Lamar Advertising CEO Sean Reilly did a 40 minute interview on the  November 2022 Business Forum.  Billboard Insider enjoyed Reilly’s command of the details and jargon-free talk.  Some things Billboard Insider learned:

The very first digital billboard

We put up the very first digital billboard in 2004.  It cost $500,000.  We didn’t have a clue what we were doing.  We were willing to take a chance…We pioneered it..

The importance of digital

We have 170,000 billboard faces and only 4,000 are digital.  But those 4,000 billboards generate 30% of our revenue.

A typical Lamar career path

We religiously promote from within.  The typical entry level job is account executive.  Just about every general manager started right out of college as a Lamar account executive…The typical path is account executive to sales manager…sales manager in a big office…to general manager in a small office…the average tenure of a Lamar local manager is over 25 years.  The average tenure of a Lamar regional manager…is over 35 years.

On solar powered billboards

Where we’re able to deploy solar we have a zero carbon footprint on our billboards.

The Colossal Media’s Future

They operate mostly in New York and LA and Chicago.  My dream for them is to take them further down into middle markets…Why not Baton Rouge?  Why not St Louis?  Why not Seattle?

[wpforms id=”9787″]

Paid Advertisement