In addition to owning some out of home assets in New York, Atlanta and Chicago, Terry Carmody handles sales for Integration Media, a specialist out of home company which works closely with IBOUSA. Here’s a summary of Terry’s zoom comments recently to IBOUSA Associates on national advertising.
How Integration is coping with Covid.
Integration is weathering the storm. Everyone has been working from home since March…The business has been off but it hasn’t been horrific…We’ve certainly seen a drop but it’s somewhat manageable…A couple large names like Verizon, Apple, Comcast, Hulu – they’ve helped us weather the storm…The incremental business that we had in place didn’t go away. The vast majority of the emails we received in March was managing postponements…Some businesses are just flat out closed…cruise lines, entertainment parks – they aren’t open. But the vast majority were postponements. And a lot of them move over to June, July and August…We took a simple realistic view. This is a once in the lifetime event. Let’s be flexible and do everything possible to help our clients…
The Future
…going forward, the last few weeks have definitely been encouraging. We’re not getting 10-15 RFP’s a day. But we’re starting to see an uptick – the second, third week in April…We’ve seen it from a number of different categories…the alcohol, the beer category has been the busiest. …The majority of RFP’s have been…July, August and September. The tech category has showed up a little bit…A lot of the activity has been focused in the Southeast, the southwest, a lot of places where the infection rates haven’t been as high…The clients, the agencies know they need to advertise and they’re happy to come back to out of home. For many, that is their best performer when it comes to advertising….Q2 is going to be off. We know that. We’re hopeful Q3’s going to be OK. We’re very hopeful that Q4 is…going to be acceptable.
I’m sure a lot of you have seen traffic picking up in your regions. I’ve certainly seen that in New York…I’ve been going in to the office in Mid-town to make a check run. Early on I would go in and Manhattan was dead…There were not a lot of people on the streets. There was nothing open. There were certainly no cars on the streets, there were no taxis on the streets, there were no ubers on the street…The most recent time that I went in about a week and a half ago the highway that I take running through the Bronx into Manhattan…it’s gotten a heck of a lot busier…
Covid’s impact locally in Atlanta and Chicago
From a local perspective where we actually own digitals – we have a few in Atlanta and in Chicago, we were realistic. We were almost 90% empty during this time frame. We decided to put the space to good use. I reached out to the agencies in each market and told them…let’s help the community…if you have clients who want to get out messages, let us know. There’s no charge…If you have friends that own restaurants…if you have charities that you’re close to, reach out to them. We’re willing to put their messages up…We loaded up the system…We have a number of hospitals which were looking to run messages. We ran the CDC ads. We put together some of our own messages…
About IBOUSA
IBOUSA is a networking group of companies that have a common interest in promoting all things of importance to the OOH Industry. We bring together some brilliant minds and cutting-edge technologies and services in our industry in some fun and engaging ways. Billboard operators, vendors, consultants, agencies and advertisers enjoy the fruits of our collective efforts and we have forged wonderful friendships over the years. These relationships have evolved to build the IBO COOP Marketplace where the inventory of our operators is combined into a large national footprint that is easy to access. Learn more by calling 580-226-2234 or visit IBOUSA.org.
[wpforms id=”9787″]
Paid Advertisement
