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IN DEPTH: Why digital billboards just can’t find love

by Barnaby Page, editor

The long-running tussle over the future of digital billboards in Los Angeles took a new turn this week with an audacious offer from Lamar Advertising that would see it dismantle nearly half of the city’s conventional sites in return for a smaller number of new locations.

Yet it is far from certain that even dramatic gestures like this will pacify the grassroots opposition to digital billboards in cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific – opposition that has solidified around the issues of traffic safety and light pollution, but may be rooted in a more generalised distrust of ubiquitous advertising.

Lamar doesn’t own any digital billboard sites in LA, where CBS Outdoor and Clear Channel Outdoor operate about 100. But it does have some 4000 non-digital signs, many of them as small as six by 12 feet, which it acquired when it bought Vista Media from Entravision Communications for $100m last year.

Under the new deal which Lamar is reported to have proposed to LA authorities, it appears that the company would take down 3500 of the former Vista signs in return for the right to erect 500 new billboards at other locations – 50 of them digital.

Lamar says that changing traffic patterns have made many of its existing sites less desirable, and will be hoping that the prospect of up to $6m in annual site rentals for new billboards on city-owned property will sweeten the deal.

However, it is also likely that the company is seeking a way to dramatically break through the impasse over outdoor advertising in LA, where a moratorium on new sites is still in place while the city government debates long-term policy.

Lamar is not finding the path to digital an easy one in other conurbations either. For example, in Pittsburgh a city official gave the firm a permit to build a 19-by-58-foot digital sign on Grant Street Transportation Center, but reportedly did so without following the correct process. Council members tried to get the permit revoked, the case ended up in court, and a judge agreed that the permit could be invalidated.

The saga doesn’t end there. The issue is now going to a higher court, and Lamar’s mood is combative: the company says that if it can’t complete the billboard, Pittsburgh should pay it more than $1m in damages to reflect its wasted investment.

Texas eyesore massacre

In Texas, meanwhile, the experience of two cities illustrates both the regulatory maze that can entrap digital out-of-home firms and the deeply-held public opinions that the outdoor operators can often do little to sway.

In El Paso, more than a year of discussions resulted this week in a new rule that outdoor firms could exchange 16 vinyl sites for one digital, as long as the digital billboards were a mile apart and changed their images only once a minute: guidelines broadly similar to those sought or imposed in other cities. The rule also introduced a limit of 40 digital billboards in total; the city currently has 15.

Tempers had run high on the issue, with Clear Channel Outdoor contending that the regulations were a sneaky way to effectively outlaw digital billboards by making them unviable, local business leaders saying that the rules would hamper commerce, and community associations riposting that protecting visual amenity was more important.

Indeed, a survey in the El Paso Times found that half of registered voters wanted to see the overall number of billboards cut; only about 30 percent were content with the existing number.

The eventual shape of the regulations emerged from a wide range of ideas, including a proposal favourable to the out-of-home companies that only five vinyl billboards should come down for each new digital one, and another much stricter suggestion that the number of digital sites should be capped at the existing 15.

As often in the debates that have flamed across the U.S., traffic safety was a major plank in the arguments of the anti-billboard camp, although there is still no conclusive study of digital screens’ effect on road accidents.

In the event, however, the final form of the regulations may be irrelevant – for the complexity of feeling surrounding digital billboards was highlighted by the decision of El Paso’s mayor to veto them shortly after they were passed.

The mayor said his veto – which could in turn be over-ridden by the city council – was imposed to allow smaller businesses to compete against the currently dominant local player in digital, Clear Channel Outdoor, and also to allow billboards to spread into newly-developed areas of the city rather than concentrating them in the downtown.

“Enough already”

And a few hundred miles east, even the corporate home of Clear Channel Outdoor’s parent Clear Channel Communications is not immune from the controversy.

San Antonio’s one-year pilot with 13 digital billboards (pictured) has been accompanied by five public meetings, and despite the outdoor firm’s assertion that it and Lamar have met or exceeded all requirements including the removal of six conventional billboards for each new digital display, it has been greeted with a familiar chorus of disapproval.

Among the objections raised at the public meetings, which will be considered by the city council when it makes a decision on digital in the autumn, were the incompatibility of large displays with a historic built environment, excessive brightness, and road safety.

Perhaps the comment of a citizen identified only as “Al” on a message board operated by the San Antonio Express-News epitomises the level of antipathy that Clear Channel, Lamar and their fellows continue to face throughout the country: That’s a great idea, tear down all billboards! I love it. We get phone calls, junk mail, spam, tv comercials [sic], flyers, handbills, that’s plenty.

www.cbsoutdoor.com
www.clearchanneloutdoor.com
www.lamaroutdoor.com

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