Great wrap up to the second day of a fun and informative IBO conference in Houston. Insider wanted to give everyone a few of the highlights of the last two days with quotes from five presenters.
Becky Smith, IBO Enterprise Manager
“The best thing about of Out of Home is we are thriving. And every other medium is struggling. According to The Harris Poll 90% of adults see our messages. We actually have the highest recall of ads of anyone. And here is the best thing, people are no longer staying home.”
George Ivie, Media Research Council, Executive Director and CEO
On creating the first MRC OOH standards:
“Whenever we waltz in to create an MRC standard we think, this is going to be a piece of cake. But that’s not true in Out of Home…. The first thing we do is cast a very wide net to try to form a working group of practitioners… We give every opportunity to be there and lend their voice. And we (the MCRC) write the standards. So we create drafts of the standards that is vetted by a committee…. One of our goals is to make Out of Home become an an important part of the media buying process across media types, so that Out of Home can gather their fair share of ad sales. It’s a key goal of our organization… What really has to happen is that we set these measurements in an intelligent way so that they flow into the buying tools that are used by the agency marketplace… We are within striking distance of releasing the standard… Maybe next month…maybe the month after.”
Ari Buchalter, CEO at Place Exchange
On the reason Place Exchange is committed to measurement and PerView
“My company Place Exchange is a Supply Side Platform (SSP)… we never woke up one morning and said, hey, lets build a measurement product… we had new buyers to Out of Home asking the same questions they asked about on-line media, how many impressions, what reach and frequency will be delivered against a target audience… we referred them to folks in the Out of Home space… who measured the OOH industry. They came back to us and generally had three concerns or issues with the solutions out there. The first is that they were very static, they did not change over time… The second problem is that…buyers were looking across the entire OOH landscape, and a lot of the products would measure roadside but not transit. They would measure malls but not elevators ,so from the buyers standpoint, that’s not good enough…. The third challenge, frankly, was the lack of transparency and insight into how these numbers were created…. So we didn’t want these buyers not to spend, so lets see if we can solve these challenges.”
Mark Boidman, Solomon Partners, Global Media Group Head
On what keeps the M&A firms up at night.
“So what keeps us up at night…. is longer term leases……We like to see longer term leases with low fixed rents. And we love to see portfolios which have a lot of longer performing leases… We are getting to a period where we think it is not a great time to sell assets for the next couple of years. So if you are a buyer, this is the time to buy assets. We do see public multiples coming down, but we do think they will come right back up.”
Steve Haggard, Arizona Market President, Alerus
On the current state of the banking industry.
“We are a regional bank. We are not a big money center bank and we are much more nimble when it comes to looking at credit risk and looking at the dynamics of an industry such as Out of Home…. We are a little more counter-intuitive. This is when we feel like we need to launch and spread our wings, and take advantage of the opportunities that will be created because of this….”
“I think there are two big threats to our market right now. One is interest rate risk that we all are dealing with… Debt is not cheap today . The other question is what’s going to happen with CRE (commercial real estate) in the urban markets…. leases are coming due, balloons are coming due on some big mortgages.. When these threats all come together, in a matter of 12 – 18 months, what happens is banks start getting a lot of pushback from the regulators across the board. You see the regulatory overreach starting to occur and that means a lot of banks may start tightening their credit quality and their underwriting standards and make it a little more painful for the operators.”
“My recommendation to any operator is develop your relationship with your banker sooner than later…. Work with regionals, work with community banks… educate them on your industry, educate them on your business…. you have historical operating success, you have great locations, you have great boards… show them you know what you are doing and you have your arms around the potential risk.”
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