Jermy Male was hit with a smile on his face during his walk from the Grand Central Terminal to the Chrysler Building, what he saw were ads, ads and ads everywhere its… 2021, but let’s get back to 2020 shall we?

            It cannot be denied that the evil virus had a negative impact on most businesses, especially the ones that were retail dependent or at least business models that required people to go on out in the streets. In the year 2020 Jeremy Male is an executive in a branch of the advertising business, basically on this year billboards were hit to a near crises point in the spring.

            Here is the thing OutFront Media is a company that sells billboards and other platforms in North America, which includes interior of subway cards and sides of buses, knowingly that they were selling spaces of more than half a million billboard. Jeremy Male is the chief executive of OutFront Media and the company was in depression due to the pandemic impact.

            Wednesday an earning report, OutFront Media’s overall revenue for the second quarter of 2020, a lockdown across the United States for three months, results in drop of 50% compared by a year earlier.

            The story is kinda similar for Clear channel Outdoor, which is an advertising company selling billboard spaces in 31 different countries. On Friday it states that the overall revenue had a drop close to a 55% within the same lockdown. Even worse for JCDecaus, another advertising firm selling more than a million promotional panels globally. The lockdown dropped their revenue by 66%.

            Prior to the lockdowns out of home advertising was in a paradise of digital innovation, blooming brightly compared to many other segments of the industry. Yet the pandemic symptoms the plague of the billboards has hit high, and companies were sealing their marketing budgets just to hide their losses.

            But hey, Jermy Male was hit by the enormous number of ads everywhere in 2021 so what happened?

            By the time the lockdown was off, the market has obviously shifted, but here is the thing, billboards were the big guy’s play, meaning it was the boss move of the big bosses up in the hierarchy, rarely did SMEs invest in billboards, marketing via social media were much cheaper or atheist TV where it’s a one big time payment rather than a consistent number of investments that pay itself back long term. 

            However now, billboards are everywhere for any SME to go for, but hey isn’t that cheap billboard not going to pay anything back anyway? People aren’t going out right?

            Not exactly, loads of business converted from billboards to social media, and a study conducted by The Harris Insights & Analytics, A Stagwell company in February 10, 2021 People were affected and introduced by businesses, services and products much more than digital ads due to the flooding of ads into their daily life, their subconsciousness were driven to treat all digital ads as irrelevant just as the human subconsciousness treats bird or whether sounds as background as irrelevant in relation to attentiveness.

            45% of the U.S. adults now comment that they notice out of home advertising more than before Covid-19, specifically the 18-54 age area. Q1 to Q2 2021 jumps were made all over Taxes. Houston got 184%, Austin 135%, Dallas-Fort Worth 105% and San Antonio 37%, according to Adquick. literally advertisers are demanding spaces in the ad space within the most competitive market in the states.

            Its obvious when the digital world have hundreds of ads popping up in front of each individual’s eyes, individuals wont bother anymore, and their brains will find it much more appealing to checkout this billboard in-between the few while taking their walk or driving their car.

            Logically speaking, it was just a matter of time, in fact smart retail investors saw billboards ownership as a big investment in 2020, everyone is afraid, running away from the bad ineffective billboards, due to the knowledge of people are not coming out on the short-term. However, it was inevitable for humans to go back to hitting the streets. 

  But hey its not too late! You still have a chance; billboards might have had their fall and raise but the raise did not come back to its initial levels pre 2020 impact yet. Which means there is still a place for you to invest and gain.

Omar Fouad Marketing manager