Clear Channel Outdoor Americas CEO Scott Wells thinks cities will be more accepting of digital billboards as they look for revenue post-covid. Here’s a selection of his comments at last week’s Morgan Stanley conference.
Is programmatic bringing in new money?
In 2011 to 2017 you had a lot of advertisers leave traditional media, including out of home because they wanted to have ROI stats…they wanted more flexibility. The first set of advertisers we got when we announced programmatic were people who loved out of home but had left because it didn’t have data, it didn’t have the flexibility…A second area is we’ve done a really good job as an industry laying out how complementary out of home is alongside social media and alongside mobile…and along mainstream digital display…
More cities will embrace digital signs
What’s going to happen coming out of covid is that a lot of cities are going to be looking for new revenue streams and cities that had been more hesitant about allowing digital signs will become more embracing of it. Whether that’s on public property, whether that’s on private property with some sort of community benefit associated with it – I think we’re going to see all kinds of innovation…and that will create opportunities for more conversion.
But static is still important
I think that static will still remain an important part of our business. I still get calls from advertisers when we convert somebody’s preferred location from being a beautiful printed location to being a multiplex digital location…that’s important in how the business works…
On how automation can make static ad production more efficient
Every time you do a big campaign printed you have to collect that copy and you have to get it on the right sign. Only in the last year or two have we been in a situation where we are contemplating end to end digitization of that process where it’s not reliant on people reading an invoice and putting it on the right truck and putting it on the right sign. It’s actually got a scan code on it that lets you make sure that all those things happen…
Insider’s take: Using bar code technology to manage what vinyls go where. An interesting thought if you have a huge billboard plant. Anybody out there doing this? Let us know using the form below.
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