Lamar EVP Buster Kantrow was interviewed on Lamar’s podcast this week. Kantrow said two things which Billboard Insider thinks explain why Lamar is the best performing public out of home company.
Lamar stays in its lane.
Lamar had gone public in 1996 and had done a lot of acquisitions, but there was a view that maybe there was an end in sight for those acquisitions…so you had investment bankers who were coming in saying, look you need to know you need to look further afield or your next opportunity you have this huge local sales force let’s put them to work selling something in addition to to billboards…That was a model at the time…Clear Channel was in the radio and the outdoor business…OUTFRONT was part of CBS which is in the TV radio and outdoor business and so they were coming in trying to sell Lamar on getting into something beyond the Billboard business and that summer I remember they were pitching the Yellow Pages business… Thank God we didn’t do that…Kevin, Sean and Brent saw that there was a lot of opportunity to invest in our business and that digital was a huge opportunity for the industry…
A local management focus
And I should say the managers made a lot of decisions that have paid off for the company I think you alluded to this but I think one of the ways that you know that Lamar operates is we invest a lot of autonomy and authority in our in our local managers and our GM’s and that’s intentional. Sean likes to say they hire, they fire, they turn on the lights, they turn off the lights…We’ve approached digital that way …it’s still the manager in Birmingham or the manager in Abilene who is expected to identify opportunities and surface those opportunities…they get the ball rolling on every digital deployment…It’s never somebody from corporate telling that manager you need to do X number digitals or you need to put a digital here.
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