The GameStop Corp. surge may have stalled, but some investors are trying to keep enthusiasm going in a new venue: highway billboards.
The now-famous WallStreetBets cartoon mascot, with his black shades and slicked-back hair, recently stretched his arms above the morning commuters on highway I-694 near Minneapolis and proposed “$GME to the moon!” GME is GameStop’s stock ticker.
The electronic advertisement, featuring rocket emojis, is just one of more than 300,000 ads purchased across at least 30 states by people drawing inspiration from the WallStreetBets subreddit, said Kurt Tingey, senior vice president of business development for Blip Billboards.
Blip offers users brief showings of their ad for a flexible price that can be as low as 1 cent for an eight-second time slot. Demand from individual investors has driven Blip’s comparably inexpensive billboard ads up to 20 times its usual rate since Jan. 30, Mr. Tingey said, with a meme-stocks-related ad appearing every 2.5 seconds on its billboards nationwide.
“When this hit, it was over the weekend and, man, our website traffic just went nuts, with a 1,900% increase in traffic to that site,” he said. “They just blew it up.”
