The Economics of Everyday Things
00:00:01 · S0, S1, S2, S3
[00:00:01] S0: To the millions of small business owners out there, we appreciate you. We see your early mornings, late nights, and all the hard work in between. And with the US Bank Business Essentials card, you don't have to go it alone. With unlimited 2% cashback on every purchase because we know your communities count on you to be here, there, everywhere. So, yeah, we don't just appreciate you, we support you. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions may apply. [00:00:29] S1: Who knew Walmart Business could help a thriving office motivate their employees? Pamela knew. She uses Walmart Business to get the assortment of items her team needs at the prices she loves. [00:00:38] S2: As the office manager, it's my job to make sure my team stays on top of their game. I can get the basics like cleaning supplies and paper towels, but what they really care about, snacks. [00:00:47] S1: And she can get everything they need when they need it. [00:00:49] S2: Greg loves wheat crackers, Brenda Crave sour candy, and Max, oh boy, he needs protein bars and milk and apple [00:00:56] S1: sauce It's walnut. And jerky. [00:00:57] S3: Built for your business. Who knew?
00:00:57 · S3, Zachary Crockett, Dan Levi
[00:00:57] S3: Built for your business. Who knew? [00:01:02] S4: Ten years ago, Dan Levi got an unusual call from a recruiter. At the time, he was a successful marketing executive who had worked at companies like MTV and World Wrestling Entertainment. He spent all day thinking about digital advertising, ads on social networks and video sharing sites. But the phone call was about an opportunity in a much less glamorous field, billboards. [00:01:27] S5: I originally turned down the interview because who wants to be a billboard marketing guy? Everything in media and the advertising world had been going so aggressively towards digital and towards mobile. So first pass, it didn't seem like it was the type of move that made sense for me. [00:01:43] S4: But Levi gave the opportunity a second pass, and he changed his mind. [00:01:49] S5: I learned that the job was about trying to help bring the world's oldest advertising medium into the twenty first century. [00:02:00] S4: Today, Levi is the chief marketing officer at Clear Channel Outdoor, one of America's largest billboard operators. In a modern advertising landscape run by titans like Facebook and Google, billboards may seem like an antiquated way to market a product. But if you drive through any major city, you'll see hundreds of them lining the freeways. They tempt you with photos of McDonald's cheeseburgers that are 14 feet tall and 48 feet wide. They extol the virtues of the latest AI software products. They implore you to call personal injury lawyers and to find Jesus.
00:02:00 · Zachary Crockett, Dan Levi
[00:02:00] S4: Today, Levi is the chief marketing officer at Clear Channel Outdoor, one of America's largest billboard operators. In a modern advertising landscape run by titans like Facebook and Google, billboards may seem like an antiquated way to market a product. But if you drive through any major city, you'll see hundreds of them lining the freeways. They tempt you with photos of McDonald's cheeseburgers that are 14 feet tall and 48 feet wide. They extol the virtues of the latest AI software products. They implore you to call personal injury lawyers and to find Jesus. [00:02:37] S5: Traditionally, billboards have been used to reach as many people as I can to deliver my message. You know, new product launches or new TV shows or movie releases, you wanna get to a scaled audience. [00:02:50] S4: But today's billboards are more than just static tools of mass communication. The industry is increasingly being digitized, and the advertisements you see on the side of the road aren't as random as you might think. [00:03:09] S5: If you've ever downloaded an app on your phone and the app asks you, would you like to allow location services for this app? That feed of data helps with decisioning on what you're going to show on a billboard and when and in what locations.
00:03:09 · Dan Levi, Zachary Crockett, Anna Bager
[00:03:09] S5: If you've ever downloaded an app on your phone and the app asks you, would you like to allow location services for this app? That feed of data helps with decisioning on what you're going to show on a billboard and when and in what locations. [00:03:25] S4: For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, billboards. A few centuries ago, merchants relied on local advertising to get people to buy things. They ran spots in newspapers and sometimes even hired town criers. But mostly, they used painted signs and posters. As roads were built and people began to travel more, these posters got bigger. [00:03:55] S6: Brands or advertisers started to realize that getting a message in front of consumers where there are is a good idea. [00:04:00] S4: That's Anna Bager. She's the president and CEO of the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America, the national trade group that represents the billboard industry. She says that the precursors to modern billboards go back at least two hundred years. [00:04:18] S6: Some of the earliest examples that we know were when a circus started to promote their business by putting up large posters to advertise their traveling shows.
00:04:18 · Anna Bager, Zachary Crockett
[00:04:18] S6: Some of the earliest examples that we know were when a circus started to promote their business by putting up large posters to advertise their traveling shows. [00:04:28] S4: These posters, from the likes of Barnum and Bailey, were hung on barns along major travel routes and featured bright illustrations of exotic animals and acrobats. By the eighteen seventies, a small industry had emerged around building billboards and renting them out to clients. And as cars and highways proliferated in the twentieth century, so did billboards from brands like Palmolive, Kellogg, and Coca Cola. Today, there are so many billboards in America that it can be hard to count them. [00:05:00] S6: One billboard can actually be two billboards facing in different directions, sometimes three. But as of structures, there's about 350,000 static billboards in The US and more than 30,000 digital billboards. [00:05:13] S4: To the advertising industry, billboards are a part of a category called out of home. [00:05:19] S6: You can think about it as any type of advertising that happens when you're leaving your house. In your house, you would watch television. You would be on your phone. You'd be on your computer, and you see ads there. But when you leave your home, you're exposed to advertising too. And out of home ads can be anything from billboards, large digital screens in Times Square, to advertising in the subway or on buses or in airports or in shopping malls or in cinemas. You know, we're everywhere outside of the home.
00:05:19 · Anna Bager, Zachary Crockett, Dan Levi
[00:05:19] S6: You can think about it as any type of advertising that happens when you're leaving your house. In your house, you would watch television. You would be on your phone. You'd be on your computer, and you see ads there. But when you leave your home, you're exposed to advertising too. And out of home ads can be anything from billboards, large digital screens in Times Square, to advertising in the subway or on buses or in airports or in shopping malls or in cinemas. You know, we're everywhere outside of the home. [00:05:49] S4: America's 370,000,000,000 advertising industry is largely driven by the Internet. Think Facebook and Google. Out of home only makes up a small sliver of the pie, but it's still a $9,000,000,000 business, and it's thriving. As other traditional ad mediums like print and cable TV have declined in revenue, billboard ads have continued to grow. Bager says this is partly because they enjoy a special advantage. [00:06:19] S6: Think about a huge billboard. You're driving past it sometimes several times a day. Sometimes you're stuck in traffic. You tend to spend more time with physical signage than I think you do with any other form of advertising. [00:06:32] S4: There are a number of small local companies across the country that own and operate billboards, but around 65% of the industry is controlled by three big national players, Lamar Advertising, Out Front Media, and Clear Channel Outdoor. [00:06:49] S5: We have in excess of 60,000 billboard faces across the country.