Billboard Insider is running an interview series with Fairmount Outdoor President Billy Tolson.  Billy has talked about finding his way from child acting to the out of home industry and what makes a good billboard lease.  Today he talks about his California murals business.

How did you enter the California market?

I like to spend my summers in LA, mainly to get out of the Texas heat. Walking around Venice Beach, I started noticing hand-painted murals making a comeback all over the neighborhood, and I wanted in. It looked like a fun, creative way to play in OOH, which can get a little stale when the only things you ever talk about are steel monopoles and vinyl.

I started signing up landlords for their walls, empty storefronts, and barricades, and then found advertisers to go up. Then I picked one prestige property to create a hybrid product: a Brand Activation / Pop-Up space combined with a 500sf Wall Spectacular. Brands and marketing agencies really loved this IRL, experiential experience. It’s not just out of home anymore. You can see it from the street and now you can walk inside the activated space and feel the product, or in one case, taste it.

The proof is the unique campaign we just wrapped for Heaven Hill Brands’ Tequila Ocho. We turned a 4,000sf building beneath the Venice Sign into the Casa de Ocho Summer Club, with two months of programming and an OOH layer across many walls in the neighborhood driving people to the door.

The wall earns the attention, sitting behind the 2nd most photographed sign in Los Angeles, so advertisers love the earned media they receive, and the building delivers the brand, all the while the neighborhood gets a reason to show up.

Do you own or lease the building?

I leased with the intention to purchase it, depending on if I was successful with this product, so I built in a Right of First Refusal. I did have the opportunity to buy, but I ended up passing because I was ready to get back to Texas and continue building out my plant. The product I developed out there, I hope to do it in other locations around Texas, specifically Austin, which I think is a good market for it. It’s a great idea for big ticket events like SXSW in March or Formula 1/ACL in October.

Tell us about the murals business?

It’s definitely more complex because it’s more time sensitive, and it’s more expensive on the production side. In Los Angeles you’ve got to pay the artist about $45-50sf. You need anywhere from three to seven days to paint it, so you’re actually losing probably 25% of your revenue from that location because that time is spent painting.

But the painting becomes the marketing, and certain clients love it, as they can post time-lapse footage to their socials. It’s not for every client, however. If I tell a client I can put up an adhesive vinyl in three hours, then heat treat it so it looks similar to a hand-paint, they tend to gravitate toward that. But as a marquee deal paired with an Activation, it’s fun. The contracts tend to be just one cycle, and you very rarely see a multi-month hand-paint deal. That’s a lot of execution for a very short run, and the sales aren’t as consistent. You don’t really get permanence in the wall game for some reason.

Hand-paints only work in certain cities, creative towns like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, SF, Austin. I think it’s more feasible as a side component of an existing OOH operator, something they can offer clients as a premium add-on alongside core inventory rather than a standalone business. Overall Murals is a big player in the space, and they seem to make it work, but I really don’t think it’s an at-scale business, especially from a permitting perspective. Even Lamar’s purchase of Colossal has stayed a boutique play rather than a platform, as it gives Lamar a hand-painted option to layer into client campaigns. Was a heck of a fun summer though!

Link to see more: https://lnkd.in/p/gTeF8Uv4