During last week’s OAAA legal seminar, Adams Outdoor VP and General Counsel Rich Zecchino reviewed when to accept and when to reject ads.
“As a company we control…the ability to approve or reject ad copy for any reason…I can’t tell how many phone calls when someone says you have to run my advertisement because it’s free speech. Our billboard structures are our property. We can decide what ads we accept. These ads come through programmatically with a quick turnaround. You need guidelines and quick approval. It goes to our sales manager and then the general manager and then to me as general counsel and maybe our CEO if it’s a big enough issue. It’s not a precise process. We stay away from sexually explicit content. We like to think we are members of the communities in which we operate. We reject ads all the time because we feel it’s not appropriate for that community. We do not accept any political through programmatic due to campaign finance laws. Programmatic can be discounted and this can create a problem if someone buys a programmatic political ad…As general counsel I had to sign off on every single political ad we were posting…we used the federal guidelines as our baseline. You had to have a paid-by line. You had to have a way to contact the person putting up the ad…We always try to make sure…whatever is on the advertisement is fact based and not subjective. We had a number of proposed advertisements against the trump campaign where there was a quote from Donald Trump “I don’t care” and a picture of gravestones…it’s taken out of context. If there were quotes we make people cite the source of the quotes…”
Other speakers at the seminar included
- Virginia Seitz on the Baltimore and Cincinnati tax cases
- Gary Kibel in Privacy
- Jay Wilder and Laura Linneball on cyber threats and covid force majeure clauses.
- Jennifer Bernardo on billboard leases.
- Allen Smith on billboard sign code challenges in Texas and elsewhere.
The seminar is free to OAAA members. Contact Kerry Yoakum at OAAA if you wish to access content.
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