On August 6, 2026, commuters on Sunset Boulevard passed a billboard advertising Netflix’s new thriller The Last House. Nothing unusual there — that stretch of Los Angeles carries hundreds of movie ads a year. Except this one had a working window, a stocked bookshelf, red curtains, and a man actually living inside it.
For three days, a performer occupied a fully furnished living room built thirty feet above Sunset and Selma — eating cereal in a bathrobe, watching traffic through binoculars, and communicating with passersby using a whiteboard (Deadline, 2026; Hollywood Reporter, 2026). Netflix called it “an eerie echo” of the film’s plot, in which a family becomes trapped inside its own home (E! News, 2026). Entertainment outlets covered it as news, not advertising (Just Jared, 2026; Time Out, 2026).
The stunt worked for a reason that has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with a 90-year-old finding in memory research.
The Isolation Effect
In 1933, German psychologist Hedwig von Restorff ran an experiment with a simple structure: show people a list of similar items — chair, table, sofa, desk — with one item that doesn’t belong, like elephant. Ask them later what they remember, and elephant wins. Not because it matters more, but because it has no competition in memory (Von Restorff, 1933). Later research has sharpened the finding: the advantage isn’t about volume or novelty for its own sake — it’s about the relationship between an item and the pattern surrounding it (Hunt, 1995).
That distinction is the whole strategy. A blue ad isn’t inherently distinctive. It becomes distinctive only when every competing ad is red. Netflix didn’t just do something unusual — it took one of advertising’s most conventional formats, the roadside billboard, and changed exactly one variable nobody expected: a person was actually inside it.
Distinctiveness Is Not Differentiation
Most leadership teams conflate two different questions. Differentiation asks why a customer should prefer you — better technology, faster onboarding, lower cost. Distinctiveness asks something that comes earlier: how does a buyer recognize it’s you before they’ve evaluated any of that? Research on distinctive brand assets frames the answer around two properties — fame (people recognize the asset) and uniqueness (people attribute it to your brand specifically, not a competitor) — and treats uniqueness as the harder, more valuable one to own (Romaniuk, 2018).
A company can be genuinely better than its competitors and still be forgettable, because its website uses the same gradient hero image, its LinkedIn posts follow the same three-lessons-I-learned format, and its sales deck opens with the same six sections everyone else uses. Buyers can’t prefer what they never encoded into memory in the first place.
Two B2B Companies Already Proved It
Salesforce didn’t win its earliest enterprise customers with a superior feature set — in 2000, its product was thin compared to the incumbents. That February, founder Marc Benioff staged a mock protest outside a Siebel Systems user conference: actors in red shirts chanting “software is obsolete,” carrying a crossed-out software-box logo. Siebel’s team parked semi-trucks to block them and called the police, which only pulled in more press (TechCrunch, 2019; Nira, 2020). The stunt landed because enterprise software marketing at the time looked identical across every vendor — feature grids, architecture diagrams, analyst logos. Salesforce didn’t out-argue the category. It staged a protest against it, and “No Software” became the one thing people remembered about a company almost nobody had heard of.
Mailchimp proved the same principle without a single confrontational word. In 2014, a sponsor read on the podcast Serial mispronounced the company’s name as “MailKimp.” Most brands would have issued a correction. Mailchimp and agency Droga5 expanded it instead — building nine absurd, name-adjacent mini-campaigns (MailShrimp, JailBlimp, FailChips, WhaleSynth) into “Did You Mean Mailchimp?”, which won the Cyber Grand Prix at Cannes (Adweek, 2017; LBBOnline, 2023). No competitor in email marketing was deliberately manufacturing a universe of nonsense names built around its own brand. Mailchimp owned that territory precisely because nobody else was standing in it.
Neither company won by being louder than competitors. Both won by being the only thing in the room that didn’t match the surrounding pattern.
The Warning: Distinctive and Bad Is Still Bad
Von Restorff’s research comes with an important caveat. A 1991 study of advertising slogans found a significant memory advantage for a distinctive slogan rated high quality — but no advantage at all when the distinctive slogan was rated substandard (Pick, Sweeney, & Clay, 1991). Different and good outperforms conventional and good. Different and weak is just noise. Netflix’s billboard clears that bar because the execution dramatizes the film itself — the medium is the message. A random SaaS company putting a stranger in a billboard, with no connection to what it sells, would generate attention without attribution: people would remember the stunt, not the company.
Where This Applies Without a Stunt Budget
You don’t need a billboard budget to apply this. You need one convention your category treats as mandatory — and the discipline to violate it deliberately. If every competitor’s report runs forty pages, publish a one-page scorecard. If every sales deck opens with “About Us,” open with the three places a prospect’s revenue is leaking instead. If every LinkedIn post is a written “lessons learned,” make yours a recurring sixty-second teardown.
The goal isn’t maximum weirdness — it’s minimum confusability. Pick one dimension, anchor it to what you actually do, and repeat it until it’s yours. Salesforce didn’t stage one protest and stop. Mailchimp didn’t run one absurd name and move on. Distinctiveness compounds through repetition; a single stunt just gets attention.
The Question for Leadership
Before approving the next campaign, deck, or content calendar, ask one question the category conventions make easy to skip: if our logo disappeared, would anyone still know this was us? If the honest answer is no, the fix usually isn’t more content. It’s less content that looks like everyone else’s.
References
Adweek. (2017, June 20). Droga5’s MailChimp campaign wins one of 3 Cyber Grand Prix awarded at Cannes. https://www.adweek.com/creativity/drogas-mailchimp-campaign-wins-one-of-3-cyber-grand-prix-awarded-at-cannes/
Deadline. (2026, August 6). There’s a man living inside a Netflix billboard on Sunset Blvd. https://deadline.com/2026/08/man-living-in-billboard-netflix-1237028274/
E! News. (2026, August 7). Netflix’s The Last House billboard on Sunset Blvd has man living inside. https://www.eonline.com/news/1434808/netflixs-the-last-house-billboard-on-sunset-blvd-has-man-living-inside
Hollywood Reporter. (2026, August 7). A man is trapped inside a Netflix billboard above Sunset Boulevard. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/netflix-man-inside-billboard-last-house-1236669147/
Hunt, R. R. (1995). The subtlety of distinctiveness: What von Restorff really did. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2(1), 105–112. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214414
Just Jared. (2026, August 7). Who is inside ‘The Last House’ billboard? All about the actor living in Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard billboard. https://www.justjared.com/2026/08/07/who-is-inside-the-last-house-billboard-all-about-the-actor-living-in-netflixs-sunset-boulevard-billboard/
LBBOnline. (2023, March 1). Droga5 means to say MailChimp in genius campaign. https://lbbonline.com/news/droga5-means-to-say-mailchimp-in-genius-campaign
Nira. (2020, March 11). How Salesforce built a $13 billion empire from a CRM. https://nira.com/salesforce-history/
Pick, D. F., Sweeney, J., & Clay, J. A. (1991). Creative advertising and the von Restorff effect. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 69(3), 923–931. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1991.69.3.923
Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building distinctive brand assets. Oxford University Press.
TechCrunch. (2019, March 8). Salesforce at 20 offers lessons for startup success. https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/salesforce-at-20-offers-lessons-for-startup-success/
Time Out. (2026, August 7). Yes, that is a real, live human trapped inside a Netflix billboard over Sunset Boulevard. Here’s why. https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/news/yes-that-is-a-real-live-human-trapped-inside-a-netflix-billboard-over-sunset-boulevard-heres-why-080726
Von Restorff, H. (1933). Über die Wirkung von Bereichsbildungen im Spurenfeld. Psychologische Forschung, 18(1), 299–342. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02409636
