109. Billboards

·22 min·2 clips

Why did a digital marketing executive leave MTV for billboards, the world's oldest advertising medium?

Host Zachary Crockett opens by profiling Dan Levy, now Chief Marketing Officer at Clear Channel Outdoor, who initially dismissed billboards as an irrelevant backwater when a recruiter called him away from digital advertising roles at MTV and WWE. Levy changed his mind when he understood the job as bringing the world's oldest advertising medium into the twenty-first century, a framing that sets up the episode's central argument: billboards are more technologically sophisticated than most people realize. Anna Bogger, president and CEO of the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America, provides a historical overview, tracing the medium back at least two hundred years to large illustrated posters used by circuses like Barnum and Bailey to advertise along travel routes. By the 1850s, a dedicated billboard industry had emerged, and by the 1870s, companies were constructing and renting out billboard structures as a distinct business category. The proliferation of automobiles and highways in the twentieth century drove massive growth, with brands like Palmolive, Kellogg, and Coca-Cola becoming synonymous with roadside advertising. Today, the U.S. has approximately 350,000 static billboard structures and more than 30,000 digital ones, and roughly 55 percent of the industry is controlled by three national players: Lamar Advertising, Outfront Media, and Clear Channel Outdoor. Crockett explains that billboards belong to the broader category of out-of-home advertising, which encompasses any advertising exposure that occurs outside the home — subway ads, airport screens, shopping mall displays, and cinema placements — totaling a billion segment of the 70 billion U.S. advertising industry. Despite the dominance of digital platforms like Facebook and Google, out-of-home has continued to grow even as print and cable have declined, partly because of a structural advantage Bogger identifies: people pass billboards repeatedly and sometimes sit in traffic staring at them, producing dwell time that no other medium reliably generates. The episode's most surprising section concerns how digital billboards are now targeted using mobile location data. When smartphone users grant an app permission to use location services, that data is aggregated and sold into advertising ecosystems that inform billboard operators about what kinds of people are passing which displays and at what times. Levy explains that this data shapes decisions about what to show on a billboard, when to show it, and in which locations — a level of contextual targeting that most drivers do not realize is happening. Clear Channel works with both large multinational advertisers like Disney, Apple, and Netflix and small local businesses that have advertised on the same regional billboards for decades. The episode touches on the different physical formats in the industry: wallscapes painted or mounted on building facades in dense urban cores, classic bulletin boards along highways, and the growing digital billboard segment that allows for dynamic content rotation. Bogger argues that the out-of-home medium benefits from being unavoidable in a way that digital ads are not — there is no billboard equivalent of an ad blocker. The episode raises questions about privacy and the extent to which the mobile data pipeline is understood by consumers, though it does not resolve those questions editorially. Crockett's characteristically deadpan reporting style treats the billboard industry with the same analytical seriousness as any other economic subject, revealing genuine complexity behind what initially looks mundane.

As heard by us

An old medium with a very modern pricing problem.

Billboards seem simple from the road, but this episode treats them as a business built on land, traffic, and pricing, with the awkward fact that a 14-foot-tall, 48-foot-wide cheeseburger still has to pay for itself.

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You want the economics behind the billboards you pass every day.

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