Billboard Insider By Staff Writer January 27, 2017
The Helma Larkin-moderated panel with executives from the big five out of home firms at the April 2016 Geopath/OAAA conference is aging well. Larkin asked each executive where the out of home industry will be in 10 years. Here’s what they said:
- Jean-Luc Decaux, Co-Chief Executive, JCDecaux. In 10 years there will be further consolidation…The share of digital will grow tremendously…We’ll be selling audiences as opposed to signs.
- Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel Outdoor. In 10 years there will be a proliferation of inventory types…In 10 years if we aren’t integrated with other media we will have utterly failed.
- Jeremy Male, CEO, Outfront Media. In 10 years there will be seamless transactions for screens. We need to think of our medium as the third screen…I don’t think it matters whether it’s a digital screen or an analog screen…We will continue to grow.
- Sean Reilly, CEO Lamar Advertising. In 10 years Cracker Barrel will still be one of our largest customers…In 10 years our physical structures are going to become more useful to society…Interconnectedness, wifi, other reasons to be around…We will ultimately either be off the grid or feeding the grid power. I think we are going to have solar panels on most of our structures. I think Tesla’s going to invent a battery that’s going to allow us to store power on site.
- Kevin Gleason, CEO, Fairway Outdoor. In the future I would like to focus on what’s going on in the mind of the advertiser. What are they thinking? We talk about ROI…How much time do we spend sitting down and talking to an advertiser…We spend much more time talking about our inventory and out business than we do in the discovery process of what an advertiser is thinking…The next big breakthrough in the next 10 years is to build organizations which can dialogue with an advertiser and marry their expectations to our assets.