What £60 Buys You: Our Facebook Test vs a Day on Axis Tower
We spent £60 on Facebook ads and got 342 clicks and no customers. Here is what £60 buys on FameCake instead: a day on Axis Tower, a Manchester landmark.
Picture your business name on the side of a 28-storey tower in Manchester. Thirty metres of LED screen, running up Axis Tower on Deansgate, in front of the trains, the traffic and the whole city-centre skyline.
Now picture what that used to take. A media agency. A campaign brief. A conversation about weeks, not days. Screens like this one were for brands with a marketing department, and that was fair enough: a landmark screen is worth a lot, and outdoor advertising has always been sold in big pieces.
On FameCake, a day on that screen is £60. Your post plays in rotation with other posts, all day.
That is still the bit that gives us goosebumps. Nobody made the tower worth less. We just made it possible to have it for one day, with no phone call.
Our own £60 experiment
We are an advertising company, so we tested the obvious alternative on ourselves. In late September we ran a Facebook and Instagram campaign to find new customers. One ad set spent £59.66. Here is what it bought:
| What we got | Amount |
|---|---|
| Impressions | 12,032 |
| Clicks | 342 |
| People who started a post | 0 |
| Customers | 0 |
That ad set was one of five. Across all five we spent £160, collected 33,228 impressions and 822 clicks, and got one person to start a post. Nobody paid.
Before anyone writes in: that result says as much about our ads as about Facebook. Our campaigns were themed around local events and independent music, and the people who saw them were not looking for a billboard. A business with a sharp offer and a good audience can do well on Facebook. Plenty do.
But look at what £60 bought in the best case. Twelve thousand scrolls past a small square in a feed, between a holiday photo and a video of a dog. Most of those people will not remember it by lunch. Some of them were not people at all: bots made up 51% of web traffic in 2024, according to Imperva, and most online campaigns pay for a share of them.
What the other £60 buys
The same £60 buys a day in rotation on Axis Tower.
- Size. A 30-metre screen, portrait, up the side of a tower. Your artwork is 816 by 3,240 pixels, and the people who see it are looking up.
- Place. Deansgate and Whitworth Street West, Deansgate and Deansgate-Castlefield stations, the Mancunian Way and the 20 Stories rooftop bar.
- A story. Take a photo of your name up there. Share it, frame it, put it on your own feed. "We're on Axis Tower today" does more for a small brand than another sponsored post.
- Company. For that day, your business sits in the same spot the big brands pay for. Nobody walking past knows your budget.
What it does not buy: clicks, a dashboard, or a guarantee that someone walks in tomorrow. A day on a billboard is a moment in public. If you want customers from it, give people a reason to act: a short code, an offer or a phone number they can read from the street.
No artwork? That used to be the second wall
Getting the screen was only half the problem. The other half was the ad itself. A national brand has a designer. A plumber has a van, a phone number and a website.
So we built the missing piece. Paste your website address, and FameCake makes a finished post from it in seconds: your business name, what you do, your phone number, your logo and colours, and a QR code that goes to your site. You check the words, fix anything we got wrong, and that is your artwork.
We did not let a robot design your ad. The layout is fixed. Your phone number and web address are copied straight from your site, never written by AI. AI suggests your name and a few words on what you do. You check every word before it goes up.
Why a day changes everything
Big screens were only sold in big pieces: weeks at a time, through an agency, with a minimum spend. That works for a national brand and shuts out everybody else.
Selling one day at a time is the whole trick. The screen keeps its value. The person who could never buy a fortnight can buy a Friday.
That person is who we built this for: the barber who wants the whole city to know they opened, the bakery celebrating ten years, the band with a gig on Saturday, the plumber who wants their firm to look as big as it feels.
How to try it
- Go to Axis Tower on FameCake and tap Post on Axis Tower.
- Upload your artwork. No artwork? Paste your website address and we make a post from it.
- Pick your day and pay £60. We check your post, and it goes up on your day.
Then go and stand on Deansgate and look up. We still do.
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