Company:  DDI Media

Markets: Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee

Headquarters:  8315 Drury Industrial Parkway, St Louis, MO  63114

Phone: 314-423-5040

DDI media operates a billboard plant with more than 1,400 faces concentrated in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Tennessee.  Tim Drury is the Company’s President.  Pat McLaughlin is SVP and General Manager.  Tony Mariani is SVP, Real Estate and Operations.  DDI is a member of the OAAA and Geopath and an IBOUSA operator.

In January 2021 DDI ran a series of digital billboard ads seeking information on a missing pregnant woman as part of a partnership with the FBI and CrimeStoppers.  In August 2021 DDI ran billboard tributes for a local marine who was one of the final casualties of the Afghanistan War.

Here are excerpts from our last interview with Vince Miller, the former President of DDI and now a member of the DDI board of Directors.

Vince how did DDI get into the out of home business?  

The Drury family used billboards for their hotels.  When they started building hotels in St. Louis they thought the prices were too high so they started developing sites.  They planned to use one face and sell the outbound to another advertiser.  They offered an operator a chance to manage the faces they didn’t need and the operator started playing permitting games on sites they were trying to develop.  The Drury’s got mad and it became personal.  The rest as they say is history.

Whose digital billboards do you use and what have you learned?   

We have self-developed 21 faces solely utilizing Watchfire.  We started with them and have had so few issues it is tough to want to try someone else until we have issues. 

Describe the local regulatory environment.

We face the same regulations as our bigger competitors…In St Louis county alone we deal with 92 different sign codes and revenue collection companies…It’s a continuous challenging environment.  We wanted to rebuild a 30 year old structure.  Our real estate rep worked it for 2.5 years and got six variances.  We were at the hearing and a neighboring landowner stood up to object…A landowner objected.  The city pointed out the objector lived outside of the city property.

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