By Rod Rackley
Half of John Morgan’s keynote in Dallas had nothing to do with out of home. It was about luck, failure and getting back up. If you run a billboard company, a print shop, a fab shop or a software business, I think it was the more useful half.
Morgan had just finished a book, Life Is Luck: Lessons from a Paperboy. He bought his first paper route in Lexington, Kentucky, at ten years old, with a bank loan his grandmother co-signed. Today Forbes lists him among America’s most successful self-made people. His central point is one that successful people don’t love to hear. A lot of it was luck.
Luck you can work on
He sorted luck into three kinds. Pure luck is lightning in a bottle, good or bad. Planned luck is Ben Franklin out in a storm with a kite and a key. Practiced luck is the two-minute drill that looks like a miracle and isn’t.
His best example came from his friend and business partner Grant Hill, who threw the full-court pass to Christian Laettner that beat Kentucky in one of the most famous plays in college basketball. Hill told him Duke had practiced that play every day. It looked like luck. It was repetition.
Our business runs on practiced luck. It’s the install crew that hangs a flex face in the wind without a wrinkle, and the plant that turns a rush order overnight because they’ve done it a hundred times. Customers call it luck. We know better.
He also talked about timing. He started practicing law not long after the 1977 Supreme Court decision that let lawyers advertise, when most lawyers who could afford it wouldn’t touch it. He got into that lane early. His advice was to keep watching for those openings:
“If you don’t want to call it luck, call it opportunity.”
Some of his luck was hard. His brother Tim was left a quadriplegic at 18 after an accident while working as a lifeguard. Morgan said watching his family go up against that system with no money and no power is what made him the lawyer he became. Tim later helped build the firm and ran its call center. Bad luck turned into a life’s work.
Vision makers, not visionaries
Morgan doesn’t care for the word visionary. Plenty of people have big ideas. Very few act on them. His proof was a breakfast story. Tired of crawling under the table after his kids’ crayons, he told his wife somebody ought to make a crayon that doesn’t roll. Six months later Denny’s handed them triangular crayons. He was crushed. His wife pointed out that he’d never done anything about it.
“There are visionaries, and then there’s vision-makers,” he said. In between are what he calls vision blockers: partners, circumstances, sometimes family. The biggest one, he said, is usually us.
Most of us have a list of good ideas we never got around to. I know I do.
Never eat alone, and write it down
Morgan recommended Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone and put it bluntly. If you think you’ll be successful eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at your desk, you won’t. He said he came to Dallas expecting something good to come out of being there, and he told a story from dinner the night before to prove it. The room enjoyed that one.
That’s the case for showing up. Conferences, supplier receptions, a customer lunch. It’s also why I keep pushing for more operations people and suppliers in the room at OAAA events. Deals and ideas happen at the table.
He also insists on written goals, every day. He picked that up selling Yellow Pages before law school, where the numbers got posted daily.
Follow the rules of the house
Morgan compared business to a casino. You don’t hit on 16. You always split aces. The two house rules people break most in business, he said, are a bad location and starting out undercapitalized. Then he added the line that got a knowing laugh from this crowd:
“Location, location, location. Same for billboards.”
Location is our product, and we’d do well to say so more often. As for undercapitalized, anyone in our supply chain carrying 90-day receivables knows exactly what that feels like.
Make failure your friend
Morgan spent tens of millions of his own money on a Florida ballot measure for medical marijuana, inspired by what it did for his brother. It won 58 percent of the vote and still lost, because Florida requires 60. He studied what went wrong, came back two years later, and won with better than 70 percent.
He also opened a crime museum in Washington, D.C. that never caught on. He moved the same exhibits to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, renamed it Alcatraz East, and says it now “gushes money.” Same idea, different location. Which brings us right back to the house rules.
Watch out for arrogance
Success, he warned, can convince you it was all you. That’s when the rude awakening comes. He pointed to two famous Hollywood names who each put about $100 million of their own money into a passion project that audiences ignored. It’s a good thing to remember in a good year.
Answer the bell
He closed with the Thrilla in Manila. Ali and Frazier, both wrecked, with the fifteenth round coming. Ali wanted his gloves cut off. Frazier could barely see. Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, threw in the towel to protect him, and Ali got the win.
Morgan took two lessons from it. Business knocks you down, and you have to get up and answer the bell. And it matters a great deal who’s in your corner.
That second point is the one I’d leave with our industry. Out of home has sat somewhere around 4 percent of U.S. ad spend for as long as most of us can remember. Media owners, agencies and suppliers are in each other’s corners whether we act like it or not. So what does answering the bell together actually look like? Here’s where I’d start.
Velocity. Too many campaigns drift to digital because a billboard takes weeks to get from approved art to the street. Faster approvals, faster production and faster installs take that excuse off the table. Every link in the chain owns a piece of that clock, and none of us can fix it alone.
Standards. File specs, proof of posting and approval workflows still vary from one operator to the next, and every one-off costs somebody time and money. We should tighten them up, and we should do it with advertisers and agencies at the table. Standards we write only for ourselves tend to solve our problems and nobody else’s.
Measurement. We’ve debated it long enough. The larger media companies need to settle on an approach and move forward, so buyers can stop using measurement as a reason to wait.
Innovation. Suppliers need to make the exciting stuff affordable: dimensional extensions, lighting, embellishments and smarter automation for static. Media owners need to sell it. Agencies need to ask for it. A great idea that only shows up as a once-a-year stunt doesn’t grow anybody’s share.
None of this asks anyone to give up a competitive edge. It just asks us to stop waiting for somebody else to go first. If we want a bigger piece of the pie, we’ll have to answer the bell together.
The last word
Morgan ended with Ted Turner, who ran a billboard company long before he built CNN. When Mike Wallace asked Turner for advice, he said:
“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.”
Morgan has clearly taken every word of that to heart. For those of us who build, print, sell and service this medium, I’d add three more.
Change the copy.
Rod Rackley is Chairman of Circle Graphics and Chairman of the OAAA Suppliers Council, and represents suppliers on the OAAA Board. He started his OOH career at Lamar, joined Circle Graphics near its founding, and later founded Anthem Displays, a digital display company. Along the way he has had a hand in producing as many billboard faces, static and digital, as almost anyone in the business. He wrote The Creative Multiplier, the first paper in OAAA’s Supplier Insights series, and lives in Boulder, Colorado. Circle Graphics prints billboards for Morgan & Morgan campaigns; Morgan & Morgan did not sponsor or pay for this series.
