Here’s a summary of Lamar Advertising CEO Sean Reilly’s comments at this week’s Morgan Stanley 2026 Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, sponsored and analyzed by SignValue.
Lamar is finishing a multi-year, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP project
So we had what IT people call technical debt, right, 20-, 30-year-old legacy systems built by Lamar, for Lamar, not cloud-based…And so cleaning that up was number one. Number two, in order to realize whatever promise AI brings you have to clean up your data and you have to have a backbone that can support an overlay of AI products. So that’s another big motivator. And what we expect is that it will take a sales process that might take 14 people hours to get a nice proposal out and get in front of a client and take that down to maybe 6 people hours, right? So the sales process is going to get much more efficient and much more intelligent, right? So more pitches, better pitches, more intelligent pitches. And hopefully, that’s not just cheaper, but also more successful. Hopefully, it also helps the top line.
On Ross Reilly’s promotion to President of the Outdoor Division
Yes, I can talk about him…Ross is going to be great in the new role. He has a breadth of experience across our whole company in terms of roles and responsibilities. But most importantly…he is in the right place to only drive the change being brought up by ERP, but also help us realize the promise of AI. And so yes, it’s a good move. And he might have prolonged my CEO life because for 15 years, I’ve had 16 direct reports and now I’ve only got 8. So maybe I’ll last a little longer.
Why Lamar didn’t buy Clear Channel Outdoor
So, their leverage was made it impossible for us to think about the whole, right? We would like to have had some discussions around buying some piece parts but didn’t get anywhere with that….they’re going to go private…I think Scott still has some expense work that he can do given the changes they’ve gone through. And I think they’re going to delever a little more. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t a public company in 3 years, right. But we’ll see what happens there.
Where Lamar wants to put its money.
Our best ROI is still digital conversion. It’s about $65 million we’ll spend this year on that. Second best ROI is going to be the tuck-in acquisitions that we just do year in and year out. We hope to spend $150 million to $200 million on that kind of activity. I would like to see us spend more money on purchasing land under our billboards. We’ve budgeted about $20 million for this year to do that. I’d like to double or triple that, because that’s a nice return, and it also protects our best assets. And then we executed on a buyback last year. Our timing was very fortuitous. We bought near the low of 52 weeks.
SignValue’s Take: We like to see Lamar spending on IT and preparing to leverage AI. Every company should be doing this now. Well-paced for growth through digital conversions and more acquisitions. However, we didn’t hear anything about new greenfield development, which seems to be missing in the conversation. There’s far better returns on building their own new signs rather than buying someone else’s old signs. If you have questions, contact one of SignValue’s experienced analysts for a free and confidential consultation at info@signvalue.com or call 480-657-8400.
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