What marketing actually does
Every business in Big Ambitions has a promotion score that decides how many customers notice it. Promotion is not something you build — it is the sum of two things:
- The building's traffic index — a fixed number baked into the location you lease. It cannot be changed.
- Marketing — paid advertising that closes the gap between that baseline and 100%.
So a store in a high-traffic building starts with high promotion for free, and a store in a dead-end location needs a lot of ad spend just to catch up. The official pitch from the developers is that the building's traffic number is the floor and marketing is the lift on top of it.
How promotion is built
The practical reading that 1.0 guides converge on:
- Your starting promotion equals the traffic index of the building you leased.
- Marketing can add promotion on top, but it tops out at roughly a +50% promotion change and bills daily, forever — cancel it and the lift disappears.
- Reach 100% promotion and you are maximising the walk-in rate the location allows.
Big Ambitions players report the lever order that actually moves profit is: Traffic Index > Pricing > Shortage Windows > Manufacturing. In other words, picking the right building beats pouring money into ads, and ads beat tweaking what you make. A building with a high traffic index is described in community guides as "a permanent discount on the marketing bill" for as long as you hold the lease.
The two ad agencies
You buy marketing from in-game agencies. Two families appear in 1.0 playthroughs, and community write-ups list daily rates that look like this:
| Agency / package | Reported daily cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| McCain's eMarketing — Small | ~$100 | Digital ads |
| McCain's eMarketing — Medium | ~$250 | Digital ads |
| McCain's eMarketing — Large | ~$500 | Digital ads |
| CityAds billboard — Small | ~$500 | Physical billboard |
| CityAds billboard — Medium | ~$2,500 | Physical billboard |
| CityAds billboard — Large | ~$6,000 | Physical billboard |
The names are parodies of real companies and, according to the developers, which agency you pick does not change the effect — what matters is the volume of impressions you buy. Small, medium, and large billboards are all valid; the larger the package, the larger the promotion bump, up to that ~+50% ceiling.
Which to run, and when
A simple rule players use:
- Already in a high-traffic building? You may not need much marketing at all — the traffic index is doing the work.
- In a weaker location? A marketing package is what makes the store viable, but watch the daily bill: it never stops, so the promotion has to earn more than it costs every single day.
- Digital vs billboard is mostly about budget tier, not mechanic — pick the package size your margin supports.
Because marketing bills daily forever, the standard advice is to set it once you are confident the location and pricing are right, then let it run rather than churning packages.
Marketing in the wider loop
Marketing is one input into customer flow. It pairs with everything else on this wiki: the business types guide for picking what to open, the goods & prices reference for pricing, and the automation guide for handing daily operations to HQ staff so you can focus on the next location. When rivals start pressing you, see the rival attacks guide.
What is not yet confirmed
The exact daily rates above come from 1.0 community write-ups and may be tuned in later patches, so no fixed numbers are claimed as final — check the in-game agency menu in your save. An older developer note described promotion as a simple average of traffic and marketing; that was flagged as an early-build quirk and the 1.0 behaviour is the traffic-index-plus-marketing model described here. A few "sidewalk sign / sign spinner" ad options appear in older forum posts but are not confirmed in 1.0 footage, so they are left out of the confirmed list.