Ian Dallimore interviewed Hal Kilshaw Lamar’s EVP Government Relations on the Digital and Dirt podcast. Here the highlights.
Lamar’s Decentralized Approach to Government Relations
Lamar does it a little bit differently than the other 2 big billboard companies …because we grew up as a company in smaller markets…we’ve tended to let our local operational people be out front on the local and state…governance where the other big companies have corporate based people who go around the country and do it…I’m a one man department because I just have to coordinate it all. I don’t actually have to go everywhere and do everything because I couldn’t but they’re out there doing it and it it just works better so when a a local general manager who’s a player in the business community of a medium sized town goes in I mean the council people already know him the state legislators already know him so it’s worked out great for us…
Los Angeles is a challenge for Lamar
I’ve made 150 trips to LA in the last 17 years and guess what we still have zero digital billboards in the city limits…I get an F on the Los Angeles…
But Los Angeles is changing.
We just never gave up we kept working, kept working, kept working and so it looks like we’ll get some digitals this year…I think in the third quarter of this year and we’re gonna start off with a spectacular by Union Station…we think the first one will be like a 20 foot by 60 foot which is a huge billboard and so …we’ll start with a bang…I can’t retire until we get digital billboards in Los Angeles
Digital billboards aren’t allowed in Washington State
46 states allow billboards. Do you know how many allow digital? 45. The state of Washington doesn’t allow digital billboards but there’s a lot of tribal land there so we’ve got some digitals in Washington but they’re on tribal land…We technically could put up a billboard in Washington if it were on a local only road but they tend not to be good locations for digitals.
The importance of avoiding low margin businesses…
The best example in Lamar land is in the transit side of the advertising business where you can…get a whole bunch of revenue but it’s hard to make very much money yeah so we don’t do that yeah right we we do things that are going to bring cash flow to the bottom line…
Government Relations reviews all Lamar creative.
Until about 15 years ago…the decision on whether or not to post copy would be made by the local general manager. They were in the community. They knew their community the best and they would make that decision…We had a big slip up and Kevin Riley Jr. was the CEO then he just decided we got to bring it in…I started doing it by myself and now we have a committee… it’s common sense…but it’s tough because people have different views…we have people who fuss about us being too tight and people who fuss us about us being too loose…people tend to believe in the 1st amendment maybe until they disagree with what it is you’re saying and they’re not so sure how much they agree and that gets frustrating…
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