For more than three decades, Dan Smith has promoted guitar lessons with paper flyers posted on lampposts and scaffolding across Manhattan, alongside his phone number and the words “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar.” That campaign is now appearing in a different advertising medium: Smith’s image is on a digital billboard in Times Square through October 12, according to the New York Post.
From Restaurant Job to Citywide Fixture
Smith began posting guitar-lesson flyers around New York City in 1992, according to the New York Post. Originally from Newton, Massachusetts, he attended New York University and worked in restaurants before turning to teaching full time. After two years of regularly posting flyers, he had built a steady teaching business, the Post reports.
Smith first put his photo on the flyers in 2000, as noted by the New York Post, a change that coincided with his becoming recognizable. The image helped make the flyers a familiar sight around New York City.
A Meme Before Memes Existed
Why Times Square Is Built for Big Signs
The billboard's setting is not accidental: according to the New York City Zoning Resolution, developments and enlargements between 43rd and 50th streets with frontage on Seventh Avenue or Broadway in the Theater Subdistrict face special Times Square signage requirements. The same rules require at least one illuminated sign for each ground-floor establishment with frontage on Seventh Avenue, Broadway or a qualifying narrow street in the covered area. Those requirements help explain why large, illuminated advertising is such a defining feature of the district.
From Paper Flyers to Rotating Screens
Times Square’s advertising environment is governed by rules that set it apart from an ordinary commercial block. The Times Square Alliance says roughly 220,000 pedestrians entered the district each day in 2024, underscoring how different the audience for Smith’s billboard is from the people who happen to pass a single street flyer. The zoning requirements described above also make illuminated signage a built-in feature of qualifying ground-floor frontages, rather than an incidental addition. The medium itself has changed as well. According to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, digital billboards typically rotate messages every few seconds, with six to eight advertisers sharing one location. That system differs fundamentally from Smith’s fixed paper notices. An earlier New York advertising precedent came in 1967, when Henry S. Levy & Sons used the “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s” poster campaign, according to BuzzFeed News; unlike Smith’s independent lesson-flyer operation, it was a commercial brand campaign.
Smith's flyer slogan has been referenced by The Daily Show, BoJack Horseman, and John Mayer songs, according to the Post. The parodies stack up: in September 2006, Mayer used promotional flyers reading John Mayer Will Teach You Guitar to promote his album Continuum, according to a Wikipedia entry documenting the campaign's history. Comedian Mike Myers also appeared in a similar New York-area campaign for The Love Guru, posed as Smith, as detailed on Wikipedia.
Jon Stewart got in on it too. On a September 20, 2010 episode of The Daily Show, he displayed a parody poster with his own face superimposed on Smith's body under the caption Jon Stewart Will Teach You Guitar. Netflix's animated series BoJack Horseman paid its own homage in its 2016 season three premiere, hiding a background flyer in an NYC diner scene that read Clam Smith Will Teach You Guitar, according to Wikipedia's account of the show. Manhattan sandwich shop No. 7 Sub even named a menu item after him — turkey, avocado, and black bean hummus on a sandwich called Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar — as reported by Food Republic.
The Times Square Upgrade
Smith's billboard is appearing on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square as part of HP's Hometown Heroes campaign, according to the Post. The placement shifts his advertising from a fixed sheet of paper encountered on a city block to a rotating digital display in one of Manhattan's most visible commercial districts.
Despite the corporate honor, Smith has not stopped doing things the old way. He continues posting flyers around New York City, the Post reports, and still opens his studio around 9 a.m., teaching into the evening. Smith has said he appreciates printed flyers because they offer an analog, hands-on advertising experience — a preference that has held steady even as his image now flickers across a massive digital screen a few blocks away.
Students Who Found Him on the Street
Among Smith's students is David Paterson, the former New York governor, who is legally blind and resumed playing guitar in 2020. Smith adapted his lessons so Paterson could feel his way around the instrument without reading notes. The two also performed together at a 2023 event with Gov. Kathy Hochul, the New York Post reported.
Paterson has called Smith's grassroots marketing ingenious and described his lessons as feeling like being part of an underground club. He called Smith a quiet hero, per the Post. Another student, Ivan Rivera, became a student after spotting one of Smith's flyers at 17th Street and 9th Avenue, and said Smith feels like a friend he can sit and talk to.
Smith's campaign has lasted by maintaining the visual simplicity of a private lesson advertisement while moving between New York's street-level paper culture and its digital advertising infrastructure. The Times Square placement makes that contrast unusually visible: the same basic message that once appeared on individual flyers is now being presented on a large commercial screen.
