Digital & Dirt
00:13:55 · Bobby Switzer
[00:13:55] S1: Yeah. Those are a few different questions there. First, the slot versus the spot versus day part, all that, I stayed out of that. I felt that that was marketing, and Tommy people, you know, had had a better idea on how that would work in dealing with the customers. They keep me away from the customers. The other part of that is as far as... When we first started, we had done a few bulletins and then decided we wanted to do a network of posters. And Stan stood up and said, I want those too. And so he got those. And at the time, we we were dealing with Daktronics, but we didn't want to have one supplier. At the time, we felt that they were probably the best group at the time. And so the next thing we decided, we'll... We go look at another vendor. And we went out to Las Vegas, and the guys that were putting up digitals left and right out there were YESCO, and they weren't doing any billboards. They were doing mostly big marquees. And so... But they had a good understanding of... Because I thought they were a pretty good team, but most of their boards were done. They were in Vegas out in very dry areas. So they didn't they didn't make it as as waterproof. So we we sent all those units and packed them up and and sent them over to Pittsburgh, and we had some problems with them. But the good part about it is all these companies responded well. You know, if there was a mistake, they stood up and stood behind it and did a great job with us on that. The question I remember now is how did we come up with six and eight slots? And so one of the things that... One of the first boards we put up was in Destin, and the manager there was happy to, you know, get it, and we had no controls on it. You could put as many as you wanted. We let the sort of the market dictate it, and he started to have twelve and thirteen spots. And we felt that if one is good, two must be better, three must be fantastic, but eventually, there's a diminishing return, and we tried to figure out where that was. And what we came up with was six, and I think that that worked, and we found that we could do that. Now, really, there's nine... When we had it, there were nine slots. Three of them were set asides for the city, the county, the state, emergencies, all sorts of things that we would set them aside.
00:16:49 · Bobby Switzer
And we felt that if we didn't and our competitors were not following those rules and they would put up, you know, 10, 15, 20 different advertisers. They would sell them, and they would sell it cheaper than us. But we felt that we were gonna have some integrity in it, and that's how we went to it. As far as going to eight, I don't know all the different guys at the time. I think it was Clear Channel. They had come into the markets a little bit after us and made a huge splash in Cleveland, And they came in and put up, I think, about six to eight of them, and they were running eight slots. And so we got a lot of pushback on going to eight. And what we decided was if that board had an occupancy up at a 100% for so many months, then it could support one more. But if we put digital in the market too fast, we saw occupancy drop and rate drop. And so that's where we were always watching the the line.
00:17:58 · Ian Dallimore
[00:17:58] S0: Yeah. And I think that that's that's an interesting thing. Right? And and we still have competitors today that do that that are selling just almost infinity slots. But to your point, I think what I loved about the Lamar process over the last twenty years with digital was just that. It was understanding what the demand is beyond just one panel. We then started to determine, hey, in this size market, these are the amount of boards. Even if there are heavy demand at certain points, demand is a good thing. So let's not oversaturate the market with digital out of home, because as much as we love digital out of home, we also understand the importance of traditional static and how they can be used together. Going back to the point about Daktronics then bringing on YESCO, one of the things early on in my career that I remember was you guys had like a digital picnic. And what we did was, for our listeners, is we brought in Daktronics, Yesco, and I believe it was one other company. But they would come in and they would set up their three or four screens and no labels. They weren't allowed to stand by their panels. But throughout the day and the week in Baton Rouge, we were running content, and we were playing with it. And what it did is it created this element of competition and understanding of what is a superior digital screen. And I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, our objective there wasn't to pick the best out of the three, but it was, hey, these are the standards where you need to be. And those of you who have been in South Louisiana in August, it's literally the most miserable place from a weather perspective with constant rain and heat and then dry weather and then rain again randomly throughout the day. So that's one of the projects that I enjoyed to watch was how we were helping the industry on the on the operations side develop and grow as opposed to just picking a winner.
00:19:51 · Bobby Switzer
[00:19:51] S1: Yeah. I think that, I had forgotten about this. We called them the shootouts, and I... I've done that in my... Over the years, I've done where I get a lot of different opinions, and we call it the pizza test because we always would serve pizza and beer while we were looking at these things. And I remember everybody at corporate, we did it in the parking lot and everybody at corporate got to come up and we asked them to sort of rate them. And we just had a big a, b, and a c, I think, on top of it, and they just had and they had to rate it based on color, you know, on different things. So that was a good time. And from that, we would get... And it was always interesting. I would never win because I always would thought this is the best one. Everybody would tell me differently, but that's either there. I... One of the things that we came out of all that was trying to get different vendors because I... What I wanted was a small, medium, and a large vendor base so that nobody nobody could control us or win the day. And so that was that was an interesting deal. But we found out later that once you made the decision to go with a particular board, you were sort of stuck with them because you had to use their products to repair it. And then if you ever wanted to change it out and keep the frame, you'd have to go back to their product. So we decided to standardize the size of the module and that that module had to fit into everybody's frame. We started doing that probably around 1314. We started coming out because we were going through all these replacements, and that's one of the big problems is these things wear out. So it's an interesting phenomenon that happens. It's not like the old billboards that last for thirty and forty years. These, you know, at the beginning where they said eight years, but really only lasted five years, and then then now they're saying ten years, and those last eight years, we're up to about twelve years, they're saying, and they're lasting probably about ten years. So... And all that happens because of the heat issue in the LEDs. Yeah.
00:22:18 · Ian Dallimore
[00:22:18] S0: And it's and it's interesting because in the world of data that we live in today, those companies that we're buying digital from it, and even internally at Lamar, we're we're better making decisions based off of, hey, in this region of the country, like you had mentioned Las Vegas and Phoenix, this is how you need to care for those. I remember early on in my career hearing a lot of stories about, hey, we have to go off in Vegas and the louvers. And for our listeners, the louvers were kind of the slates in between the LED lightings to make sure that the message was portraying in the right direction per se for the consumers that are driving past. And there was a lot of care for them. In this market, you need to have those louvers cleaned off often certain times of the year to get the dust off and that way the message is still bright. And in the South this is how you need to handle them having so what I've enjoyed is the evolution not only of the product and we'll touch on that in just a second when I ask you about the future, but just how to maintain these by region. And now having all this historical data, so now when we go to these companies we can say, hey, these locations are likely going to be in the Northeast or there's heavy snow in the wintertime. Let's evolve this product. And I think a lot of our listeners probably take this for granted. And again, to my point, it's just, hey, it's just this billboard on the side of the road. But what you and your team has put into this over the years is just interesting. So let's touch on the network operating center, or what we call internally the NOC, in the early days and what that's evolved into today. And for our listeners, the NOC is a location that's here at corporate that they're constantly monitoring the uptime, the efficiencies of digital, the rollout of digital. The one place, Bobby, whenever I bring guests in and that visit corporate, I bring them straight to the NOC because I think it's just this cool location with...
00:24:09 · Bobby Switzer, Ian Dallimore
[00:24:09] S1: So I would venture to say that the NOC at the beginning was just for eye candy. Here we are, a medium that's a 100 and something years old. We are considered the not very exciting medium, and we are doing a leapfrog ahead of everybody else. And at the time, we were a public company, and so we wanted to make sure our investors saw that we were jazzing it up a little bit. So at the beginning, we started and we put it right next to the reception center in a glass bubble over on the old old office. And at the beginning, it's not real sexy. We... But we put up the big flat screens, and we had bells and whistles and buttons that we could dial and fool with, and everybody got all jazzed up about it. We thought it was fabulous. [00:25:05] S0: So you basically created a Hollywood set. That's one of the reasons why I stayed with Lamar in the very beginning. I was like, wow, that's cool. They even have a Red Bull refrigerator.