By Rod Rackley

I’ve been to 25 OAAA conferences. That’s a lot of hotel ballrooms and a lot of keynotes. If I’m honest, most of them are gone from my head by the time the plane lands.

John Morgan’s talk in Dallas last May is the exception. Six months later I’m still quoting it to people. So this fall I rewatched the video and read through the transcript, to see what held up once the laughing stopped. Most of it did. Enough that I’m splitting it into three posts.

This one is about who was at the podium and the one line from that morning I think our whole industry should take personally. Part 2 gets into how Morgan actually runs his billboards. Part 3 covers the lessons that had nothing to do with billboards and everything to do with running a business.

If you weren’t in the room, the keynote is on YouTube here. Fair warning: he doesn’t always keep it clean.

Who was talking

You know the face. Everyone does. Morgan founded Morgan & Morgan, which bills itself as America’s largest injury firm. The video that introduced him said the firm spent $350 million on advertising last year, plans on $500 million this year, and is the largest buyer of out of home in the country, ahead of Amazon and McDonald’s.

He’s also a former billboard owner. That matters. He isn’t a guest who learned our vocabulary on the flight in. He knows what a structure costs, and he knows what a board is worth when nobody’s looking at it.

And he started out in costume. Before law school he worked at Walt Disney World as Fiddler Pig, then King Louie, and then, thanks to what he called his dancing skills, Pluto. Once you know that, a lot of his billboards make more sense.

Why a lawyer wants to be everywhere

A few years ago Morgan asked himself what Google would look like if it were a law firm. His answer was “everywhere for everyone.” Personal injury firms are small and local by nature. He wanted one that was national.

Think about that from our side of the table. If your goal is to be everywhere, there’s one medium built for the job. You can’t buy everywhere on a phone screen. You can buy it on an interstate, a city bus, a subway platform and an airport baggage carousel. He has bought all four.

His introduction made the rest of the case. People skip pre-roll. They block, filter, stream and opt out. Nobody skips a billboard. That’s the best argument we have in 2026, and we don’t make it often enough.

I’d add one caution, and I think Morgan would too. Being unskippable gets us seen. It doesn’t get us remembered. A board can be impossible to avoid and still be ignored.

The line we should take personally

Later in the talk, Morgan said it plainly:

“Most creative is not creative.”

Then he went a step further and said most of the billboards he looks at are wasting their money.

The room laughed. I laughed too. Then I thought about it on the flight home, because he wasn’t wrong. And he’s the last person in America with a reason to run down this medium. He has as much money riding on it as anybody. When your biggest customer tells you a lot of your product is being wasted, that isn’t an insult. It’s free consulting.

I’ve spent my career on the production side of this business, and I’ve watched an awful lot of billboard faces come off the press. The printing is rarely the problem anymore. The board goes up tight, bright and on schedule. The problem is what’s on it. Too many words. A logo the size of a postage stamp. A phone number nobody can read at 70 miles an hour. And the same message left up so long that the commuter who passes it twice a day stopped seeing it back in March.

I’d argue that’s our problem as much as the advertiser’s. Every flat, forgettable board is a small argument for moving next year’s budget somewhere else. Weak creative hurts renewals, and it hurts how the public sees the whole medium.

What we can do about it

Media owners can give their sales teams permission to tell a client the truth about weak creative before it goes up, and to bring ideas along with the rate card. Clients notice the difference between an order taker and a partner.

Suppliers can make good creative cheaper and faster to produce. That’s a big part of Part 2, and there’s a story about a cow involved.

And all of us can stop treating creative as somebody else’s department. The board sits on our structure, in our market, with our medium’s reputation riding on it.

Morgan didn’t stop at the critique. He spent the next stretch of his talk walking us through his own boards, one after another. That’s where we’ll pick up next time.

Rod Rackley is Chairman of Circle Graphics and Chairman of the OAAA Suppliers Council, and represents suppliers on the OAAA Board. He started his OOH career at Lamar, joined Circle Graphics near its founding, and later founded Anthem Displays, a digital display company. Along the way he has had a hand in producing as many billboard faces, static and digital, as almost anyone in the business. He wrote The Creative Multiplier, the first paper in OAAA’s Supplier Insights series, and lives in Boulder, Colorado. Circle Graphics prints billboards for Morgan & Morgan campaigns; Morgan & Morgan did not sponsor or pay for this series.