Lamar Advertising Board Chairman Kevin Reilly Jr. appeared last week on Lamar’s Digital and Dirt podcast.  Some of the highlights.

Lamar’s decentralized approach

So we had consolidated financial control over decentralized operations…that means the person who runs that profit center is 100% responsible for the P&L right and they make all the decisions related to that but the things that can be consolidated collections payables certain legal or certain real estate efforts those things need to be integrated into into the mothership…

Lamar’s first digital billboard

Bobby Switzer was also very instrumental in pushing the cost per square foot of this vinyl down and it was not an easy task because the silk screen business was firmly entrenched in our industry. But anyway, moving on to digital, he says “look I want to build a digital sign across the street and I’m going to put a couple of air conditioners on it and it’s only gonna cost a half a million”…he says…”I see Moore’s law coming into place here and we need to be early adopters because the price per square foot of these units is going to come down the energy consumption is going to come down and we need to be leaders in this space.” So we put up the experimental unit.  It worked OK. Resolution wasn’t that great.  The air conditioners worked sometimes and of course today Sean could speak to this better than I can but I think we’re the largest out of home digital player in the the domestic US

Lamar and innovation

Innovation for us goes down a couple tracks…one is environmental concerns so that would be converting your lights to LED, it has to do with recycling substrates, it has to do with using inks that are more environmentally friendly… if we can reduce our energy footprint it reduces cost and it’s good for the planet it’s also good for all of our shareholders.   So that’s one road that we go down which is energy savings and just trying to do everything that we do better and cheaper going back to the golden rule…So the other road is risk and this company has a pretty solid capital structure and it has a substantial footprint domestic US so we need to take risk in our space just because of the size of our enterprise since since we really are the largest in terms of market cap of any of the other outdoor companies in the world we need to be a leader when it comes to innovation I mean that’s just unavoidable…

To receive a free morning newsletter with each day’s Billboard insider articles email info@billboardinsider.com with the word “Subscribe” in the title.  Our newsletter is free and we don’t sell our subscriber list.

Paid Advertisement