John Bodger, OUTFRONT’s Twin Cities Real Estate Manager for 33 years, recently retired after a 42 year out of home career. Bodger built over 500 static billboards and 32 digital billboards during his career. Last week Bodger talked about R.O. Naegele Sr’s advice on dealing with landlowners. This week he talks about a difficult sign build and what makes a good location.
The most satisfying project in my career – First Avenue Nightclub at 1st Avenue and & 7th Street across from Target Center in Downtown Minneapolis.
In Downtown Minneapolis, we had a 30’ by 30’ static rooftop sign at the corner of 7th Street and Hennepin Ave. on the Mann Theatre that was being condemned for a new theatre. We asked the City if we could move it and save the condemnation costs. The City agreed and we talked to the owner of the First Avenue Nightclub a city block away– a place where a lot of upstart musicians including Prince have played. The owner agreed to a new lease and we received a sign permit to move the sign, but it had to be the existing roof top sign structure. Special engineering was needed to place steel beams on the new roof to match the sign coming from the old roof. Construction would take a large crane on tracks to pick up the existing roof top sign structure and move the sign one City block over. The crane picked the sign up and drove down 7th Street with the sign in the air like a boat sail, the sign was placed on top of the First Avenue Nightclub with no problems. We got permits to close a couple lanes of the road for the crane to drive down 7th St. It’s some of the best inventory in Downtown Minneapolis. Later the code changes so we could add 2 more static rooftop faces, so now it’s an iconic Downtown Minneapolis location.
What are the keys to a good location?
I like to look at it from the advertisers point of view.
- Clear sight lines.
- A 6-10 second read.
- No vegetation.
- Enough height on the sign to clear obstacles. The higher the better.
- High traffic count.
When does digital make sense?
Where it can be permitted, almost any good static location should be a good digital conversion location. You just don’t want to put them next to each other, maybe a couple miles or more gap. As you know, digitals are currently hot!
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