Insider continues our conversation with Rod Rackley, this time focused on maintaining and building revenue and what the future might look like for Circle Graphics.

Before Covid became the dominate issue, being an OOH printer in this new digital environment was becoming a growth challenge. Yet Circle Graphics has not seen any revenue decline. Talk about what you have done as an organization to maintain your sales levels?

We work hard on our relationships, the backbone of our business. Ideal partnerships create trust and improve efficiency by allowing each party to move straight to problem solving versus wondering where you might be at risk in a relationship.

We were fortunate to acquire MMT at the beginning of 2020, just a few months prior to Covid. This iconic printing company has been a wonderful addition to the Circle family and has given us expanded options in walls, acrylic paint and 5-year products, as well as better access to east coast markets. Most important, the teammates that joined Circle from MMT have been incredible and have made Circle, without question, a better company.

We added Anthem Displays, a digital billboard manufacturing company in North Carolina, to our portfolio, which gives us a full suite of visual solutions for our OOH partners. The combination of Anthem’s reliable digital displays and Circle’s long-standing history of standing behind our products should give our billboard company partners confidence in buying digitals from us.

We are also making a big push with independent billboard operators. We launched Circle Rewards, a loyalty program with a number of additional valuable benefits.

Taking care of customers, of all sizes, is important.  What is Circle Graphics approach to customer service and support?

We have some core principles at Circle related to customer service.

• We make promises and keep them.
• We respect your time and work to streamline processes to make things more efficient.
• We value gratitude.
• We do not argue with customers. If there’s a problem, we make it right.
• We review every mistake, and we learn and improve from them.

Today we are better than we were yesterday, and tomorrow we will be better than today.

A good example of our customer focus happened a few months ago as we were analyzing our inbound emails and determined that many of our customers would benefit from having a “hot line” solution to make changes to an in-process order. We installed an “URGENT BUTTON” on our My Circle online portal, and it has been a huge success. Now Circle customers can make any number of changes to an order at any time of the day or night and get immediate action and confirmation.

What do you see as opportunities for OOH and Circle Graphics moving forward?

Notwithstanding the fact that many smart people are trying to remove friction from the OOH buying process, we still have a long way to go.

We all know that eventually (I’d say 5 years, max) media companies will have their avails online in real time, and the inefficiencies of RFPs, inventory holds, substitute panels, etc. will be in the rear view. This should pave the way for broader adoption of OOH in media plans.

I feel like an important opportunity that we can implement “now” is a standardized OOH panel/display database. This database will have the obligatory geocode information as well as be a repository for current and future measurement data. AND this database will have production specifications (material requirements, live and finished sizes, critical copy areas, finishing requirements (think wall murals), ship to info, paneling and packaging info, etc.).

Having this information translated into database fields will give every printer the info needed to execute without the endless shuffling of PDF files for every campaign.

From here, all you need to produce a single billboard or an OOH campaign is a panel id (or list of panel ids) … and some artwork!

Yes – I know Geopath has a database, but it’s not comprehensive (only containing audited panels), and it’s not public … or free.

A number of our partners, including AdQuick, PJX, DOmedia, and others have proprietary panel/display repositories. Indeed, Circle has about as comprehensive a panel database as anyone after 20 years of printing campaigns. However, we feel this core infrastructure needs to be open sourced and available to all … for the greater good of OOH.

“You can’t sell cars in a country without roads” is a favorite expression of my friend, Sam Mallikarjunan, CEO of Onescreen.ai. Onescreen is taking the lead on building out some important “roadways” with an open-source, publicly accessible panel/display database where every media owner keeps their data up-to-date and available to access via API. Their team has also digitally scrubbed the local permitting offices nationwide, and they claim to have discovered twice the number of billboard faces in operation in the US – 800,000 versus the commonly quoted 400,000! Imagine, if true, what this says about how much room for improvement we have in all areas of OOH.

In terms of opportunities closer to home, we see great promise in the vehicle wrap segment. Companies like Wrapify, Boxi, AdWheels and Wrapmate are exciting and hard-charging companies doing well in this space, who we proudly support.

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