Today’s podcast guest is Grey Vick the founder Grey Outdoor, an independent out of home company with 260 billboard structures in North and South Carolina.  Here are his thoughts about digital billboards and small markets.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:52 — 32.9MB)

On Digital signs.

We’ve got a few digitals and we’re going to be doing more…We’ve got around 10 or so digitals…it’s different because you’re updating them constantly and the best results for these advertisers are to update it constantly.  I like digital.  I really do…I’ve got both Formetco and Watchfire.  We like both of them…Formetco’s been really good to us and Watchfire has a really good product as well.  We’ve had very little issues with both of them.

Advice on buying your first digital

To not put one where you don’t need a digital…Don’t put a digital where a static board should be.  You want something where the traffic can kind of slow.  You can put a digital in a high demand area but if you can only see one or two flips on the digital…you’re going to have a hard time keeping advertisers on it…they want that long open read…Intersections are the best.  Everybody knows that because people just stop and they have nothing else to do but just sit there…

Just because you can put a digital on one face doesn’t mean you want to put a digital on the other side.

100%…I’ve had to learn that myself, but the hard way.  And now, most of the new digitals we’re going up with I’m going up with one digital.  I did notice that I might have a 2 sided digital – and could be bringing in the same revenue with one digital right there…There’s not going to be as much directional as a static board.  The directional are not going to be as prevalent in digital…Start with one, make sure you can fill it up and then go to your second one.

Automated sales platforms like Adomni or Blip.

Right now it’s a little bit incremental revenue for us.  I’m using Blip.  I really like the system that they have. It’s really easy to upload ads from my phone.  I’m on the go a lot trying to manage all this – myself and one other person – so the ease of their software, the system that they use is great.  I believe in the future that’s going to be a huge amount of revenue for our industry…

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