This week’s Billboard Insider podcast guest Ike Wingate talked about when to run and and when not to run a billboard ad.  We’ve excerpted his comments below.

You made a decision a few years ago to run a movie billboard ad which had been turned down by another billboard company.  Talk about that.

This was in an election year.  Feeling very similar to right now.  The Republican convention was happening in downtown Cleveland.  This movie called Gods Not Dead Two was wanting to advertise…They were ready to go to installation and then the company decided to pull the ad because it was too incendiary.  They thought it was too provocative.  The ad said “I’d rather stand with God and be judged by the world than stand with the world and be judged by God.”  There’s a whole series of these movies put on by a company called Pure Flix.  My family had seen the first one and liked it.  I kind of thought it was ridiculous.  Of all the offensive ads you could put up there they were pulling it because of that…I posted something on facebook and a couple of my friends said “why don’t you just run ads for it.”  I thought, maybe I should.  So I reached out to the film…Two days later I got a call from a reporter for Foxnews.com asking all about it…Some local publications picked it up.  I ended up writing an op-ed in a national publication.  I got our friends in the IBO to jump on board.  The ads were seen all over the country…It got all kinds of publicity.

How do you use to decide what to show and what not to show on your billboards.

We have a content policy that is family-friendly.  Are the ads family-friendly?  The litmus test is if I’m driving down the road with my kids and we see an ad am I going to have an uncomfortable time explaining this to them…that is not a place where people should have to worry am I driving down the road and I see something that creates an uncomfortable conversation that I didn’t want to have for a couple more years…We’re not prudes.  One of the things about billboards is that you can use comedy and provoke thoughts, but you can do it in a positive way…

We have to be careful right now as billboard operators because there’s a big trend “I’m going to go get a billboard and make a really polarizing statement on it and I’m going to get a ton of earned media out of it.  The local station is going to cover it and I’m going to get all this extra publicity because I’m willing to be polarizing”  We’re being used.  We are pawns in their scheme.  You’ve got to be careful about that…

We got approached a couple years ago by a SuperPac that wanted to put an ad up that said The NRA Is A Terrorist Organization through the IBO.  I’m for gun rights but I’m also for free speech.  But we are not going to put that on a billboard.  That is just meant to polarize…people and we didn’t want to be a pawn in that.  So they put up an ad up that said End The NRA instead.  We didn’t agree with the message but it wasn’t as polarizing.  And what was funny is you put an ad up for one point of view and somebody with another point of view comes back and says I want to advertise as well…We picked up a local gun safe company that got on the other side of the board.

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