OUTFRONT Media Completes Billboard Asset Swap

NEW YORK, July 5, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — OUTFRONT Media Inc. (NYSE: OUT) announced today that it has completed an asset swap with Independent Outdoor Network.  The Company acquired digital billboards in the Boston designated market area (DMA) in exchange for static billboards in four non-metro market clusters considered not strategic to its top DMA focus.

The acquired assets include 16 digital billboard displays, including two displays in-development, and two static billboard displays contiguous with the Company’s existing portfolio surrounding the city of Boston. The divested assets include several hundred static displays in predominantly non-metro areas of Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and South Carolina.

OUTFRONT Media connects brands with consumers outside of their homes through one of the largest and most diverse sets of billboard, transit, and mobile assets in North America.  Through its ON Smart Media platform, OUTFRONT Media is implementing digital technology that will fundamentally change the ways advertisers engage people on-the-go.

Clarksburg, WV -Lamar Advertising is taking the city of Weston to court over its billboard restrictions.

Lamar said it got the Lewis County Board of Education’s approval to erect a billboard on school-owned property in August 2016. That same day, Lamar said city officials sent the board a letter asking them to reconsider their decision. Nearly four months later, in December, Lamar said the city passed an ordinance prohibiting billboards within 500 feet of “any church, school property, cemetery, public park, public reservation, public playground or state or national forest.”

A month later city officials rejected Lamar’s application for a permit for the billboard.

Los Angeles, CA-Elected officials on a city committee have generated controversy by loosening a proposed Citywide Sign Ordinance to permit digital billboards both within sign districts and outside of them.

According to the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, if the committee members’ proposed changes are approved by the full City Council, billboards would be permitted in “commercial” zones, which include most major Los Angeles streets and intersections, and digital billboards, therefore, would be “flashing messages in our faces every eight seconds.”

Recreational marijuana use may still be illegal in New Mexico but that hasn’t stopped one clever McDonald’s franchise from strategically placing an intriguing billboard near the Colorado / New Mexico border.

Pandering to the soon-to-be famished road warriors headed for the Colorado state line and the legal weed that awaits them, a chronic tweet of a creative billboard near Raton, N.M. lit up social media over the weekend.

“Usually when you roll something this good, it’s illegal!”

The franchises business opportunity is referencing Colorado’s legal marijuana market, the bold billboard left more than a few weary travelers wondering whether it was a political statement or just clever marketing.

Either way, according to KRQE, the dope billboard “has people laughing and many saying its placement is key.”

The billboard jokingly emphasizes the costly dividing line between the dark days of marijuana prohibition and America’s new reality – legal marijuana.

In the hours leading up to the 2017 NBA draft, the main question on the mind of New York Knicks fans wasn’t which prospect the team would select with the eighth overall pick. Nor was it whether Knicks owner James Dolan would find time to treat concert-goers at City Winery to any Johnny Cash covers later that evening. (Spoiler alert: he did!) No, the one thing every Knicks fan wanted to know: would they really trade 21-year-old franchise centerpiece Kristaps Porzingis, as president of basketball operations Phil Jackson had been suggesting the team might make in the run-up to Thursday’s draft?

The mere suggestion that Jackson might jettison the lone bright spot from the last two dark and chaotic years of Knicks basketball, whether over a missed exit interview or out of a desire to kickstart a rebuild necessitated by the sins of management in pretty much every area but drafting Kristaps, left Knicks fans furious and apoplectic. And it drove one fan to take extreme measures, expressing his opposition to the idea of trading away the 7-foot-3 Latvian star in very big, very bright lights:

During Thursday’s draft, a gigantic digital billboard displayed the text “DON’T TRADE PORZINGIS” on the corner of 33rd Street and 7th Avenue, directly across from Madison Square Garden. (The smaller print: “We are not affiliated with Porzingis. We just want him to stay.”)

  

The message came courtesy of Cycle, and specifically from Knicks fan Rob Perez, who hosts a digital basketball show called “Buckets” for the culture website. As Perez explained via Periscope, the billboard was his way of putting his money where his mouth was – making sure that Jackson and the rest of the decision-makers at MSG couldn’t possibly avoid the voice of this particular fan.