On last week’s conference call, Lamar CEO Sean Reilly projected 3.5-4.0% revenue growth during 2020.  It’s illuminating to see where he thinks Lamar’s growth comes from.  Here’s the detail.

• Reilly expects organic sales to grow by $52 million or 3%.  This is slightly in excess of the US inflation rate of 2.5% for the 12 months ended January 2020.
• Political revenues increase from $5 million in 2019 to $13 million in 2020.  You can already see heavy use of Lamar billboards in Bloomberg’s trolling of Trump.
• Programmatic revenue will increase from $13 million to $20 million.  A 54% improvement is great but it’s on a small base.

Insider’s take:  Not surprising political revenues will grow.  Bloomberg is spending heavily on out of home (see Bloomberg Spending Big on Billboards article today).   Still early days for programmatic which will account for only one-eighth of Lamar’s projected revenue growth in 2020.   Lamar’s projected 4% revenue growth is well off the company’s 8% revenue growth for 2019 and the US out of home industry’s 7% growth rate for the first 9 mos of 2019.   This is a conservative forecast.

[wpforms id=”9787″]

Paid Advertisement