Pelican Billboard founder John D Jackson III operates a Louisiana out of home plant with numerous faces including 9 digital faces.  John is known as “The Billboard Guy.”  Last week he talked about digital signs and his philosophy of business.  Today he talks about what makes a good location and how to build and maintain structures.

Good locations.

You can’t get emotionally attached.  It’s got to make sense.  You’ve got to have good paper.  Otherwise you just find another location.  Anybody can overpay for a lease.  When you can give a fair shake and a deal that’s good for the landowner and the operator that deal is going to stand the test of time.  Other billboard companies have paid heavy and then after time when zoning gets changed and whatever else occurs sometimes certified letters get sent to landowners and rent reductions occur.  We just don’t do that.

Easements.

Those are good but there’s a lot of gamble with that.  You do an easement and you have all of the upfront cost and then over time landscaping gets planted or somebody next door builds an on-premise sign that block the views of your billboard then you are in real trouble.

Building

I don’t think anybody builds a better billboard than me.  I like the welding, the fabrication and the design element of billboard locations.  I spend a lot of money.  I pay heavy to build these locations.  You have a great looking product.  The landlord likes it.  You can kick up your boots when these big weather systems roll in.  When you build it strong you don’t have worry that much.  We also have hurricane frames on our locations.

Insurance is Tough

During Hurricane Katrina we had electrical boxes on billboards that were under water.  It was surreal.  That’s probably when I got hyper-sensitive about how to build a billboard and the benefits of outdoing yourself.  Here in New Orleans insurance is slim pickings.  So there are few underwriters and high premiums when you find it.  One of the many lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

Combatting Rust

Get things galvanized that you can.  You can also do a 16 mil tar coat down to a certain depth on your foundation pole so to get past the water table but not too far that is would decrease friction between the foundation pole and the soil.  Also I have moved to an acrylic based paint.  Pick a really good paint for the primer and topcoat.  We put our structures on a rotation for painting, some billboards get painted sooner than others.