We all know that there are areas of the country that do not have much Outdoor Advertising. But you sometimes forget that there are many major roadways in some of the largest United States markets that have no billboards, no Wallscapes, no 30-Sheets, just open space. I was reminded of this on a recent ride out to Burbank to take completions photos for a new Bus Shelter campaign. There was no outdoor advertising on the I-5 Freeway (except for one double faced board) from downtown to past Burbank approximately 10 miles.

So how do you reach the communities that don’t have outdoor on their major roadways? The answer is by using non-traditional Out-of-Home. Here are a few examples:

• Mobile billboards can reach any area and demographic while staying on a specific route determined by the client or wander through the most highly trafficked area of the target geographic area. They are 10’H x 22’W double-sided with vinyl production (sometimes they also have a tail ad), and are illuminated for nighttime campaigns. Some markets also offer Digital Mobile Billboard trucks.
• Movie Theater Advertising is a great way to reach large captive audiences in a precise target area. You can utilize a single theater or multiple theater complexes to fit a specific budget.
• Gym & Health Club ads, Bar & Restaurant advertising and College & High School ads are other ways.

But for those truly hard to reach areas, there are a few more creative options:

• Coffee Sleeve advertising, which are in most of the independent coffee shops throughout a neighborhood. The ad is inches from your face for the entire time it takes to drink a hot cup of coffee. Put a QR Code on it and it could remain with the prospective customer indefinitely.
• Pizza Box advertising comes into your home and is in front of you while you enjoy your pizza. Put a QR Code on the box to intrigue the consumer to visit your website or receive a discount/coupon for your product.

The bottom line: There is always an Out-of-Home way to reach potential customers no matter where they are and with your budget in mind. You can’t escape OOH advertising.

Recently on an episode of the TV show HOUSE, multiple formats of Outdoor Advertising were a main component of the show. As it should be! The hospital was promoting itself and featured one of its doctors, Dr. Chris Taub (one of House’s team) as the image of the hospital. The tagline was “Be Great”, and the outdoor was. They used: 30-Sheets, Bus Shelters, 8-Sheets and a backlit Kiosk inside of the hospital cafeteria.  

As his character is prone to be, Dr. Taub was unhappy with himself and his relationship with his wife. Unluckily for him, everywhere he looked there was outdoor with an image of himself staring back at him. For him it was a burden but it did highlight the beauty of a coordinated Out-of-Home campaign. It was everywhere he looked, everywhere his colleagues looked, and of course everywhere his protagonist House looked. The hospital was happy with the campaign. Taub was not. 

This is just one more confirmation of outdoor as a medium. Here it is central to the storyline on a major TV show. As a point of fact: All other media formats use Outdoor Advertising to promote themselves: Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and movies; they all use outdoor. The outdoor industry never uses them.

Yes, Super Bowl Sunday is here! And the TV commercials have been sold for a whopping $3 million per 30-second spot. I think there’s a football game on that day also. But enough about that. The previews to the Super Bowl commercials have been leaking out and look to be funny, sexy, action-packed and everything in between. We love them! And the size of the audience that will see these commercials on Super Bowl Sunday is without doubt going to be HUGE.  

But let’s compare those costs to Outdoor Advertising and see what we get.  For the cost of one 30-second Super Bowl spot, you could buy:

• A network of 10 Digital Billboards in LA for a 4 week period, for 3.5% of the cost.  
• 25 Wallscapes or Billboards in Manhattan for 4 weeks, for 1/3 the cost of a spot.
• A network of 43 Bus Shelters in Chicago, for 2% of the cost.
• A #50 showing of King Bus Sides in San Francisco for less than 2% of the cost.
• 20 Airport Dioramas for 2.5% of the cost, and so on.

The point is, for the cost of just one 30-second Super Bowl spot, an advertiser could easily do a very effective Out-of-Home campaign, in the top 10 markets, and still have plenty of money left over.

Granted there is nothing more fun than sitting with a bunch of friends in front of the TV and watching the Super Bowl. But just imagine how much money you could have for beer, chips and dip by doing an Outdoor campaign. Oh yeah, and an enormous amount of people would see it too.

I recently spent a week in Loreto, Mexico, a small fishing village on the Sea of Cortez side of the Baja Peninsula. In a town of 15,000, a young girl of around 8 years old had gone missing. The Outdoor Advertising community saw the need and posted her picture and contact information for reaching the authorities. Billboards and posters are currently aiding in the search for this girl, who we pray is found safely soon.

Once again this shows the power of Outdoor and the responsibility our great industry shows to the residents of towns and cities here in the United States, and the other places around the world.

Happy Holidays!

Once upon a time in a Galaxy far far away… No that’s not it. When dinosaurs roamed the earth…No. No.

At a time when DOOH (Digital-Out-Of-Home) is popping up everywhere, it seems like ancient history (or so I’ve been told) to write about the next subject matter, but here it goes:

A while ago, say 30 years ago and way longer than that, almost all outdoor billboards used as perms and definitely all Wallscapes were hand painted by a group of extremely talented artists. Some of these artists are still out there and painting beautiful Wallscapes but the advent of computer generated vinyl and mesh has all but made them (sadly) a thing of the past.

Here is the step by step process that took place to paint a billboard:

A photograph and/or all accompanying artwork was scaled to the dimensions of the outdoor billboard. As an example say a 14’H x 48’W billboard. The artwork was taken into the painter’s large high ceiling warehouse type studio and placed on a light projector to project the image of the art onto a metal wall draped in butcher paper. An image of a full sized billboard (sometimes in sections depending on the overall size) is now projected onto the huge butcher paper covered wall of steel from the piece of paper artwork roughly the size of a taxi top. Using a person’s face as an example, the painter gets on his scaffold and traces the outline of the eyeball onto the paper using an electric pen. The projected eyeball is roughly the size of his entire body. When the pen touches the paper a tiny hole is burned into the paper until the entire outline of the eyeball, iris, lashes, etc. is made up of a series of dot/holes. Then the eyebrows, the nose, mouth, creases, head, body, etc. until the entire artwork image has been transformed into a series of dotted stencils. The paper is then rolled up in sections and then the real work begins.

The painter would take the paper sections with the outlines burned into them and attach them to the white painted billboard face. He would then hit the holed paper outline with a pounce bag which was a porous bag of graphite which would penetrate through the holes in the paper onto the white billboard face. When the entire image was “pounced” he would remove the paper and would be left with a pencil like outline on the board. He would then blend his paints to match the artwork colors and begin to paint the image per the artwork. The real artistry is to paint an eyeball that is bigger than your body from a piece of artwork that fits in your hand in such a way that it will look real while seen from a moving car 1000’ away. Then the face, body, trees, background, etc. to look exactly like the art director designed it but much much bigger.

What complicated matters somewhat was where the billboards were painted. Some billboard faces were disassembled from the structure on the street into six 14’H x 8’W sections and placed on a flatbed truck and brought to the paint studio where they were reassembled onto a billboard size paint rack and painted “in-house”. Once painted they were again disassembled and brought back to the street where they were hoisted up the billboard and reassembled with the painted image. However, some boards (and of course all walls) were never built to be taken apart so they were painted “on-site”. The painters climbed up billboards that were 50, 75, 100 feet off the ground or on the roofs of buildings that were five, 10 stories high and climbed onto catwalks that were three feet wide and painted. Some wore harnesses, some not because it “restricted” their movement.

I’ll never forget I once asked a high pictorial painter friend of mine, who I considered a fantastic artist, to draw a simple picture of something for me. To my surprise he said “ no no, I can’t do that, I can’t draw”. I was shocked and must have shown it because he then said to me that “he was like a copier machine stuck on the enlarge mode and that was all he did”. Sorry. Someone that can take a picture from a piece of paper and duplicating it exactly on a 50 foot billboard is an artist.

And that is the history lesson of an almost forgotten art. I hope I didn’t forget anything.

For years people have been talking about Digital Billboards: They like them. They don’t like them. The lighting is too bright, they’re disruptive, they cause traffic jams and accidents, etc. Some don’t like them simply because they’re not like the simple beauty of the familiar static billboard that doesn’t flash at you every 6 – 8 seconds.

Well finally, a study from Tantala Associates and the OAAA has come out that will put to rest one of the Digital Billboard concerns: They don’t cause or increase traffic accidents. Granted this is only one conclusion from just one study, so there will still be plenty of controversy, but it’s a step in the right direction and a beginning to the end of the debate. So rest assured that while you’re driving down the road and the person next to you is talking on their cell phone while smoking a cigarette and drinking a soda with their burger, a Digital Billboard is not what will cause an accident.

What Digital Billboards will do is inform you, direct you, create a need, urge you to action to buy something, tell you a story and just downright entertain you. The changes of the images draw your attention to the advertising, giving the advertiser an advantage over other signage (including retail onsite signs). In most cases, Digital is sold in networks spread out over a large highly desired geographic area, generating a huge number of impressions on a daily basis. Digital technology is also being used in many other Out-of-Home formats such as Mallscapes, Bus Shelters, Taxi Tops, Bus Sides, Airport Dioramas, and others.

The Outdoor Digital revolution is not only here and spreading, but now is suggested to be safe and consumer friendly.

GPS, Wi-Fi, facial recognition, proximity location technology and more is coming to the Out-of-Home industry faster than you can tweet what you had at Starbucks. It’s all about user friendly technology to make your life easier and more fulfilled.

Right now a coupon can be sent to your Smartphone when you walk by a Bus Shelter. Or a song can be downloaded after passing a Billboard. There are even ads now that have bar codes which you can scan into your phone for sale items, store locations, directions, etc. With a push of a few buttons and a click on “Accept”, you’re done. But just think what the future could hold… no “Accept” or “Deny” option, it’s just written into your cell phone agreement, or in an App you’ve downloaded.

Look at the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise. How much longer before those scenes become real? Imagine:
You’re walking past some digital street furniture and it says to you "Hey Mrs. Jones, that dream vacation you’ve always wanted just went on sale. And we know you can afford it because we checked your bank account, and it will still leave you with a balance of $17.53. And remember to pack that blue bathing suit you bought yesterday.”

As you’re contemplating your vacation, you hop on the train and the Overhead Car Card advertisement tells you, “Don’t forget to get a pedicure before your vacation. According to your calendar, the 3:30 appointment I just made for you will fit perfectly between your already booked 2:30 & 4:40. See you then.”

This is Outdoor Advertising at its best when the sole purpose is to inform you, entice you, motivate you, sell you and be an even bigger part in making your life just better.

But don’t forget that pedicure! You’ll need it for that vacation.

Digital billboards are one thing, but digital License Plates? Are you kidding me?

Have you heard that the California Legislature’s is considering a bill that would allow digital advertising on car license plates? This is being considered only because of our multibillion dollar deficit.

The Concept goes like this:
The license plate number would remain visible at all times, however when the vehicle stops for more than 4 seconds (in traffic or at a red light) a digital ad would appear.

But wouldn’t it be more interesting if the plates changed while you were driving? Here’s the scenario:
The police are chasing a car and they are trying to radio-in their location for assistance with the description of the car. It’s “a blue Chevy Malibu with license plate number Drink Coke and Set Yourself Free, traveling north on the I-5 Freeway and just passing the billboard reading Stop Child Obesity in our Schools…”

I love Out-of-Home Advertising because it captures people when they’re on-the-go and out enjoying life. Billboards, Wallscapes, Bus Shelters, Wrapped Buses etc., they’re big and bold just like life itself. But License Plates? I’m sorry, nothing compares to the real thing.

I think we need to leave license plates alone and let them serve the purpose for which they’re intended: identifying cars and aiding the police.

Out-of-home does not need any help thank you very much! It’s already a fun, creative and current medium, it doesn’t need dangerous futuristic Jetson’s gimmicks to make it unique or alternative.

Did you ever wonder how those aerial banners you see flying around actually get up in the sky? No, they don't drag them along as they take off; no, they don't throw them out the window once they get airborne. No, it's way more Evel Knievel and harrowing than that.

The banner is made of a super strong, vinyl-like material but so lightweight that 50’ x 100’ banner a could actually be folded and placed into a large cardboard box. Then they throw the whole box out the window. No, just kidding. Before takeoff, the banner is spread out lengthwise on an adjoining runway with the harness attached to a couple of upright poles (similar to a football goalpost).

The plane takes off without the banner attached, then it gains altitude and speed, circles around and dives down towards the goalpost with a grappling hook trailing behind the plane. (Think crop-dusters trying to hoe a field with a hook. Or a fighter pilot landing on an aircraft carrier, but way slower and without the $30,000,000 plane.) So pilot is diving, hook is hanging and speed is increasing; the pilot pulls the plane up just as he approaches the posts, which have a horizontal catch-wire attached to the harness, which is attached to the banner. He hits the wire with the hook and accelerates straight up, pulling the banner aloft without dragging or tearing. He completes his route for the advertiser, approaches the airfield from whence he came, drops the hook and banner over the field and they float to the ground safely to be used another day.

The pilot lands, thanks God and proceeds directly to the bar, or to therapy, or to the Adrenaline Rush Anonymous meeting.

Check out some of our recent Aerial Advertising campaigns!