Company: Emerald Outdoor

Market: Washington, Idaho.

Headquarters: 9212 E Montgomery Ave, Suite 604, Spokane Valley, WA  99206

Phone: 509-327-0103

Email: tommyt@emeraldoutdoor.com

In early 2004, Emerald Outdoor Advertising became associated with Sunset Outdoor Advertising in the Spokane area, adding 57 prime bulletin/billboard “faces” and 150+ bus bench advertising units. Emerald now has over 110 billboard faces in the state of Washington, Premier LED units in the Seattle/Tacoma area, Wenatchee and Portland. Emerald Outdoor has excellent coverage in the Spokane area, Wenatchee and North Central Washington.

Tom (Tommy) Townsend is always a great interview, so we sat down with him for a quick update.

Tommy, how has the Pacific Northwest and Emerald Outdoor weathered the Covid pandemic? 

Overall I think we weathered the storm pretty well…we have 90% local business. We had a few clients where we had to give relief to based on their business category, they were simply shut down and couldn’t operate for many months. We let them out of their contracts, but they are back now and doing well….and we’ve developed a business relationship with them that will withstand competitors efforts to switch to them.

Your home base of Spokane is seeing significant growth.  How is that impacting your business?

Again, local business is our bread and butter and if the local market is doing well we will do better. I think the Spokane area is pretty optimistic about the future. We are seeing more and more national businesses (Amazon and the like) locating their plants or distribution centers in our area, creating more and more jobs. It all trickles down. And while the national market could have a down turn I believe we are insulated enough to weather that, be it a Covid shutdown or a down turn in the economy. We feel pretty good about 2022.

Spokane does not have off-premise digital signs written into their sign code.  Do you see any interest from the City Council or Mayor? 

I haven’t seen it. The powers to be have traditionally been anti-billboard. Faces have changed in the last few years so there may be at least an opportunity to discuss it, but there’s a lot of work needed on that front. Lamar, the bigger company here in Spokane, has been making in- roads. While they are our competitor we do have a cooperative working relationship with them when it comes to these type of issues.

Billboard companies became a point of focus in Spokane on a proposed “graffiti tax”.  Can you tell what it was and where it stands?  

We really haven’t heard much about it since it made it’s big splash in the newspaper last year. It made headlines, probably grabbed some attention for the Council members pushing it but it hasn’t gone much further. The proposal and the implementation are two diametrically opposing concepts. A frankly I think here’s a case were Covid as been positive….the ability for people to meet and try to implement it is a little more cumbersome than before; and obviously this will be fought by the industry to the end.

[wpforms id=”9787″]

Paid Advertisement