On today’s Billboard Insider podcast, Blackbird Media CEO Chenault Saunders and President Prentiss Nelson talk about giant digital billboards.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:11 — 29.2MB)

Some highlights of the interview

Blackbird Media owns a spectacular 36′ by 38′ digital sign in Nashville.  Tell us the story about how it came about.

My grandfather…bought that sign in the 50’s…It had been a coco-cola perm.  It was a big static thing.  It had a time and temp.  So he operated a business there for many years.  We started to explore the opportunity to take it digital and ended up having ot go and lobby the metro council here in Nashville…and ended up getting a special provision in the code here in Nashville that allowed us to do digital…after looking at a lot of options…we made the decision that we would try to dgo it along.  I started a little company – Blackbird Media.  Me hired a couple of folks from the radio business.  We went up with the sign and it’s been quite an adventure…It’s at the intersection of West End Avenue and Broadway….It looks right down the middle of the largest, most important street in Nashville…

The Digital Install.

First it was taking a sign down and it was pretty amazing because a lot of it was made of plywood and we peeled back multiple layers, actually got all the way down to the original coca-cola sign that was there.  We had to buttress the structure that was there.  It was very challenging.  The hardest part was that this property had been used for automotive purposes since the 30’s.  We were trying to sink these metal pilings into the ground right in between 14 different underground storage tanks which we could not break.

Getting city approval

I got a call from our land use attorney and he said, look, there’s a bill floating through the city council that would outlaw digital billboards in all of these zones and this would apply to you.  We went and we talked to them and we said look, this sign has always been here.  It’s a part of Nashville.  It’s used as a wayfinder.  Why should Nashville not have the best quality sign.  The Council and everybody was in favor of it…

How do you sell a spectacular?

These giant signs – if they are in the kind of places where we have ours…they sell themselves…We have a dual selling plan.  We have a national sales plan and a local sales plan.  The local sales plan is where we are out in front of the community reaching out, trying to understand when the big events are…with the nationals it’s a different animal.

What you think about the automated sales platforms (e.g. blip, onescreen, vistar, adomni, adquick…)

We’ve been kind of dipping our toe into automated stuff.  It has not been particularly effective on our spectaculars…On the rest of our plant that is more standardized we have dipped our toe in with Vistar, Adomni, Place Exchange through Apparatix and our IBO relationship.  We’ve had some success with that.  We’re still figuring out how to optimize…We have used Blip…and we’ve had great success with that especially as of late…We’ve been pleased with how that’s gone…It’s money from the sky that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

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