Gleason, Reilly, Wells and Male at GO2018 Town Hall

Last week, Kevin Gleason, Sean Reilly, Scott Wells and Jeremy Male appeared at a GO2018 CEO Town Hall last week.  The panel was moderated by Horizon Media CEO Jill Nickerson, who contributed this quip:

“Don’t think of out of home as a medium, think of it as a large.”

Here is a summary of each CEO’s comments.

Jeremy Male, CEO, Outfront

“We’re 15% digital.  That’s a little behind the US as a whole.  UK digital is 50%.  We need to increase the amount of digital hardware.  That includes digital billboards, investment in transit systems, smart screens.  The other piece is becoming digital internally and how we transact.  Digitizing internally; digitizing externally.

“If you’d have said a few years ago that we’d have data scientists working in our business I would be surprised.  We’ve hired social media specialists.  We now have well qualified creative – the Outfront Studio – in all of our offices.”

Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel Outdoor

“We’re trying to be part of the digital solution and have digital data accountability and attribution.  We’ve learned a lot about attribution.  The key thing is being with the customer (advertiser) and following where they lead…You need to be wiling to roll out a viable product and iterate.

“When you think about the fight for dollars, the out of home industry is $8 billion.  We knock each other out over that.  What’s a lot more interesting to me is the $120 billion that advertisers spend on other media or the $80 billion in ad spend from people who don’t even touch out of home.”

“One of the biggest challenges of this industry has been our success.  41 years of revenue growth to the recession.  31 quarters of revenue growth since the recession.  Success makes it hard to change.  You need to be scrappy.  Think bigger.  Take risks.  Advertisers resonate with it.”

Sean Reilly, CEO, Lamar

“The challenge isn’t developing a digital tool box.  There are lots of vendors.  We’re taking an a la carte approach.  The challenge is educating customers.  We need to be  digital evangelist.  Our local customers don’t know what we can do.”

“It’s important that we not run after the latest shining bauble.  Just because we can do it doesn’t mean it works for us.  You have to be willing to spend a little money without knowing you’ll get a return.  We’re mostly fast followers. ”

“Next year we will talk about what a great rollout Geopath had and how we grew faster than GDP”

Kevin Gleason, CEO, Fairway/Adams

“We’ve launched digital specialists in each of our markets.  They understand digital and mobile buying.  They partner with local sales people.”

“We don’t get ad $$ because we don’t ask for it.  We don’t hold our sales people accountable.  We accept too many shitty little contracts.  This needs to be a campaign, not a sign.”

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