By Nick Coston
Years ago, when I first started out in OOH, say around 2001, Clear Channel Radio bought a well-known OOH company, Eller Media. The new name became Clear Channel Worldwide, combining both the power of radio and outdoor media. The thought was that consumers would be in their cars listening to the radio as they drove past billboards, transit or posters.
Hit ‘em twice!
A one-two punch as we used to say, right? Clear Channel even set up in certain larger markets, selling teams that were assigned the task or selling both products, combined, as one. Most of those reps came from radio. The combo garnered a lot of attention in the beginning, even CBS bought an outdoor company and renamed it CBS Outdoor for years. Telling retailers that you worked for CBS had a certain cache to it, advertisers felt like they were going into entertainment, even though they were buying mostly transit from them.
Combining two mediums had become a thing, more ammo for salespeople to carry around when calling on agencies and clients direct. More eyeballs, more ears, more impressions. Great way to cover a whole DMA.
Cut to 2026. What do we see? History repeating itself, only this time it’s OOH and social media. This time with OOH, you only need a few locations, or in this case, only one, then let billboards big brother, social media, take it from there. Imagine that, one iconic, attention getting billboard on a busy LA street, then blown up through social media millions of times a day, worldwide.
Worldwide I tell ya!
One billboard with the right copy, in this case, a Netflix board, or a “billboard house”, just on mind you, on jam packed Sunset Blvd. That one billboard came with a novel eye-catching idea, a real live, breathing actor was “trapped” inside the high up billboard structure for three days, yes, a measly three whole days to promote their thriller film, “The Last House”.
That perfectly located billboard gets an average of 30,000 plus cars per day passing by, combined with a 1.5 vehicle occupancy multiplier, my Chicago Public School education says that’s about 45,000 impressions.
Not bad, aye?
Now, add it the behemoth social media numbers brings and those 45,000 eyeballs using the likes of TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest, and that silly little billboard number suddenly balloons to, oh, around 10 million, just for the three days a real live person was living inside that 30-foot suspended billboard structure.
Again, from 45,000 impressions to 10 million impressions. Impressions that will live on forever, never be taken down, unlike the person living in the billboard will be.
The cost of all these millions of impressions? Not much more than the cost of the billboard, I reckon, because that unique visual of someone flaunting their high up in the sky home will live on forever and ever. Just on LinkedIn today alone there were over 175 posts from various connections of mine reposting and commenting on the Netflix display. Using the roughly 135 million users online with LinkedIn at any given time, well you do the math.
That’s for LinkedIn alone. On Instagram, at any one time for any one post carrying the house on a billboard, an average of over 25,000 likes per post.
There are over 500 million daily Instagram users. I can’t even add that high.
Kick in TikTok and the rest, and millions upon millions views per day for one, yes ONE billboard on a busy urban street. Passing by one way at around 20 mph.
Billboards, lots of views. Yea! Add in their rich cousin, social media, and suddenly it’s gazillions of views. More than you can count on your calculator, if you still use one.
The cost? As I said, not much more than the cost of the billboard, the expense of building and hanging it, and the person living on it. I mean, they do have to eat.
Remember, none of these incredible viewership numbers ever happen without one teeny-weeny thing.
That billboard.
Insider’s Note: Nick Coston has been writing opinion pieces for the OOH industry for 10 years now. His weekly pieces also appear on Substack where you can view the last 2 years worth. Full-time, Nick is the VP, Sales and Sales Strategies for Moving Walls, the Singapore based media and ad tech giant, here in The America’s.
If you are interested, here is Nick’s Substack LINK
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