square subway station averages ridership of over 1 million weekly, while the Port Authority’s Midtown Bus Terminal is the busiest in the world, with ridership of approximately 260,000 every weekday (SOURCES: MTA, Port Authority of New York & New Jersey).


To extend the campaign’s reach to other trendsetters, Neuro also ran the campaign on our Digital Shelters in Miami Beach.

What were the results? With an emphasis on mass reach and frequency, this campaign was able to deliver 54 million impressions in just one week (SOURCE: Geopath), which translated into the best possible outcome for Neuro: a complete sellout of both SKUs (SOURCE: Neuro).

“Our Times Square and subway campaign was a big moment for our brand,” said Kent Yoshimura, Neuro CEO & Co-founder, “putting us on one of the world’s biggest stages and driving incredible engagement for one of our biggest launches in company history.”

The success of Neuro’s campaign demonstrated the importance of out of home advertising in a social commerce strategy.

Would you like to capture some of that success for yourself? Contact us today!

Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Specialist @ OUTFRONT

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