I’ve been writing moderately humorous pieces for the OOH industry now since 2015. While I lost count after the first five postings, I reckon that’s roughly 500 pieces, based on publishing once a week, somewhere in the universe. Figure fifty times a year I’ve invaded your space.

But you know what? Not once have I ever written piece in two parts. Nope, never. I am vain enough to have checked.

Until now.

Last week’s piece, titled the same as these weeks, seemed to have hit a nerve. It should, considering most OOH employees, regardless of what fine product they are working for, are mainly salespeople. Oh, you can call us Account Executives, Digital Media Specialists, Sales Consultant, Sales Advisor, Client Success Manager, VP of Supply, Business Development Manager, Customer Service Rep, SVP Media, and my favorite, Strategic Advisor.

Whew.

We all do the same thing. We are selling advertising. Give yourself any flossy title you want, but our job is to fill space. Without us pushing to fill space, there are no revenues. Without revenues, there’s no dough to pay for installers, leasing fee’s, sales coordinators, the free sodas in the fridge.

Basically, anyone who’s not in a sales capacity is getting supported by ad sales. That’s why there’s a lot of us, many with different titles, all doing the same thing.

Which brings me the “Sequel” portion of today’s piece. Seems as though I left a few readers hanging after they read the line “I perfected the greatest opening line for any billboard salesperson. It’s two sentences and you get your answer right away.

I’m not going to tell you what they are right now, but when you see me at the upcoming shows hit me up.”

I didn’t realize the ruckus it would cause on my LinkedIn feed. Considering that ruckus is my middle name, I should fess up.

So rather than wait to run into me at a show, one reader who I hadn’t communicated with in almost four years, chimed in via text “Hi Nick, I’d like to know the two best sentences”.

Oh, winner, winner.

Since she was the first person to ask, I had to respond. Others followed soon after asking the same question. But since Danielle, now you know her name, piped in first, I wrote her back answering her question.

The rest of you get to read it here, in all its glory. Here are the two lines I started using in 2003:

“Hi, my name is Nick Coston, and I work for Clear Channel Outdoor. We have a few billboards that are within 2 miles of your location, and they are going to be available in less than a month for you to advertise on. Do you want to know these locations?

The follow-up question is just as easy: “have you ever thought about using billboards to help drive business your way?”

You can use these both on a cold call over the phone or an in-person cold call. All you need are some recent photos of the boards and maybe spotted map showing the board locations in green and the store location in red.

This can work with direct sales, programmatic sales, all kind of ad sales. These opening lines do not discriminate.

Of course, back then we only had bulletins, posters and transit to sell. Now you have far more OOH products to hawk, some digital, some moving, some in windows of retailers, some on boats, and some in the air.

But the pitch is always the same, it hasn’t changed in 25 years.  “I have space available on these units coming up soon, here’s where they are, here’s what they look like, here’s what they cost and here’s how many people on average see it. You probably pass by this unit every day”.

When I first started selling ad space way back in the stone age for Washingtonian Magazine, our boss, the ad director, who you’ve seen me write about in my pieces, used to remind us daily as he waved a freshly printed magazine in our faces:

“Monkeys with rate cards can sell this, remember that. Monkeys with rate cards”.

Regardless of our job titles and duties, if you are in the OOH world and you may not know it, we are always selling something. Keep your approach simple, don’t try and be sneaky, let whomever you are speaking to know who you are, who you work for and why you want their attention.

It works.

Just like a monkey with a rate card.

Insider’s Note: Nick Coston has been writing opinion pieces for the OOH industry for 10 years now. His weekly pieces also appear on Substack where you can view the last 2 years worth. Full-time, Nick is the VP, Sales and Sales Strategies for Moving Walls, the Singapore based media and ad tech giant, here in The America’s.

If you are interested, here is Nick’s Substack LINK

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