When you think of billboard towns, it’s easy to conjure up New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Philadelphia is awesome too especially when driving north on I-95 through the heart of the city. Billboard heaven on both sides of the road, nice and low so you can read the copy.

Those big metro areas are easy marks. Any average Joe on the street can tell you this. But I am not your average Joe.

My favorite billboard town is none of these hot spots. Mine is way out west, western Texas to be exact, where the boards are a compilation of small and large companies, local and regional ads, and lots of dust. ‘

Ok, the gig is up. I’m talking about Amarillo, as in Amarillo, Texas, proud home of the world-famous Cadillac Ranch, The Big Texan Steak and Brewery, the humongous Palo Duro Canyon, only the second largest canyon in the U.S, and finally a large portion of historic Route 66, that runs from Chicago to Santa Monica, California.

Back in spring of 2024 when I lost a bet and wound up driving from our little ol’ farm town in Maryland clear across the U.S. ending up a week later at the yearly OAAA conference in Carlsbad, California, one of my surprises was spending the night in Amarillo. I had just traveled a few hundred miles from visiting with IBO Chief, Chris Cowlbeck at his ranch somewhere near or in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Chris mentioned to me the best way to get west and see the sights was to take the U.S 40 until I get to Amarillo, stop there and eat a big honking steak.

I’ll never forget his parting words. No, they weren’t “don’t you dare show your face around these here parts again” but instead, in Chris’s wonderful western rancher accent told me “Don’t forget to see all the billboards. They’ll tell you everything you’ll need to know about the area. Ride and die by the boards”, he yelled as he slapped his horse on the rear, did a “high-o-silver, away” and vanished into the sunset.

I made that last part up, but you get the visual. He did have horses too.

This year 2026, Route 66, where it chugs through Amarillo is celebrating it’s 100^th year. How did I know that? It’s on all those sparkling throwback billboards as you cruise and in out of the area, that’s how. They’ve been plastered all over google images and it when I was researching for another story. I guess the old highway was celebrating its 98^th birthday when I saddled on through.

And what an amazing billboard town it was. I did eat at The Big Texan Steak Ranch, skipped the 72 ouncer, strolled through Cadillac Ranch, even stayed at The Big Texan Hotel and listened to some awesome local music at The Western Horseman where I do believe it was Cowboy Night.

All because of billboards. You just must stop at that Caddy Ranch, you must eat a Big Steak at the Big Texan, you gotta listen to some live local music. No billboards you say. Sadly, you’d wind up just keep on a going west until you hit the ocean and never see these amazing sites.

I made that last sentence up.

“Well, it goes from St. Louie, Joplin, Missouri
Oklahoma City looks, ooh, so pretty
You’ll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino
Won’t you get hip to this kindly tip
Jack, and take that California trip?
Get your kicks on Route 66”

I sang that the whole way from Chris’s Ranch. Really, I did. Thank you, Chuck Barry.

So next time you are stuck in miserable east coast traffic as you crawl through Southern Phili trying to figure out who the heck is Steven Singer is and why do we hate him so much, build in an extra 2 weeks to your ride, make a hard left on I-80 head for Chicago. There you’ll pick up Route 66, take a lot of stops and pics, and just few days later meet me for dinner in The Big Texan in Amarillo. Just follow the billboards.

I’ll treat.

“Where words fail, the melody speaks.”

Virtually every Friday afternoon since 2021, right towards the end of the dreaded Covid period when we all needed a pick me up at the end of week, especially those of us who were working remotely, I started to post live music, in concert videos on my LinkedIn page. Just a little something to cheer us billboard people up as we headed into the weekend, especially aiming at those who were quarantined or just living alone.

The post was called “Friday Night Dance Party” and since has graduated to “World Famous Friday Night Dance Party” because, well, why not. While growing in popularity starting out at around 80 views in early 2021, WFFNDP now enjoys anywhere from 500 to 1000 views on Friday Nights. A few have hit the 2000 mark, thanks to artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, The Bangles and fab one hit wonders like The Macarena and The Ketchup Song.

The Ketchup Song. Found it on KIDZ BOP, 2003. Really. Ring it up.

But what gives me the most pleasure is tagging my friends at the end of the post. LinkedIn allows up to 25 people in standard text posts and up to 30 peeps in photo posts, or in this case videos.

Usually I tag the same 20 people in some sort of rotation, then add in 5 to 10 ringers. Just to razz you dead beats who refuse to return emails or texts, I know how to find ya.

My fav peeps to tag? Here’s a sampling of 10 that appear weekly. Why weekly you ask? I have no earthly idea other than I like them. I really like them. And it’s my way of saying hi and that I’m thinking of them.

Starting with everyone’s DOOH chum and all around super nice woman, Mary Perrella. Mary also has a superb grasp on classic rock music, someone I’ve trolled around with since 2017. Mary usually gets “Top 5 Billing”. She’s usually followed by Regis Maher of Do It Outdoors who’s just downright a cool guy and someone I’ve known since I got into OOH in 2001.

The next lucky one’s include AdQuick’s Katie Burwell, who I’ve been flirting with at almost every OOH conference since 2016, Quan’s Brian Rappaport who’s smiling mug is on almost every other LinkedIn post, Emily Frenkel, who I met and sat next to at an NYC Advertising Week live panel, and have been friends ever since, if you’ve never met Emily I encourage you do, starring above said Brian Rappaport, he’ll get at least 3 more mentions before this piece is over, because, well, it’s Brian, Joel Martin, pretty much because he photo bombs most every shot I take, Jonnathan Trilleras from Miami simply base he exudes cool, Bill Durden, ‘cause Wild Bill can command an OOH stage better than anyone, Mandakini Negi, my exuberant, and brilliant colleague at Moving Walls, who recently completed the absolute grueling 250km “Racing the Planet” ultramarathon that takes runners through the rugged terrain of the Peloponnese region of Greece, where my family hails from, where I’m fearful of even driving a car let alone a footrace. To put Mandy’s accomplishment into plain English, that’s 155 miles and then some. I’m tired just typing this.

Industry besties, Bill Lodzinski, Billy Long, Steve Lind, Jessica Chappell, Wendy Hickey, Noah Klas, Jeff Gropper, David Shing, purely ‘cause his nickname is “Shingy”, Molly Rima Hoopes, Ali Broback and Kym Frank round up the usual suspects being tagged each week.

The peep I tag at the end of virtually every Friday Night Dance Party post since late 2023 is a former colleague, Alan Chen. Alan was an absolute fun-loving joy to be around even though I only knew him for like 5 months, his life cut far too short in my old DC neighborhood. My mentioning him on a weekly basis is one way to keep his buoyant spirit alive in our close-knit OOH community.

After all, as my long-long LONG lost cousin Plato, the Ancient Greek philosopher used to say to us, “music is the medicine the soul needs”.

It’s the latest thing, “chunking”. All the crazy kids are doing it, as well as a few of you old farts. Especially a fe bloggers. Chunking has become the new mode of the written word.

I see who chunks and I’m not impressed. Some of you are chunking more each day. LinkedIn has become a chunk-fest.

“Must you chunk?” is my new phrase.

See, I just chunked.

According to someone on the Google, “Chunking is the cognitive technique of grouping individual pieces of information into larger, meaningful units — called chunks — so that they become easier to process, remember and act upon. Instead of overloading working memory with separate items, chunking packages information into manageable groups. “

And here I thought chunking was something us kids did on Thursday Nights in the late 70’s after a night of barhopping in Whitewater, Wisconsin.

“Ewwww, now that was chunky”, you would in the tavern’s men’s room.

They weren’t referring to literature.

For record I’m not fat-shaming either, calling a bunch of you media peeps “chunkers”. After being a chunker myself for years, size wise, totally different meaning.

I hope.

“Chunking” or “micro blogging” has increasingly gained popularity on LinkedIn posts, Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit. Being a chunker means you break down the larger amounts of information into smaller, sometimes almost one sentence long pieces. For example, today on LinkedIn I saw eight fresh chunkies, very short, on-the-go almost bullet points segments, mostly written and posted by names (if you’re a LinkedIn stalker) you would find familiar. This short form of social media writing is a clever way to keep readers attention rather than risk losing them in a 1000-piece heavy study material.

Without delay, or in “chunk-speak”, here’s a few chunks that appeared earlier today, all Cannes related. See if you can figure out who the Cannes chunker is:

- “5 scheduled meetings (3 with air conditioning) and countless more unplanned run ins”

-“Two years of building these rooms and I’m still learning something new inside of them.”

-“Day 1 at Cannes Lions
International Festival of Creativity: That time when I packed dresses that don’t
wrinkle, but my eyes didn’t get the memo.”

-But here’s what most teams are missing:”

-“I booked my flight and hotel to Cannes months ago with zero confirmed opportunities.”

-“Everybody who’s going is SOMEBODY.”

-While governance was the shared thread throughout the session, another theme really stole the show. Any guesses?”

-“Brand entertainment is everywhere”.

And finally, -“I only got 1000 views…”

How’s that for some Cannes chunk? They really didn’t say too much. Sound bites.

Not exactly attention getting, but if you build maybe 20 of these chunks into one post, you look like a genius. Instead of three or four paragraphs where you risk losing your audience just rip off a few original chunks, and voila! A social media masterpiece.

It’s easy to chunk. Hemingway never chunked, neither did F. Scott Fitzgerald, or George Orwell. But plenty of well-known bloggers, company heads, agency owners and a few brand chiefs do. It’s quick, it’s keeping the reader’s attention and you get in-get out without ever having to making a point.

Which brings me to my very own chunk-laden lines:

-“I used to post daily, then I didn’t.”

-“I always drink my coffee strong, black and boiling hot.”

-“Then I got the call”.

-“It wasn’t who I thought it was”.

-“I decided to meet my client for dinner for an offsite. I got there first.”

-“Then I screamed, who here ordered the veal cutlet”?

-“He got up to hit the head; darn guy never came back”.

-“Ended not getting the IO, stuck me with the check, I got canned the next day”.

-“Got told to stop speaking in sound bites”.

-“Decided to learn short-hand”.

It’s only fitting that I end today’s ramble with an original chunk of my own:

-“what’s your favorite candy bar”?

Mine’s Chunky.

(Editor’s Note: the two B/W photos used in this ramble are of famed American silent film actor, director and screenwriter, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, 1887-1933, one of America’s original “Chunkers” who not only famous for his chunkiness but also for being accused of accidentally killing his girlfriend in 1921. After two mistrials due to hung (chunked) juries, Fatty was fully acquitted in his third trial in 1922. The jury even issued him an apology as well as a box of Chunky bars.

June 17th, 2026

There are certain moments in our careers we always remember. Today’s ramble harks back to that exact moment in May, 2024. The piece I penned below appeared back in June of 2022, during an interview conducted while dining at The Old Homestead Steak House in Lower Manhattan. It wasn’t just any dinner, I had been asked to write a bio-style piece on the newly appointed President of GeoPath, Dylan Mabin. The industry was happy with this choice, coming out of Covid the decision seemingly united us all. This was an easy and obvious choice announced at the then GeoPath/OAAA OOH Media Conference & Expo in sunny Marco Island, FL.

I was quite honored to accept this assignment.

Jump to two years later while attending the 2024 OOH Conference in Carlsbad, CA, eerily titled “Our Moment”, Dylan again took the stage on the last day and had been sadly rumored, emotionally announced his leaving the helm at GeoPath.

Like I said, this was only two years later.

After the last session on the last day of the conference ended, as we walked back from the auditorium building to the main hotel, Dylan of all people walked besides me. I can’t recall everything we spoke of, but it was extremely heartfelt and I suspected there were a few tears. He thanked me for my friendship, we had known each other professionally since 2015 as spoke in quiet tones what his future might look like. With over 850 industry people around us, it was me he chose to make that long walk with.

It was indeed quite a memorable career moment as again I was quite honored to accept this assignment.

The next day, dressed in much more casual clothing, we sat outside having drinks as the air seemed far less thick than that of the previous afternoon. Everybody was smiling. It felt good.

My Dinner with Dylan

by Nick Coston

(originally posted in OOH Today, June 8th, 2022)

He’s easy-going, brainy smart, can create and cook a real blowout, has one the biggest, recognizable smiles in the industry, and was just named President of Geopath, the Out-of-Home industry standard for audience measurement in the U.S. Although that’s a mouthful, it’s all true.

That’s why, when I met up with Geopath’s Dylan Mabin a few weeks back in SW Florida, I suggested we convene for a dinner-style interview in New York City, one-to-one. Over food, big happy food, the type we both could relate too. He loves to fire up the stove, entertain and eat, I just love to plain ol’ eat. And take pictures. That’s why I let Dylan pick our dining spot. I knew he wouldn’t let us down.

Picking The Old Homestead, a vintage, 1868 NYC steakhouse, was a classic call. Dylan tore through that menu like speed reading some audience analytics that someone put on his desk. He picked all the right items, right down to the drinks. If you want an indication of how a person is going to do in a leadership position, see how he navigates a classic New York City steakhouse. He was a master, a virtuoso, an “old pro”, as my dad would say.

But getting back to how we got here all started just 2 weeks ago.

I don’t believe there was a person in attendance at the Marco Island OOH Media conference who was surprised when it was announced Dylan Mabin was being named Geopath President. Certainly not me. Gone was title of “Acting.” Left in its place was a happy audience who wondered out loud, “what took so long.”

But was he nervous, anxious, even pacing when he waited outside the Geopath Board Meeting a few weeks ago at the big, fancy JW Marriott? Heck yea, he was. It wasn’t over until it was over. But then the line came, “congratulations Mr. President.”
Whew.

It was the wise move, regardless of how long it took. It sends a strong signal to the industry, that one of our biggest assets in selling space is in the hands of a veteran player, his experience at the organization going back to 2008. That’s longer than most of the OOH CEO’s have been at their companies. That’s perseverance, endurance, and fortitude, not to mention a thick skin. There is no doubt that this time our industry got it right

I love sports analogies, especially the ones about those who came up in the ranks. Baseball’s Tommy Lasorda, basketball’s Phil Jackson, football’s Tom Laundry. They all came up as assistants, none of them had especially famous careers playing, but all of them won championships as coaches/managers. All of them are in the Hall of Fame. Players loved hustling for them. You see where I’m going here.

I met Dylan back in 2015, when it was still called the Traffic Audit Bureau. By then he was Senior VP, Insights & Innovation. In English, that means that one of my newest clients, trying to break into the OOH world with technology we thought would revolutionize the industry, would need to meet with him. Dylan was patient, thoughtful, and cautious, directing my client in the right direction. He even hung a camera outside of his office window in midtown Manhattan to measure the traffic that passed by to see how the technology worked. He was that guy that did the little things to see if they could bring big things. He was that guy that went the extra mile.

As he does now, he excelled in embracing diversity, new technologies, and on the whole, many of the underdogs of our business. Everyone got considered. When the time came for someone to be named as Acting President in 2021, there was really only one choice, and it came internally.

Don’t be fooled by his down to earth, Ron Howard style, aw-shucks demeanor. In fact, I highly doubt he ever says aw-shucks. He got us through a big part of Covid, toughed it out working alone in a trailer, parked on his parent’s property in rural Virginia, then came back to New York City to prove himself, repeatedly.

My Dinner With Andre was an artsy, snoozer of a film from 1981. It was about two people in the same industry, jabbering over dinner, in a classic New York City restaurant. For almost two hours. It’s the butt of a lot of movie jokes. There’s even a Simpsons episode based on it. In reality, it was a true work of art, directed by a famous French director, Louis Malle, backed by an outstanding script using New York City as the backdrop, and of course, picturesque, delicious food. All of this without a break in the conversation. Somewhat similar to our dinner, only ours lasted three hours. And if anyone was eavesdropping on our rap, it would never be considered as boring. Our time noshing and gabbing covered miles of our industry, family, politics, cooking, what Bob Woodward is like, recipes, what’s it’s like to meet a real astronaut in person, who’s Geopath’s biggest competitor, his biggest challenge today, and his current state of mind.

Dylan’s responses were quick, honest, and to the point. Zero hesitation. Coming out of a life-altering pandemic, finishing up what most of us thought was a successful conference, and heading into the summer with a permanent title, I think we are going to see quite a bit of quiet leadership from President Mabin.

Not to mention he’d be happy to give you tip or two on a full-flavored, homemade red sauce. Don’t be shy, now.

Sunday, June 7th

This ramble originally appeared in Billboard Insider On Friday, June 5th, photos have been updated.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” —final soliloquy in the 1982 film, Blade Runner

I don’t know about you, but I just noticed I have over 41,000 photos hanging around my iCloud. That’s just since 2001 and doesn’t include all the prints, negatives, pre-digital tech, scattered around both my office and on our third floor where we never go save for three times a year.

Interesting thing about all these photos, the 41,000 that I can account for electronically all were shot in from 2001 – current. Just when I entered the OOH media world. A mere coincidence?

I think not.

OOH is THE visual advertising medium. Whether it’s digital, transit, place-based, experiential, static posters, airplane banners, helicopter digital’s, boats, umbrella’s, fortune cookies and just recently I saw napkins with ads, which apparently unbeknownst to this media guy, they’ve been around since 2022.

Napkins. Yep, they are a form of OOH media. In fact, I just noticed where they are looking for an SVP of Brand Partnerships. Really. Interested?

“Your ad on a napkin? Wipe away the competition” is their catchy tag line. I’m not making this up.

My point being what do they all our fab OOH products have in common? Easy answer.

They are all visual. Without your eyes, you can’t see them. As the peeps who run all the OOH conferences remind us constantly, “we are a visual medium”.

Heck yea.

Now you know why I have over 41,000, around 80% of which are OOH related, photos tucked away, stored forever and ever. I just can’t help myself.

We are a species that can’t enough of looking at stuff, especially other people. That’s why of these 41,000 pics of mine, guessing that 75% are of people, mostly OOH people. The rest are billboards, our pets our kiddies and my yard

So, I did a little test. I went in back in time to 2022, post-Covid era, going through all my OOH conference pics to date. And you know what?

Since 2022, more than 40% of those smiling and some not so smiley faces are no longer in the same job. In fact, some are retired, some are out of the industry and sadly, a few are goners. Morte. Six feet under. Nar’ to be seen again.

Any who, regardless of where they are now, one thing is for certain. If you feel the urge to snap a pic of your colleagues either at a show, at the office, in an Uber, or on the street, one thing I recommend you consider:

Do it now. Don’t put it off. A week later that person may be onto other things, or like me, get hit by a car, then you would have blown your chance for both yourself and the people in the photo. Photo’s make people feel good; it’s one way we say thank you for spending even an ounce of your time with any of us.

With digital tech, photos are timeless, they will never go away.

I cherish every OOH related photo I’ve shot, be it a billboard on Interstate 95 on approach into Baltimore, a digital screen in the window of an Asian Restaurant on 7^th Ave in NYC or throwing back shots with colleagues at Casadonna on the water in Miami. They all have juicy back stories that if you don’t snap that shot, you’ll never record it, and you may never see it again

Like the famous line goes, don’t throw away your shot. Take it.

Then take ten more. You won’t regret it.

May 19, 2026

Could OOH Media use an ombudsman? A what, you ask?

An ombudsman is an independent, impartial official designated to investigate, report on, and help settle complaints. Unless I’ve missed the last 25 years, I don’t think our industry has one. We have some fine associations who set their own guidelines, but nobody really knows what those are, may just be a formality when forming an association with members.

Nonetheless, I believe our industry may benefit from employing an Ombudsman. Coca-Cola, National Public Media, CBS News, Paramount, The New York Times, The Washington Post, all employ them. They even list them on their web site or in their masthead. Ombudsmen are not a big secret. They are almost every big corporation, especially the public ones.

Aren’t we a large enough industry to employ such people? Would they be an asset or deterrent?

Clear Channel, Outfront Media and Lamar Advertising are all publicly traded companies. Should they have their own ombudsmen? Do they and we don’t know?

Think about it for a moment. If OOH as an industry employed the services of an actual ombudsman (the term ombudswoman is perfectly acceptable too, I checked), who would take such a gig? While we have an industry full of qualified professionals who could easily move into this spot, who would want it? Who would risk their contacts, friendships, reputation by becoming “The Official Watchdog of OOH”? Who would pay you? Would it be by paid subscription? Agencies? Brands? Media owners?

The Feds?

While I have none of these answers since we have zero history of an actual OOH Ombudsperson, we do have some fine online publications who do take a stab at posting actual industry critiques. OOH Today, Adotat, Billboard Insider, several prolific LinkedIn posters, plus individuals like AdTechGod, OOH Insider and occasional OOH agencies such as Brian Rappaport with Quan Media and Todd Palatnek at Marny Road. All smart, spot-on contributors to our space that often cover touchy subjects.

Except for one thing.

Would any of the above-mentioned writers, blogs, websites whomever, really call out an agency, media owner, tech company or brand by their name and under their own name? Or would it be better if this ombudsperson remains anonymous, letting readers guess who it is. I’m not saying they wear disguises like fake noses and glasses, maybe walk with a slight hitch as I often do or write in the third person. Maybe they would hide behind a planter at a big OOH conference, taking notes or wearing Google glasses to snap pics.

Doesn’t matter. What is obvious is that regardless of who would be in this position, they would have a lot of ground to cover. Traditional billboards that are aging, locations still in billing that have obstruction issues (tree’s, trucks, trash, weeds), lights that don’t work, digitals with pixel issues, digital place-based urban panels with blocked sightlines (umbrella’s, construction, awnings), expired copy on static units (dated), digitals that are too bright (digital brilliance), too many faces on one roadway (ad fatigue, less recall) and an issue that only the large corporations can afford the bigger impression/prominent location displays keeping local businesses sidelined.

Let’s not forget the thousands of nonpermitted, nonconforming or illegally modified displays that still stand and are in use. Would this put an end to the wild-wild west attitude of some media owners? Could it? Would ombudspeople issue violations, like parking tickets and would it even matter to the OOH audiences?

With over 450,000 sign faces currently in service in the U.S., these positions would have their work cut out.

The big question is, would all this be worth it? Would the ombudspeople (you would need a whole task force to cover this much ground) not be welcome at OOH conferences? Would other attendees throw food at them? Who would benefit the most, the brands, the agencies? Would they dare to be seen at the Screenverse late night parties or would all head to an all-night Waffle House to stay discreet?

Perhaps we may be better off continuing the policy of OOH media policing their own properties? We might just be. Would the fear of being outed be enough for them to step it up? Would an independent ombudspeople task force increase OOH share of ad dollars? Would they increase the overall value of all the OOH in the U.S. if someone was there to enforce whatever guidelines we as an industry set?

Would it be good to have someone outside of OOH have our backs?

Years ago, the major film studios all had “film checkers”, they would show up unannounced at a movie theatre, buy a ticket, watch a show usually with some refreshments and write reports up (projection and sound ok, theatre cleanliness, ticket prices, etc..) and the theatre owner would get a copy like a week later. Theaters with the high scores continued to receive the hit films.

Billboard checkers? Perhaps? Maybe? Is it a stretch?

We used to schedule lots of market rides, like film checkers, only for OOH. But with all the new digital inventory out there, place-based, urban panels, retail media, does anyone even attempt to monitor those buys with human eyes?

No doubt, billboard (OOH) checkers would be a lot of work. Either way you go, it’s a monumental question. All I know is I don’t want to be that guy with the OOH Sheriff badge eating at a Waffle House at 2:30am after the next OOH Conference in Fort Lauderdale.

Alone.

Summer of 2026 DPAA Events:

June 3^rd: Research, Retail, & Tech Session with FatTail. Online, 11:00am 12:00pm EST

June 13th-19th: ic26 InfoComm 2026, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas https://www.infocommshow.org/

June 16^th: Canada Summit VIP Dinner, Toronto, 6:00pm -9:00pm

June 17^th: Canada Summit, Toronto, All Day Event, Toronto

July 1^st: Research & Retail Technology Series, online, 11:00am-12;00pm EST.

July 15^th: Women’s Empowerment (WE.DOOH) Webinar, 11:00am-12:30pm EST

August 5^th: Research, Retail & Tech Session, 11:00am 12:00pm EST

September 2^nd: Research & Retail Technology Series, online, 11:00am-12:30pm EST

September 15^th: UK Breakfast w/Ad Leaders, London, UK. All day event.

September 22^nd: Member Town Hall Event, NYC (location TBA)

September 29^th: Women’s Empowerment (WE.DOOH) Webinar 11:00am-12:30pm EST

Summer of 2026 OOH Events:

May 27^th-30th: Media Post OOH Insider Summit, Hotel Fraye, Nashville, TN

June 3^rd-June 5^th: World Out of Home Annual Congress, London, UK.

June 18^th: XUSC Presents The Checkered Social, Las Vegas, NV 6:00pm https://digitalsignagefederation.org/events/event_list.asp

June 22^nd-June 26^th: CANNES LIONS Festival, Cannes, France.

June 22nd-26^th: Cannes Lion DPAA Global Curated Experience, Cannes France. https://dpaaglobal.com/curated-experiences/

Sometime in the next two days, John Morgan, the man you see on most of the Morgan & Morgan billboards throughout the U.S., will be a keynote speaker at this year’s OAAA Conference in Dallas. I was looking forward to seeing Mr. Morgan speak mostly for two reasons: he and his firm have absolutely revolutionized the way P.I attorney’s utilize our industry by snapping up huge amounts of billboards throughout the U.S. (in 2025 according to OOH Today, Morgan & Morgan was the 2nd largest OOH advertiser in the U.S) so they can make or break a market; and, his firm also represents me in an auto-accident lawsuit.

Yep, little ol’ me.

But sadly, I picked this year to sit out our industry’s big show.

Full transparency, in 2019 when I was one-half of Geico’s OOH buying team, we were the number 3 largest OOH advertiser in the U.S. Our number 1 OOH nemesis? P.I. attorney’s, specifically Morgan & Morgan. We were told we could not or run any boards that were in line of sight of ANY P.I. firms, which caused us to, let’s say, really dance when picking our locations. Because of this policy, we rode every market where we bought. That’s a lot of markets considering we were also the largest poster (12 x 24) buyer the the country.

It was even in our ad space contracts that we could not be in any line-of-site boards containing P.I firms. It was serious stuff.

We were in cars often trying to dodge the fella’s billboards who’s speaking this week.

But that was 2019. Since then, auto insurance companies have cut way back on those big billboard buys replaced by, you said it, Personal Injury Attorney’s. It’s why John Morgan is speaking this week at OAAA and why you should pay close attention to what he has to say. He’s not only very rich but he and his firm have become very, very savvy marketers and have completely changed the OOH landscape.

Which brings me to today’s OOH question: has our industry, especially roadside billboards, become far too dependent on Personal Injury firms? By flooding some key markets with P.I. copy, are we locking out locals who want to be on those boards? Do our roadways become less appealing in certain markets where over 40% of the ad copy are P.I. attorneys? Are consumers (drivers) becoming immune to all the same sales pitches over and over? Have we become less interested in OOH copy when one category dominates whole states like California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, New Jersey, Illinois, just to name a few?

Are we cannibalizing our own industry for the sake of filling space?

Maybe.

“Legal Services” were the top spending ad category in OOH during 2025. I have a sneaky feeling that number one seed will repeat itself in 2026. No longer is the Top 10 spenders in OOH auto insurance companies, most now are settling for Top 100. At what point will consumers get board with seeing so much P.I. advertisers? Will this booming category scare off non-attorney advertisers to other mediums?

I hope not, although time will tell. In the meantime, all this billboard copy plastering our roadways must be working, the phones must be ringing, lawsuits and settlements have to be at record-highs. I’m a real-life example of that. It is truly a testament to the continued power of billboards, whether you like this category or not.

Billboards still work.

Wonder what John Morgan says?

by Nick Coston

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

by Nick Coston

Fact: I haven’t missed an OAAA OOH Conference since I began going in 2013, that year being in Los Angeles when it went by the name OAAA/TAB National Convention & Trade Show. The show’s theme back in 2013 was IGNITE, where Sean Reilly from Lamar Advertising and Rick Robinson of Billups were the dual hosts. For the record that was 13 years ago.

Both fine OOH men still look as they did in 2013. I, on the other hand, have aged unmercifully. So much for that.

The only time I didn’t attend since 2013 was in 2020 and 2021 when there was no conference due to Covid. Those years, no one attended as we were all grounded.

Which brings us to 2026. This year’s OOH Conference, titled “The Human Medium”, will be held in Dallas, a wonderful Texas city with terrific hospitality and juicy beef brisket. There’s only one problem regarding the 2026 show.

I may not make it.

Not because I don’t want to, and certainly not because of the speaker line-up as it looks quite robust. Heck, my own attorney John Morgan (Morgan & Morgan), Mr. Billboard himself, is a speaker. And it’s not the very fancy Hilton Anatole Hotel where this year’s conference is residing, after all, if it was good for the 1984 Republican Convention, where President Reagan and Vice President Bush stayed, making it a significant site for political history, it’s going to be good enough for 2026 OAAA. I’ve even stayed there on three occasions while on market rides. It’s a hoot!

Fun Fact: The Anatole features one of the largest private hotel art collections in the U.S., featuring over 1,000 pieces, including two 12-foot sections of the Berlin Wall and a 15-ton propeller from the RMS Lusitania. Wait, there’s even more: the property boasts a Southeast Asian theme, particularly in its art, reflecting the interests of its developers and includes a includes the 4-acre Jade Waters resort pool complex. Woo-hoo!

I guarantee that you will get lost on the vast hotel grounds at least five time.

So, by now you’re saying “Nick, with all this going on in Dallas including the brisket, why for you not be attending”?

Outstanding question that deserves simple answers: It’s the third major OOH related conference in 5 weeks, beginning with the IBO in New Orleans, followed quickly by a five-day trip to Miami Beach for POSSIBLE, then a week off for bad behavior and boom! here comes OAAA in Dallas.

Besides me, even my credit card is tired. That and racking up some serious expenses is enough for me to hit the pause button and reconsider this next lollapalooza of a conference. Don’t get me wrong, I know plenty of OOH peeps who we hung with at POSSIBLE that said “see you in Dallas” as we parted ways. But did they attend IBO in New Orleans, and before that for two weeks in a row of NYC trips including a DPAA Town Hall? I’m even tired just typing this.

Make no mistake here, I absolutely love this time of year and attending our big industry annual conference. We laugh, we eat, we sometimes drink, smoke cigars and talk shop. But I’ve pretty much seen most of you more than twice somewhere in the last three months and although I really do like you all, well, most of you that is, my family paid to have my face plastered on the side of a milk carton.

“Where am I?” it says.

Is there still time to register, hop (I don’t really hop) on a plane and be there by Monday morning, May 11^th in Dallas? Oh, heck yea there is. Might I?

You’ll just have to go there yourself and find out. Even I don’t have that answer.

Yet.

As the 1982 tune goes, “Darling, you got to let me know

Should I stay or should I go?’

Well?

April 21, 2026

A long essay about markets that stopped being markets, the one corner of advertising that escaped the squeeze, and Jay Gould.

By Chris Gadek

I.

On the morning of September 24, 1869, which was a Friday, a 33-year-old named Jay Gould sat in an office above the Gold Room on New Street in lower Manhattan, watching the price of gold climb toward $160 an ounce, and tried to calculate whether he was about to become the richest man in America or the most publicly ruined one.

He had been planning this particular morning for about six months. The plan, to the extent a plan that relied on bribing the President’s brother-in-law can be called a plan, was straightforward. Gould and his business partner, Jim Fisk, a former circus performer who had talked his way into a railroad board and then into controlling interest of the Erie, had been quietly buying up every ounce of gold they could get their hands on. At the time, gold and U.S. paper currency were not the same thing. They traded at fluctuating rates, like two currencies belonging to different countries that happened to share a postal system. If the price of gold went up, short sellers, meaning people who had bet the price would fall, had to buy gold at the new, higher price to cover their positions. If Gould and Fisk could push the price high enough, the shorts would panic, gold would spike, and the two of them would walk away with something like a quarter of the net worth of the United States.

The only thing that could stop them was the U.S. Treasury, which at any moment could dump its own gold reserves onto the market and crush the price. To prevent this, Gould had arranged for Abel Corbin, an obscure financial operator who happened to be married to President Grant’s sister, to spend time at Grant’s weekend house in Saratoga, explaining to the President at great length why it would be very bad for the economy if the Treasury sold gold right now. Grant, who was not an especially attentive President on economic matters, had been largely convinced.

On the morning of September 24, gold was climbing. $147. $150. $155. The short sellers were beginning to panic in the way that short sellers do, which is to say visibly and loudly and in some cases literally on their knees on the floor of the Gold Room begging buyers for mercy. Gould was watching this happen and preparing, I assume, to order champagne.

Then, at about 11:45 in the morning, Ulysses S. Grant figured out what was going on.

His wife Julia had, on his instruction, sent a warning letter to his sister Jennie ordering her to close out her husband Abel Corbin’s speculative positions immediately, and Abel Corbin had seen that letter, and Grant had learned of his seeing it, and Grant now understood that his own brother-in-law was not a concerned patriot asking patriotic questions but a compromised participant in the corner itself. Grant, now correctly furious, immediately ordered the Treasury to dump $4 million of gold onto the market. The price collapsed in about fifteen minutes. Half of Wall Street was ruined by sundown. Thousands of investors who had bought gold at $160 watched it fall to $130 before they could unwind their positions. The newspapers, trying to capture the specific quality of the catastrophe, started calling the day Black Friday.

That is the origin of the phrase Black Friday. I had to look it up to be sure. I didn’t quite believe it either. The word we now attach to doorbuster sales at Best Buy started, in 1869, as the description of a Gilded Age market crash caused by two guys trying to corner gold with the help of the President’s brother-in-law.

I have been thinking about Jay Gould a lot lately, which, if you know me, is almost entirely out of character. I am not a 19th-century finance guy. I am not a historian. I run a company that sells out-of-home advertising (billboards, transit ads, airport displays, the screens above the bar in a hotel lobby), and my professional life mostly involves spreadsheets, coding, and conversations with people who own land near highways or want to rent ad space on land near highways. Jay Gould should not be occupying this much real estate in my head.

He is anyway, because the advertising industry in 2026 looks, structurally, a great deal like the financial industry in 1869. I realize that is a lot to claim in the fifth paragraph of an essay. I’ll spend the next nine thousand words trying to justify it. You are welcome to stop reading at any point if the argument doesn’t hold up. I would understand, and I would also, honestly, be a little impressed that you got this far.

What I want to do here is something I don’t see many people in my industry doing out loud, which is to describe what is actually happening to advertising in the 2020s as honestly as I can, and to suggest that we have been somewhere quite a lot like this before, and that the way out of it last time is probably similar to the way out this time. If that sounds grand, it is grand. It is also, I think, true. Let me show you what I mean.

II.

The New York Times sold $662 million worth of advertising in 2014.

I want you to sit with that number for a minute, because the number by itself does almost nothing. It’s just a quantity of money, and the thing I’m about to do requires you to have a feeling about it. So: 2014. The iPhone 6 had just come out. True Detective had aired its first season (the good one). LeBron was in Miami. Gas cost $3.36 a gallon, which I know because I looked it up, and which is a sentence that sounds invented but isn’t. The New York Times had just won four Pulitzers in two years, run the Snowden stories, and published what was, by almost any measure a person could come up with, the most important English-language journalism of the decade.

And they sold $662 million in advertising.

Ten years later, in 2024, they sold roughly $508 million of advertising. That’s about a quarter less, in nominal terms. In real terms, after adjusting for the dollar losing roughly a third of its purchasing power over the intervening decade, the Times’s advertising business shrank by something close to half. In the same ten years, the Times tripled its digital subscriber base, built Wordle into a product line, acquired The Athletic, launched Cooking and Games as subscription services, and grew its total revenue from $1.6 billion to almost $2.9 billion. Every part of the business grew except one. The advertising business, the business that had for a century defined what it meant to be a newspaper, ended the decade materially smaller than it had started it.

The reason this is interesting, and the reason I started this essay with it rather than with the actual argument I want to make, is that it is not a story about the New York Times. It is a story about what happened to the thing the New York Times was selling into. If you imagine that the Times has been, for the past ten years, a very skilled fisherman standing next to a lake, this is not a story about whether he knew how to fish. This is a story about the lake.

Here is what the lake did:

In aggregate, outside of five specific companies, the global advertising market has not grown since 2018.

I had to read that sentence four or five times before I fully absorbed it. The number comes from WARC, which is essentially the Congressional Budget Office of the advertising industry. If they publish something, nobody serious argues with it for about eighteen months. Their finding, as of 2024: if you subtract Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance, and Meta from the global ad market, whatever is left has been flat since 2018. Not growing slowly. Not growing with inflation. Flat. Eight consecutive years.

I’d like to do a kind of roll call here, because I think the sentence only starts working when you realize who “whatever is left” actually includes. It includes NBC and CBS and Fox. It includes every newspaper on earth. It includes every magazine publisher, every terrestrial radio station, every podcast network, every cable channel that hasn’t yet shut down, and a couple that have. It includes Spotify. It includes Disney, as in the whole of Disney’s advertising business, which includes ESPN, which includes Monday Night Football. It includes Netflix’s ad tier (new) and Paramount+ (struggling) and Peacock (who can say). It includes the reconstituted remains of Twitter, which lost almost $6 billion in cumulative ad revenue after Musk bought it and replaced half of the advertisers with bots and the other half with whatever the opposite of an advertiser is. And it includes the one that stopped me cold. The New York Times.

All of them. Together. Did not grow. For eight years.

I checked this number. I want you to know I checked it, because I did not believe it the first time I read it, or the fifth. I pulled the underlying data. Global print advertising was worth $75.9 billion in 2016. By 2022 it was worth $37.3 billion. That’s not a decline. That’s an evaporation. Amazon’s advertising business, which essentially did not exist before 2013, was worth $37.7 billion in 2022. So to a rough approximation, Amazon’s advertising revenue equaled the entire global print advertising industry’s. An industry that took roughly two centuries to construct. Absorbed, in dollar terms, by a company that used to sell books.

U.S. linear TV advertising peaked in 2018 and has been in structural decline since. Current projections have it dropping from about $60 billion to under $48 billion by 2027, which is a phrase analysts now write without emotion, the way obituaries describe long illnesses. Global audio advertising (podcasts, streaming music, terrestrial radio combined) has been flat at roughly $27 billion for five years running and is projected to decline through 2029. X’s top advertiser in 2022 was AT&T, spending about $33 million a year on the platform. By 2025, AT&T’s annual spend on X was $100,000. Disney’s spend fell from $27.7 million to $500,000. These are not small businesses rounding to zero. These are Fortune 100 advertisers who used to send eight-figure checks to one of the top twenty media owners in the world, and who now send checks that a mid-sized dental practice could match.

The entire remainder of the advertising industry has spent the last eight years fighting for share of a pie that stopped getting bigger the summer TikTok showed up.

You remember that summer, or you remember a version of it. In August of 2018, ByteDance merged Musical.ly into a new thing called TikTok and released it globally. Most people in advertising did not notice. It looked, at the time, like a novelty app for teenagers who wanted to lip-sync. I have a vivid memory of a senior marketing executive at a consumer brand I was chatting with in late 2018 telling me, with real confidence, that TikTok was a fad and that “the kids will be back on Instagram by Christmas.” He meant it. I can still hear the way he said the kids.

TikTok had, in 2018, approximately 55 million global users. It now has over 1.7 billion. It is the fifth member of the oligopoly this essay has been describing. It is, in 2026, one of the five companies that absorbed every incremental dollar of advertising growth over the last eight years. The reason I’m putting this fact next to the WARC stagnation data is that it is not a coincidence. The last time the global ad market for everyone not in the club was growing is, almost exactly, the same summer the fifth member of the club showed up at the door. Nobody let it in, exactly. It just arrived, and then within five years it was eating everyone else’s lunch, and the advertising industry spent most of the intervening period trying to figure out whether to be afraid of it, whether to advertise on it, or whether to pretend it was still going to go away.

That summer, in memory, feels both very recent and impossibly long ago, which is approximately how long eight years is. Most of the things that felt fragile in 2018 are now structural. Most of the things that felt structural in 2018 are now gone. The advertising market you and I work in is one of the things that felt structural and is now, for everyone not in the club, effectively stalled.

And yet.

I’ve been giving you a list of categories that have flatlined or shrunk since 2018, and the list is long enough that it can feel, reading it, like the entire advertising industry has been slowly compressed into the shape of five California companies. But that isn’t quite true. There is one advertising category, and I want to be specific about this because it is the entire reason I started writing this essay, that has not flatlined. That has, quietly, compounded. That has crossed dollar-value milestones in the same eight-year window in which everything else I’ve named has been fighting to hold its ground.

It is the kind of advertising that hangs on the side of a building in Des Moines.

U.S. out-of-home advertising, meaning billboards on Interstate 80, signage at O’Hare, the wrapped side of a bus in Chicago, the screen above the bar in a hotel lobby, crossed $9 billion in domestic spend for the first time in 2026. The growth is not spectacular. It is slow, it is physical, it takes cement and permits and the cooperation of actual landowners to happen. But it has compounded for most of the years that everything else I’ve described has not.

The question I kept arriving at, the one I could not stop asking, was: why. Why would a 150-year-old medium, made of vinyl, steel, and aluminum and occasionally a single enormous LED, be growing in the same decade that print halved and linear TV entered a managed decline and the New York Times watched its advertising business quietly shrink by roughly a quarter?

The answer, I think, is structural, and it is the same answer that explains why the Gilded Age lasted as long as it did and why it ended the specific way it ended. A billboard on Interstate 80, standing in a field outside Des Moines, is not logged into anything. It does not have a Google account. It does not report its impressions to a walled garden. It cannot be bought inside Ads Manager. It is visible to every driver who passes. The only entity that knows how many drivers passed is the company that owns the field, and the only way to put an ad on it is to ask them.

That is the shape of a market the robber barons of 2026 cannot own.

The rest of this essay is about why, and about what that means, and about how we got here. It is going to take a while. I’d recommend a second cup of coffee.

III.

There is a phrase for what Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, ByteDance, and Alibaba have been doing for the past eight years, and the phrase has been in use for approximately 155 years, which is to say it showed up roughly the moment industrial capitalism at scale became a thing human beings had to talk about. The Atlantic Monthly used it for Cornelius Vanderbilt in August 1870. It stuck. It is now, probably, the single most recognizable epithet in the history of American commerce.

They called them robber barons.

I want to spend a minute on the phrase itself, because I think most people who use it today don’t know where it comes from, and the etymology does a surprising amount of the argumentative work in this essay. Robber baron is an English translation of the German Raubritter, which literally means “robbing knight,” and which was the medieval Rhineland term for a specific kind of feudal lord. A lord who would set up a toll booth on an unauthorized stretch of river and demand payment from merchants whose goods happened to float past his castle. The key word is unauthorized. The toll wasn’t for services rendered. It wasn’t for protection or improvement of the river. It was for the right to keep moving. The lord owned a stretch of the waterway, and if you wanted to ship your flax to Cologne, you paid him to not stop you.

The phrase applied itself to 19th-century American industrialists because industrialists were doing, in an industrial context, exactly what Raubritter had done on the Rhine. They owned the rails, the ports, the refineries, the coking plants, and the telegraph wires (the infrastructure between producers and markets), and they charged whatever the traffic would bear to let commerce flow through. This was not, in the strictest sense, theft. The railroads really did transport the wheat. Standard Oil’s kerosene really was cleaner and cheaper than the alternatives. The telegraph lines carried messages. What made the barons robber barons was not that they produced nothing. It was that they had arranged things such that commerce could not happen without passing through them, and they collected a toll every time it did.

The data, from that period, is staggering. In 1890, the wealthiest 1% of American families owned 51% of the country’s real and personal property. Standard Oil, at its peak, controlled approximately 90% of U.S. oil refining. J.P. Morgan, at the height of his influence, led a network of banks and trust companies that a congressional committee documented as holding 341 directorships across 112 corporations, a web the public had by then given its own name: the money trust. Morgan personally organized a bailout of the U.S. Treasury in 1895, selling gold directly into federal coffers to prevent the government from running out of it, and then a few years later orchestrated a private-sector rescue of the entire American banking system during the Panic of 1907, an intervention so consequential that Congress, partly in response to having watched a single private citizen perform the function of a central bank, created the Federal Reserve. A private citizen was liquid enough, and connected enough, to twice keep the American financial system functional. There was a period in the 1890s when if Morgan had taken a long weekend, the Treasury might have defaulted.

(Side note: the fact that J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the federal government twice should be in more essays. It comes up almost nowhere. It keeps not coming up. If you’re ever in a meeting where someone is making a vague point about government capacity, try this line, please. “J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the federal government twice” will end any meeting you deploy it in. It is a conversation-killer of the highest order, and it is also true.)

Here is the move that matters for my argument. The robber barons were not, on balance, stupid men running inferior companies. This is the thing that took me longest to absorb when I started reading about them, because the cultural caricature of the Gilded Age industrialist is a mustache-twirling villain sitting on a pile of gold coins, and the reality is a lot more uncomfortable. Rockefeller’s oil was genuinely better than his competitors’. It burned cleaner. It came in consistent grades. It cost less per gallon to produce because Standard Oil had vertically integrated the entire supply chain. They owned the barrels, the pipelines, the tank cars, the wholesale depots. Carnegie’s steel was structurally superior to its competitors’. The Bessemer converters at the Homestead works could produce steel rails that lasted decades. The rails his competitors sold had to be replaced every few years. The railroads actually moved the wheat. They moved a lot of wheat. The American industrial economy that emerged from the Gilded Age became, within thirty years, the largest economy in the world, and most of that infrastructure was built by the people we now call robber barons.

What made them robber barons was not the quality of their product. It was the position of their tollbooth.

Rockefeller is the cleanest example, and the one whose story is most useful for understanding what’s happened to advertising. He did not win the oil business by making better oil than anyone else, although he did. He won it by making a deal with the railroads. The South Improvement Company, formed in 1872, was technically a railroad pool: an agreement between the major Eastern trunk lines to stabilize rates and limit competition. What the public didn’t know, and what Ida Tarbell would eventually expose, was that Standard Oil had negotiated a second, secret provision. Rebates. For every barrel of oil Standard shipped, the railroads would give Standard a discount. That was bad enough. The next part was worse. For every barrel of oil Standard’s competitors shipped, the railroads would also give Standard a cut, a payment called a “drawback,” paid by the railroad to Standard Oil every time a competitor used the same railroad to move a competing product.

Let me state that again, because I don’t think it quite lands the first time. Standard Oil was being paid a percentage of its competitors’ revenue every time its competitors used the railroads. It was extracting a toll on commerce it wasn’t part of. The competitors often didn’t know this was happening. They just knew that their margins kept compressing, their shipping costs kept going up, and for some reason Standard Oil kept being able to undercut them on price. By the time the arrangement was exposed in the early 1880s, half of the independent oil producers in Pennsylvania had already been rolled up or driven out of business, and Standard Oil controlled 90% of the market.

If that arrangement sounds familiar, if it sounds to you like a description of something other than 19th-century oil, that is because it is.

IV.

The advertising industry is consolidating at three layers simultaneously, and I think that’s the thing most people miss when they talk about this. We usually talk about one layer at a time, meaning Google’s power, or the holding company merger, or the media owner roll-ups, and the one-at-a-time framing obscures the real picture. The real picture is that every layer of the stack is concentrating at the same time, in the same window, for the same underlying reasons. That has happened exactly one other time in American history, and we gave that time a name.

Layer one: the platforms. Google, Meta, Amazon. These are the Standard Oils of the 2020s, which is a comparison that will annoy people who work at those companies and that I stand behind anyway. They own the channels where ads are served. They own the targeting infrastructure. They own the measurement. They set the prices, they grade the results, and the advertisers who use them have, as the operative term of art goes, nowhere else to go. A 2024 analysis put it this way: advertising inside a walled garden is operating inside a system that is optimized first for the platform’s growth, second for user experience, and third, if there’s any budget left, for whether the ad actually actually worked. That is not a conspiracy. That is written into the business model. A platform that put advertiser outcomes first would be leaving money on the table, and the market, being what it is, would punish it for doing so.

(Mild digression: I don’t actually think Google is evil. I’ve met people who work at Google. They are largely nice, largely smart, and largely doing what any rational actor in their position would do. Same for Meta and Amazon. If I ran a business with a 30% operating margin and shareholders who expected it to grow every quarter, I would also protect the measurement layer. I would also make it hard to export my data. I would also build walled gardens. The problem isn’t that these companies are run by bad people. The problem is that the incentives are what they are, and the incentives are not aligned with the people paying the bills. This is a structural observation, not a moral one. I want to be clear about that, because the structural observation is much more dangerous than the moral one. You can replace the leadership of Google. You cannot replace the incentives.)

Layer two: the holding companies. This is the railroad consolidation of the current Gilded Age, and it happened, with almost novelistic timing, in November of 2025. Omnicom acquired Interpublic Group for $13.5 billion. The deal had been announced in December 2024 and spent the year working its way through regulators on three continents. When it finally closed, the combined company had $26 billion in annual revenue, eliminated approximately 14,000 roles, and collapsed the Big Six global advertising holding companies into the Big Five. Vanderbilt, who in 1870 rolled up two competing lines into the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad (the year after Jay Gould’s gold corner, which is to say when the dust of that particular catastrophe had barely settled), would have recognized the playbook exactly. You buy the rival, you fire the middle management, you vacate the office space, and you emerge with a single network that sets the prices for every advertiser in your Rolodex.

It is not just the scale. The holding companies have also spent the last decade buying their own data layers, so that when a CMO hires an agency, the agency delivers them to its own proprietary data platform, which measures its own campaigns, which reports against its own benchmarks. Publicis bought Epsilon for $4.4 billion in 2019. IPG bought Acxiom for $2.3 billion the year before. Dentsu bought Merkle back in 2016. What these acquisitions built, collectively, are mini walled gardens inside the larger walled gardens. Closed measurement systems inside closed media systems, each of which has a financial reason to want you to spend more rather than less.

(Aside for anyone who worked at IPG: I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. 14,000 people is not an abstraction, and I have a couple of friends in that number. History also doesn’t know what to say to you, which is partly why history keeps happening.)

Layer three: the media owners. In the same quarter the Omnicom-IPG deal closed, Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the largest outdoor media company in the Americas, was taken private by Mubadala Capital and TWG Global in a $6.2 billion all-cash transaction. Outfront Media, the second-largest outdoor company in the United States, announced a $20 million strategic investment in an independent marketplace to modernize its sales operations. These moves happened within a 90-day window, were mostly not covered by the mainstream press, and represented the largest structural reorganization of the physical advertising layer in about three decades.

I know about all of this in some detail because I work in it. This is the closest I’m going to come in this essay to mentioning my own company by name, and I’m going to leave it at that, because the essay is not about my company. If you want to know what I do for a living, my LinkedIn is right there. You can figure it out. What I want to note is that the physical layer of advertising, meaning the screens you pass on your way to work, the billboards you see from the highway, the signs at the airport, is restructuring in parallel with the other two layers, and for the same reasons. Media owners want to be part of something bigger, or part of something private, or part of something that can negotiate with the platforms from a position of scale rather than weakness. The individual rational move, for each of them, is consolidation. The aggregate outcome, across three layers simultaneously, is the Gilded Age.

Three layers of one industry, consolidating at the same time, for the same reasons, in the same window, is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. The pattern has a name. We already gave it a name a thousand words ago.

V.

I want to take a detour through Pennsylvania. I know this seems like a digression. It is a digression. It’s also, I think, the most useful way to understand what’s happening to advertising right now, and I’ll explain why in about nine hundred words.

The Pennsylvania oil fields, in the decade after the Civil War, were the largest industrial boom of the 19th century. Oil had been discovered in commercial quantities at Titusville in 1859. Within four years, the hills above Oil Creek were producing more petroleum than the rest of the world combined. Towns appeared overnight. Pithole City went from a wheat field to 15,000 residents in nine months, which is genuinely a wild sentence to have to write about a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Wildcatters became millionaires in a summer. The price of a barrel of crude oil was $10 in 1860, collapsed to ten cents by the end of 1861 as too many wells came online at once, recovered to $4 in 1862 when the producers organized to set a floor, then spiked back up above $12 during the Civil War years, then collapsed again to $2.40 by 1867. Nobody had any idea what anything was supposed to cost, because the entire industry was less than a decade old and every month some new well or refinery changed the math.

This was, essentially, advertising’s open web era, except with more beards and significantly more gunfights.

Thousands of small producers, none of them with pricing power, all of them drilling as fast as they could, all of them competing to the death. No one owned the market because no one could own the market. If you had a well, you had oil. If you had oil, you could ship it. If you could ship it, you could sell it. The railroads that carried the oil out (the Erie, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Atlantic and Great Western) charged the going rate. Everyone had access to the rails. The rails were the rails.

John D. Rockefeller arrived in this chaos in 1865 as a 26-year-old Cleveland bookkeeper who had decided to get into the refining business. He did not have the largest refinery. He did not have the best wells. He didn’t even have oil. He was strictly a refiner, buying crude from the Pennsylvania producers and turning it into kerosene for urban lamps. What he had, eventually, was a deal with the railroads. The deal I described earlier. The rebate structure. The drawback system. The secret rate schedule that meant Rockefeller’s shipping costs were a fraction of his competitors’, and that every barrel his competitors shipped generated a small payment to Rockefeller from the railroad itself.

The Pennsylvania producers did not know this was happening. They just knew that their margins were compressing and Standard Oil’s weren’t. They knew that every time they tried to raise prices, Standard undercut them. They knew that every refiner in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in Philadelphia, was either being bought by Standard or driven out of business, and they did not understand why a company in Ohio had more financial leverage than companies operating fifty miles from the wells. By 1872, seven years after Rockefeller started, the “Cleveland Massacre” saw 22 of Cleveland’s 26 refiners sold to Standard Oil within a three-month window. By 1878, the Pennsylvania producers had lost. The Oil Exchange in Titusville, which had once been the beating heart of the American petroleum industry, closed its trading floor. The towns that had grown up in the Allegheny hills, meaning Pithole, Babylon, Red Hot, a dozen others, emptied out. Most of them no longer exist. If you visit Pithole today you can walk through grass and occasionally see a rectangle of foundation stones where the opera house used to be.

I tell that story because it is almost perfectly the story of the open web in advertising, and because I think the parallel is so exact that once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it.

The small Pennsylvania producers were not bad at oil. They drilled wells, they struck oil, they moved barrels. They did every single thing a petroleum producer was supposed to do. They lost because they could not see the arrangement between Rockefeller and the railroads, the invisible structure under the visible market, and because by the time they could see it, it was too late. The rebates had been in place for years. The drawbacks had been pooling into Standard’s coffers every time a Pennsylvania barrel moved east. The competitive playing field had never been level. It had just looked level, which is worse, because it meant the producers spent years believing the game was winnable when it hadn’t been, structurally, since 1871.

Every publisher I have ever spoken to about their digital advertising business, in any detail, has sooner or later arrived at a version of this realization. The New York Times is not bad at selling ads. The Washington Post is not bad at selling ads. NBC is not bad at selling ads. The publishers who have been squeezed over the past eight years are, almost without exception, operationally competent. They know their audiences. They have good sales teams. They produce premium inventory. They lost because they could not see the arrangement between the platforms and the identity layer, the invisible structure under the visible market, and because by the time they could see it, it was too late. The walled gardens had been built. The auction infrastructure belonged to the platforms. The measurement was marked by the graders. The competitive playing field had never been level. It had just looked level, which is worse, because it meant the publishers spent years believing the game was winnable when it hadn’t been, structurally, since about 2014.

The Pennsylvania wildcatters were not bad at oil. They were bad at not owning the railroad.

We are not bad at advertising. We are bad at not owning the rails.

There is one form of advertising, however, in which the rails cannot be owned in the same way. I will come back to it in a few sections. I mention it now only to plant a flag: the thing that saved the category I work in is not better measurement, not better data, not better audience targeting. The thing that saved it is that its infrastructure is physical. You cannot own the rails when the rails are not rails. The rails are a billboard, in a field, on a hill outside Des Moines, made of aluminum, steel and vinyl and the right to occupy a specific piece of American ground.

Hold that thought. I’ll return to it.

VI.

Okay. I’ve been making a confident argument for about five thousand words now, and I want to stop and ask if it’s actually right.

The obvious problem with the Gilded Age analogy is that every time someone argues we’re in a new Gilded Age, they’re usually wrong. People have been saying we’re in a new Gilded Age since approximately 1982. The argument resurfaces every decade. Sometimes it’s about bank consolidation, sometimes it’s about Reaganomics, sometimes it’s about tech generally, sometimes it’s about private equity. At some point it starts to feel like the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf is J.P. Morgan. If I’m being honest, the burden of proof for “this time is actually different” is on me, not on the reader.

So let me take the three biggest objections seriously.

Objection one: is this really concentration, or is it just the natural dominance of better products? Google Search really is better than the alternatives. Meta’s ad targeting works at a technical level that no one else has matched. Amazon’s retail media is effective because it sits next to purchase intent in a way that no other placement does. Maybe the 56% combined market share reflects real value creation, not market failure. Maybe the stagnation of everyone else is the market correctly routing dollars to the most effective place for them.

I think this is partly true, and I want to grant it. I think Google Search really is a better product than what existed before. I think the quality of targeting on Meta is a genuine technical achievement. If you had told me in 2005 that one company would be able to place the right ad in front of the right person as reliably as Meta now does, I would not have believed it. The products work.

But “the product is good” is exactly what Rockefeller’s defenders said in 1890, and they were right. Standard Oil’s kerosene really was better than the alternatives. That did not change what the market had become. The Sherman Act did not get passed because Standard Oil’s product was bad. It got passed because a market with one dominant provider, however good, stops being a market in any meaningful sense. The market becomes the provider, and the provider becomes accountable only to itself. Whether or not the outcomes it produces are good is then a matter of its own benevolence, which is not a reliable structure for a democracy to rest on.

Objection two: isn’t advertising a different kind of industry? Oil is a commodity. Steel is a commodity. Advertising is more like a creative service, and maybe commodity-market logic doesn’t apply to it.

I used to think this was a strong objection. I’ve talked myself out of it. The physical substrate of advertising, meaning the impressions, the screens, the seconds of attention, the targeting signals, are absolutely commodities. What sits on top of them (the creative idea, the brand strategy, the emotional hook) is a craft, sometimes a great one. But the rails underneath are pipes, and the pipes are owned. The “craft” argument works fine at the level of a single agency creative director making a single campaign. It does not work at the level of an industry being reshaped by companies that sell pipes.

Objection three: what if this is all just cyclical? What if the industry concentrates for five years, antitrust pressure arrives, the walled gardens crack open, and we return to something closer to the fragmented 2005 market?

I thought about this one hard. I don’t think it’s cyclical. Here is the reason. The structural force that keeps the Gilded Age configuration stable is not legal or political. It’s technical. More data means better targeting. Better targeting means more revenue. More revenue means more data. Once you are the company with the most data, you are also the company best positioned to acquire more data, and the next company has to build a data business from scratch while you compound your lead. This is the feedback loop that no 19th-century monopoly actually had. Rockefeller’s competitive advantage was operational. He ran his refineries better, and operational advantages can be matched. A feedback loop is not a matchable advantage. It is a widening moat. Over time, it doesn’t narrow. It widens.

So the three biggest objections, as far as I can see them, don’t quite hold. I could be wrong. It has happened before. But I’ve looked at the argument from every side I know how to look at it from, and the Gilded Age parallel keeps holding up. At this point, convincing me out of it would require showing me a piece of industry history I haven’t seen yet. I’d genuinely welcome the attempt. If you have that piece of history, write me. I’ll read it.

What I want to do now is talk about how the Gilded Age actually ended, because that is the section where the essay either earns its argument or fails to.

VII.

The Gilded Age ended. How?

This is the question I think matters more than any other question in this essay, and I think most people get the answer wrong. The caricature version of the answer is “antitrust broke up the monopolies.” That’s not quite right. The real story is more interesting and, for our purposes, more useful.

The Gilded Age was dismantled by three specific pieces of federal infrastructure, enacted over roughly a 26-year period, none of which actually dismantled the industries they regulated.

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was the first. It was also, structurally, the most important, and probably the least remembered. Its job was to regulate the railroads, the rails that had been the backbone of Rockefeller’s advantage, Vanderbilt’s dynasty, and Jay Gould’s larger portfolio. The law did not nationalize the railroads. It did not break them up. It did not limit their size. What it did was require them to charge published rates, treat shippers equally, and operate under federal supervision. The railroads stayed enormous. They just became legible. A small Pennsylvania refinery in 1888 could, for the first time, see what Standard Oil was paying to ship a barrel from Cleveland to New York, because the rate was now required to be public. The tollbooth didn’t come down. It just had a posted price list.

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 came three years later, and it is the one most people remember, mostly because it was used, eventually, to break up Standard Oil in 1911. But notice what happened in that breakup. Standard Oil became 34 separate companies. Those 34 companies included entities that are now called ExxonMobil, Chevron, Amoco, Mobil, BP, Conoco, and about fifteen others. The combined value of the 34 spin-offs within a few years exceeded the value of the original Standard Oil. The “breakup” didn’t eliminate scale. It eliminated coordination. The pieces had to compete with each other, which they did, imperfectly and with lots of cheating. But they had to, which was the point.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was the third. It was prompted, in part, by J.P. Morgan’s personal bailouts of the federal government. The observation was that perhaps the U.S. should not be reliant on a single billionaire in lower Manhattan to keep its banking system solvent. The Fed didn’t break up the banks. It created a central institution that could perform the bailout function without needing a phone call to Morgan. The banks stayed large. They just stopped being the only game.

The pattern, across all three reforms: the Gilded Age corrections did not dismantle the industrial revolution they responded to. They made its infrastructure public, its pricing legible, its behavior accountable. The rails kept running. The oil kept flowing. The banks kept banking. What changed was what they were allowed to hide.

This is, I realize, an unglamorous version of the ending. The movie version is Teddy Roosevelt riding a horse in a tall hat and announcing he has slain the monopolies. The real ending is a lot more bureaucratic. A lot of federal rate schedules. A lot of published price lists. A lot of depositions and consent decrees and compliance filings that nobody remembers now because the compliance layer, once it exists, becomes invisible. The invisible layer is what held the post-Gilded Age economy together for seventy years. It is also, I think, almost exactly what the advertising industry is about to require, and what will eventually come, and what, when it arrives, will look nothing like the dramatic antitrust story most people are expecting.

The thing that solved the Gilded Age was not breaking up the powerful. It was making the powerful operate in public.

What this means for advertising: the reform, when it comes, will not look like Google being dismembered. It will look like regulatory pressure toward measurement that advertisers own, pricing that is published, and identity layers that are portable. The platforms will stay enormous. They should stay enormous. They’re useful. What will change is that some of the dollars moving through them will become legible in ways they currently aren’t. The advertiser will stop pretending that the platform’s self-graded test is an audit.

This is, I think, already happening. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act went into effect in 2024 and forces interoperability requirements on the largest platforms. Several state-level privacy laws in the U.S. have pushed the identity layer toward portability. Cross-channel measurement, meaning the ability to see how a campaign performs across Google, Meta, and everything else in a single dashboard, has gone from “marketer wish list” to “table-stakes procurement requirement” in the last three years. The Interstate Commerce Act analog isn’t a single piece of federal legislation. It’s a ten-year accumulation of smaller pressures, each of which forces a little more transparency into a system that was designed to prevent it.

That’s the remedy. And it’s not a surprise what the remedy is, because we invented it 140 years ago and wrote down how to do it.

VIII.

I want to talk about out-of-home advertising for a minute. The category I work in, the one I’ve been circling through this entire essay, the one I promised to return to and now am.

Here is the thing I think is true about out-of-home, and that I didn’t fully understand until I started writing this essay: it is structurally the Interstate Commerce Act of the advertising industry, except nobody had to pass a law to get it there. It just was.

Let me explain what I mean. Out-of-home has three structural properties that no other major advertising medium has in 2026, and I want to name all three because any one of them alone would be interesting, but all three together are the thing that explains why the category has kept growing while everything else has stagnated.

One: it cannot be bought inside a walled garden. There is no Google Ads dashboard for billboards on Interstate 80. There is no Meta interface for the signage at O’Hare. The inventory sits outside the platforms, by physical fact. It has to be bought through a separate marketplace, which means the walled gardens do not control it, do not meter it, and do not grade the test. A CMO who buys out-of-home buys it from the media owner or through a marketplace that sits between them, and in either case, the data about what they bought, what they paid, and what it did belongs to them. This is unglamorous. It is also the thing.

Two: the audience is not logged in. A billboard reaches everyone who drives past it. There is no account to de-platform, no algorithm to demote the view, no privacy law that changes the measurement, because the measurement is, fundamentally, how many cars passed and how many eyes were plausibly on the screen. Out-of-home is the one major advertising category that was never built on an identity layer. The identity-layer erosion that is currently reshaping the rest of digital advertising (the cookie deprecation, the Apple privacy changes, the state-level privacy laws, the GDPR overhang, the impending AI-driven identity chaos) does not touch out-of-home at all. The category is, structurally, post-cookie. It has always been post-cookie. It was post-cookie before the cookie existed.

Three: the supply side is the opposite of concentrated. Unlike the platform layer (three companies) or the agency layer (five companies), the OOH inventory market has no dominant owner. Lamar, Outfront, Clear Channel, and JCDecaux combine for about 66% of the U.S. market. The remaining 34% belongs to independent operators. Family-owned billboard companies in Tulsa, regional transit networks in the Pacific Northwest, place-based media companies that specialize in gyms or grocery stores or urgent-care waiting rooms. There is no Standard Oil of billboards. There isn’t even a Rockefeller trying to build one. The structure of the category makes a Standard-Oil-style rollup nearly impossible, because the inventory is tied to specific physical locations owned by specific counterparties with specific local relationships.

(Brief tangent on this third point: the reason there can’t be a Standard Oil of out-of-home is that the inventory is physically constrained in a way digital inventory is not. If Meta wanted to double its ad inventory tomorrow, it could. Just show more ads per scroll. If Google wanted to triple its inventory, it could. Index more sites, show more placements. But you cannot double the number of billboards in Manhattan. The permits are finite. The buildings are finite. The highway frontage is finite. The FAA restricts what can be built near airports. The DOT regulates what can sit on Interstate right-of-way. Physical reality is the moat, and physical reality is not disruptable by a software release.)

Out-of-home will not replace digital. I want to be completely clear about this, because the maximalist version of the argument (billboards will eat Google) is stupid, and I don’t believe it, and I’m not making it. Digital will continue to be the dominant form of advertising for as long as any of us are alive in this industry. What out-of-home does, structurally, regardless of whether anyone planned for it to, is exist as proof that a transparent advertising market is still possible.

In a world where 83% of digital ad revenue is projected to be inside walled gardens by 2027, the existence of a major channel that cannot be walled is a corrective pressure on the whole system. Not because advertisers will move their whole budget to out-of-home. They won’t, and they shouldn’t. But because having an alternative with published prices, advertiser-owned data, and independent measurement changes the negotiating position of every CMO in every room with every platform. The existence of the alternative is itself a form of regulation. It is the Interstate Commerce Act, but it’s a market condition rather than a statute. It’s what happens when one piece of the infrastructure refuses to be enclosed.

I don’t think the people who work in out-of-home fully appreciate this yet. I talk to media owners all the time. Family billboard companies in Oklahoma, transit operators in Boston, place-based media executives in Los Angeles. Most of them see themselves as operators of a slightly old-fashioned business that happens to be profitable. They do not yet see themselves as the last functioning open market in American advertising. I think they should. I think that’s what they are, and I think that’s why, in a decade where everything else in advertising has either been absorbed by five companies or structurally flatlined, the category has quietly, unheroically, kept growing.

The thing out-of-home is, in 2026, is the thing oil in Texas was in 1905 after Spindletop. Not the end of Standard Oil’s story. Just the evidence that Standard Oil’s story wasn’t the only one that could have been written.

IX.

I want to tell you something personal, because the essay is long enough already that I feel like I’ve earned the right to get a little personal, and because I think it matters for what comes next.

I joined the company I now run in the middle of 2018, which, if you’ve been paying attention to the arithmetic of this essay, is the exact year the ad market outside the top five platforms stopped growing. This is not a coincidence I planned. It’s a coincidence I noticed in retrospect, writing this essay, while pulling WARC data for the passages you read twenty minutes ago. When I came in, I was an early employee at a small company trying to build a technology layer underneath an industry (out-of-home) that was badly underserved by software. We had a working product and not very many customers. I spent my first year basically optimizing Google Ads and cold-emailing people.

In July of 2018 (a couple of months before TikTok launched globally, for those of us keeping a mental timeline, though none of us knew at the time that that date was going to matter), I was on a plane somewhere and had a conversation with a marketing executive of a consumer brand you’ve heard of. He was explaining to me why he was spending 80% of his budget on Facebook and Google, and he said something that I have been quietly turning over in my head for almost eight years. He said something along the lines of: “I know the measurement is probably bullshit. But it’s the only measurement we’ve got, so we use it, and we optimize against it. What choice do we have?”

What choice do we have.

That was the sentence that put me on the path to the argument in this essay, although I didn’t know it at the time. Because the answer to what choice do we have is, when you look at it historically, almost always more choices than it currently feels like you have. It felt, in 1878, like every oil producer in Pennsylvania was going to lose. Most of them did. Some of them didn’t, and the ones who didn’t mostly didn’t because they found a part of the industry that Rockefeller couldn’t easily control. A specific refining technique, a specific regional market, a specific piece of logistics that Standard Oil hadn’t yet encircled. The producers who survived the Gilded Age were the ones who figured out which parts of the industry could not be enclosed, and who built their positions there.

I spent the next six years watching the advertising industry consolidate at every layer simultaneously, and I spent that time, mostly, building software for the one category that structurally couldn’t be enclosed. Not because I had a grand plan about it. I didn’t. I was mostly just trying to make buying and selling billboards easy. But somewhere around 2022, after the cookie announcements and the iOS privacy changes and the first wave of agency consolidation, I started to realize that the category I was in was not a sleepy backwater. It was, structurally, the one remaining place in American advertising where the market still worked the way markets are supposed to work. Published inventory. Known prices. Data that belonged to the buyer. No platform grading its own test.

I became CEO in the spring of 2024. By that point, the Gilded Age parallel had moved from “interesting historical frame” to “something I thought about most days.” I started reading more Gilded Age history. I read Ron Chernow on Rockefeller and Morgan. I read Matthew Josephson. I read Ida Tarbell’s actual 1904 exposé of Standard Oil, which is, genuinely, one of the most underrated pieces of business journalism ever written. Everything kept confirming the pattern. Everything kept confirming that what I was watching happen in my industry had happened before, and that the shape of the resolution was already available if anyone wanted to look it up.

Which is part of why I’m writing this essay. I am aware that I am biased. I run a company in the exact category I’m defending. If you finish this essay thinking “the author was not neutral,” you will be correct. What I’d ask you to do is not to discount the argument because of who’s making it, but to test it on its own terms. The WARC data is not mine. The Omnicom-IPG deal is not mine. The Clear Channel take-private is not mine. The 90% market share figure for Standard Oil is not mine. The Gilded Age happened to people a century before I was born. I’m just describing the shape.

The reason I started this essay by telling you about Jay Gould is that Jay Gould keeps showing up in my head, uninvited, most days. I spend a lot of my professional life watching the same pattern reassemble itself. That’s the honest version. Make of it what you will.

X.

Okay. Let’s deal with the thing. I can feel you thinking it. I would be thinking it if I were reading this. The author runs an out-of-home advertising software company and has just spent nine thousand words arguing that out-of-home advertising is structurally important. Of course he thinks that. He’d be fired if he didn’t. Why are we listening to this?

You’re right. I am biased. I have a stake in the outcome. I would not be writing this essay if I did not run this company. If any of that makes you want to discount the argument, I understand. I would do the same in your position.

The thing I’d ask you to do, though, is not to discount the argument because of who’s making it, but to test it on its own terms. Strip out the CEO. Strip out the company. The facts of the essay don’t need me in them. The three-layer consolidation is happening whether I write about it or not. The Omnicom-IPG deal closed in November 2025 whether or not anyone in my business noticed. The Clear Channel take-private went through. The walled gardens are heading toward 83% of digital ad revenue by 2027 independent of anything I think about it. The Gilded Age parallel holds or doesn’t hold based on the historical and industry facts, not based on who’s drawing it.

What I’d offer in return for you discounting my conclusion is this: I have been sitting with these facts for eight years. If I’d wanted to make an easier argument, I’d have made one. The easier argument is “here are four case studies of successful campaigns, please book a demo.” I have written that argument before. It is a perfectly fine argument. It is also not this essay. This essay is the one I actually think is true, and I’m writing it at ten thousand words because the shorter version doesn’t capture the shape of what’s happening.

The biased version of the argument and the true version of the argument can coexist. I think they do. You are welcome to hold me accountable if they don’t.

And now that I’ve made the concession, I want to use the remaining time to say something specific about what I think happens next, because I think an argument that doesn’t make a prediction isn’t really an argument. It’s a diagnosis.

XI.

Three forecasts. Each falsifiable. I’m putting them in writing so you can come back in five years and tell me where I was wrong.

Forecast one: Regulatory pressure on walled-garden measurement, not walled-garden existence. Over the next five years, the political and regulatory pressure on Google, Meta, and Amazon will focus increasingly on what they’re allowed to keep proprietary. Identity graphs, measurement methodology, auction transparency, data portability. Not on whether they’re allowed to be big. The playbook will look more like 1887 (Interstate Commerce Act) than 1911 (Standard Oil break-up). This will be unsatisfying to people who want a dramatic antitrust moment. It will also be, in the long run, more durable, because measurement transparency is a harder moat to rebuild than corporate structure.

Forecast two: Advertiser-owned measurement becomes table stakes. The CMO of 2030 will not accept “the platform says it worked.” They will demand independent measurement that they own, can export, and can compare across channels. The companies that win the next decade of advertising technology will be the ones that operate the transparent layer. The marketplaces, the measurement networks, the cross-channel attribution systems. Not the ones that operate the walled gardens. The walled gardens will still be profitable. They will also, gradually, become less central to how media planning happens, because the measurement moat will erode. This is a bet, and I am making it in public, and I will live with the consequences of being wrong about it.

Forecast three: The consolidation at all three layers continues, and then reverses at the media-owner layer. Over the next five years, the Big Five holding companies will probably become the Big Three. The platforms will not lose share. They will consolidate it. But the media-owner layer, which is currently consolidating via the Clear Channel take-private and the ongoing rollup among independents, will eventually re-fragment as new independent operators enter the market, drawn by the structural advantages of the categories the walled gardens can’t reach. The action will move to the physical edges of the industry, because that’s where the rails can’t be owned the way software rails can.

Any of these predictions could be wrong. Probably at least one of them is. I’m putting them in writing anyway, because I think the worst thing an essay like this can do is dodge making a claim while pretending it has.

The next ten years of advertising are going to be more interesting than the last ten. I don’t say that casually. I say it because the structural conditions that made the last ten years what they were are starting, finally, to crack. The walled gardens are under pressure they haven’t been under before. The measurement moat is narrower than it looks. The physical advertising category is growing in a way most industry observers haven’t noticed yet. The Omnicom-IPG deal has produced the largest advertising-industry labor dislocation in modern memory, and 14,000 newly unemployed advertising professionals, most of them very good at their jobs, are about to start companies.

The industry is not stuck. It only looks stuck from inside the 2018-to-2026 window. Step back, and the pattern is the early phase of the resolution, not the endless extension of the problem.

That’s what I think is true. I could be wrong.

XII.

Jay Gould died in 1892, at the age of 56, of tuberculosis. His estate, adjusted for inflation, was worth approximately $22 billion in 2026 dollars. He spent most of his last decade being sued. By the federal government, by competing railroads, by widows of shareholders whose savings he had incinerated in various rounds of stock manipulation, by Abel Corbin (yes, that Abel Corbin. The relationship did not survive Black Friday, which you can imagine), and by an entire category of smaller investors who had been ruined by Gould’s various campaigns.

The thing that ended his grip on American finance was not a competitor. It was not a better product. It was not a more ethical rival who outworked him. It was, slowly, over years, a legal framework that made what he had done, retroactively, a crime. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890. Gould didn’t live long enough to see it applied in full force. The bigger actions came a decade after his death. But the structure that would unmake the Gilded Age was already being built while he was still alive. He could see it coming. He did not have the legal framework to stop it. He had the money. He didn’t have the laws.

I am not predicting that for Google. I am not predicting it for Meta or Amazon or Omnicom or Publicis or any of the media companies currently taking themselves private or getting acquired. I don’t think anyone currently running these companies is committing a crime. Nobody in the advertising industry is trying to corner a gold market with their wife’s sister’s husband. The companies in question are, mostly, well-run, led by capable people, producing genuinely useful products, hiring thoughtful employees, and doing what any rational actor in their structural position would do.

But the shape of the correction, when it comes, and it’s coming, will probably look more like the 1890s than like whatever we’ve been expecting. It will be quieter than an antitrust movie suggests. It will take longer than reformers want. It will look, in the moment, like regulatory pressure and market repositioning and a few strategically timed essays on LinkedIn. In retrospect, it will look like an industry becoming legible.

That’s what I’ve tried to describe here. I don’t know if I got it right. You’ve made it to the end of ten thousand words about advertising and the Gilded Age, which either means I got enough of it right to keep you reading, or that you have too much time on your hands. Either way, I appreciate the attention.

The billboard on I-80, outside Des Moines, standing in the field, the one that doesn’t have a Google account, that cannot be bought inside Ads Manager, that reports its impressions to no walled garden, is going to still be there in ten years. That is not a prediction. That is a property of physical infrastructure. The question is not whether it will be there. The question is whether the rest of the advertising industry, over the next decade, will come to look a little more like it. A little more transparent, a little more legible, a little more accountable to the people paying the bills. Or whether the billboard will remain, as it is now, one of the last places in the market where the market still works.

I know which outcome I’m rooting for. I also know which one the history books, eventually, tend to deliver. The Gilded Age was not permanent. Nothing structural in capitalism is.

Jay Gould’s estate was worth $22 billion in modern dollars. The thing he couldn’t buy, at any price, was the thing that would eventually be written about him. I think about that most days. I thought you might want to know.

— Chris

A billboard off Interstate 80, in the middle of a large field. Just the type of location Chris speaks of in this amazing piece he penned.

Posted Thursday, April 23rd

Beginning this Sunday, a few thousand advertising and marketing execs, influencers, founders, salespeople and some just looking for new work will camp out either in or out of this year’s POSSIBLE Conference in the sun and fun capital of the world, Miami Beach. The lobby bar at both host hotels, The Fab Fontainebleau and its charming art deco neighbor, the Eden Roc will be buzzing for three straight days, an army of small delivery robots from a host of high-tech companies will be scooting inside the buildings and outside, digital mobile trucks will be put in position on Collins Avenue and or driving up and down the beach route and I have it on good authority that there will be a flying, two-sided digital bulletin in the air over the beach/ocean area. Add in plenty of digital taxi/ride-share digital toppers, wrapped vehicles, maybe some bathroom mirror and floor signage and voila, without a billboard in sight, attendee’s and party crashers alike will get their fill of OOH media.

I know that market well. The closest traditional OOH are some shelters as you get closer to Lincoln Avenue area and maybe some bus sides, but once you leave the highways that reach the beach bridges, there’s not a billboard in site.

No worries! Thanks to some very savvy new tech, we got these conference areas covered. As far as anything old school, there’s still airplane banner ads posting up from south to north over the tip of the beaches and which will stick out better, the 14 x 48 digital sign being hung by a helicopter or the old, Wright Brother’s era prop planes dragging their mesh messages through the air? Lots of happy hour specials advertised to watch for. And if you don’t feel like looking up into the big, beautiful blue beach sky there’s always those hard to miss digital boats chugging back and forth up and down coast.

By plane, by boat, by car, by truck, by bathroom door, we will find you.

I don’t guarantee much in life, but I will guarantee you this: anywhere you go inside and outside both historic venues that OOH will be all around you. You will not be able to avoid us. Charging stations for your phone with digital screens, we got ya. Take a seat in a potty stall, and boom, there’s a static ad inside the john door. Lobby kiosks too, changing copy with event news, where to eat, and some slick ad copy tossed in.

It would be quite a feat to see from the time a person gets close to and then onto one or both venues, how many ads they see in any given hour, or say day part, like a full morning or afternoon. How many impressions if you calculate all this eye-catching OOH would there be on one day, say Tuesday of next week? Between digital, static and mobile OOH products, wow, can anyone calculate a worthy CPM?

Doubtful, but then again who really cares. With the huge pass-along numbers from social media, me included, anything that’s posted, on wheels, flying over the beach or on the side of escalators will be seen for the next year, many times over. Or at least until POSSIBLE #5 rolls along next year.

Speaking of #5, I will guarantee you this my peeps: there will be even newer OOH products in our line of sight that we never even dreamed of.

Think low flying Tinker Bells taking drink orders buzzing around the world-famous Bleu Bar wrapped in old billboard vinyls.

It could be done, you know.

Penny-wise, $1.3 Billion Short: Why Out-of-Home’s Obsession with Currency Standards Is Costing Us the Bigger Conversation

by Eric Kung

General Manager, Moving Walls, Americas

April 8, 2026

I recently visited Hong Kong and Malaysia for the first time. Different countries, vastly different cultures, and yes, different currencies. Two incredible places to add to the itinerary.

As a dad traveling alone, I had the unheralded duty of finding trinkets that would satisfy my two Gen Alpha kids - read: hyper-aware of the world and high thresholds to impress.

And so I went shopping - note: I am not a shopper.

It was agonizing. I debated. I changed my mind. I picked things up, put them back, and circled the stall at least 3 times. I stressed over colors, second-guessed sizes, and I might have even done a bit of price haggling.

But you know what I didn’t stress over? The local currency. Not once did I stop to verify the precision of the exchange rate with each vendor. I internalized an approximate exchange ratio, and then I got on with the commerce. Sure, I paid a tourist tax on a few of those trinkets but that’s the cost of leaving your family back home for a week. The transactions happened, value was exchanged, and nobody got hurt from approximating the exchange rate.

Now let’s talk about out-of-home.

We’ve Let the Currency Debate Stall the Commerce

For years, the out-of-home industry has been locked in a circular, sometimes paralyzing conversation about measurement currency. How do we count impressions? Is it OTS or LTS (or maybe ROTS)? How much will the next release impact us? Who dictates what an impression is?

These are legitimate questions. Currency matters. I’m not here to tell you it doesn’t.

But I am here to say: we have let the pursuit of a perfect exchange rate prevent us from being full participants in commerce.

While we’ve been debating the value of a single OOH impression - refining it, auditing it, arguing about it in conference breakout rooms - the rest of the advertising world moved on. Digital channels didn’t wait for a perfect currency before they started transacting. They established a workable standard, agreed on the rough exchange rate, and started doing business. They iterated, improved, and learned from live market activity, not from white papers.

And while we’re still standing at the market stall with a forex app open, waiting for the perfect exchange ratio, OOH’s share of total ad spend has gradually decreased from 3.1% in 2022 to 2.7% in 2025 - translating to $500 million in lost market value since 2022 and $1.3 billion since 2017.

IPSOS is Here - Hooray! Now Let’s Get to Work.

On March 31st, Geopath and OAAA announced Ipsos as the selected partner for the next generation of OOH audience measurement. A pilot launches in the second half of this year, with integration beginning in 2027 and full adoption targeted for 2028.

Let me be clear: this is good for us. Ipsos operates OOH measurement systems in over 20 markets globally, including the UK and Australia. They bring real credibility and operational experience. The industry should welcome this.

But here’s my honest reaction — and I mean this as the highest possible compliment to everyone involved: let’s agree on it, and let’s move on.

Not because it doesn’t matter. It matters a great deal. But because agreeing on the exchange rate should be the mundane, procedural, table-stakes part of the conversation. It’s the plumbing. It’s the part you get done so you can get on with building something on top of it. In a healthy market, the headline “industry agrees on how to count impressions” should carry the same excitement as “banks agree on wire transfer protocols.” Essential? Absolutely. The thing that gets you fired up about our industry? Probably not.

So yes, congratulations to Geopath, OAAA, and Ipsos. Sincerely. Now let’s talk about the part that should actually be exciting.

It’s Not That OOH Can’t Be Measured. It’s That We Won’t Move Past Step One.

Let’s be clear about something: out-of-home is not being left behind in the performance marketing conversation because the medium is irrelevant. It’s not because the data doesn’t exist. It’s not because measurement is impossible.

It’s because we’re so consumed with our own internal currency exchange that we never get to the conversations that actually matter to the people writing the checks.

Brand marketers aren’t losing sleep over your viewability zone definition. Make it logical, make it consistent, and check the box.

What actually drives decisions are questions like:

• Did this campaign move the needle on sales?

• Can you design a test that isolates the incremental value of OOH?

• How does this channel fit into my media mix?

• What did we learn, and how quickly can we optimize?

These are the questions that unlock budgets. These are the conversations that earn OOH a permanent seat at the planning table. And we can’t get to any of them if we’re still stuck arguing about the denominator.

The Real Prize: Understanding the Customer, Not Just Counting Them

Here’s where it gets exciting. Once we agree on the exchange rate, we stop counting and start learning. Every marketer — whether they’re selling sneakers or software — is trying to understand the same journey: Did anyone notice our ad? Did that attention contribute to a decision? Can I prove it? Did they convert?

That’s a funnel. And every step of that funnel, we have a measurement discipline ready to illuminate it — if we’re ready to move past the currency debate.

Did anyone even notice? — Brand Lift. Your customer saw 4,000 commercial messages today. Your billboard was one of them. The first question isn’t whether they bought — it’s whether you broke through at all. Did awareness move? Did perception shift? Did you earn a place in the consideration set? Brand lift research answers the most fundamental question in advertising: in a world of infinite noise, were you heard? This is the top of the funnel, and it’s where OOH has had an unfair advantage.

Who gets the credit? — Media Mix Modeling. Here’s the truth that every marketer knows: no single platform deserves 100% credit for a sale. The customer saw your billboard on their morning commute. They got retargeted with a display ad at lunch. They searched for your brand name that evening, and they bought on Friday. Channel credits are correlated with their measurability, or more specifically, their ability to be included in the study. Billions are allocated across media plans, for OOH to get a bigger piece of that pie, we need a consistent delivery signal. Not a perfect one. A consistent one.

Can we prove it was us? — Match Market Testing. OOH is not deterministic. We don’t have 1-to-1 measurability. We’re also not a 1-to-1 medium. But that doesn’t mean we can’t prove impact. Think matched markets (or zips) — similar demographics, similar media environments, similar baseline sales. Activate OOH in one. Hold it out of the other. Measure the difference. This is the closest thing our industry has to a controlled experiment, and it gives CMOs the causal proof needed to defend a line item. It doesn’t require impression precision to the sixth decimal. It requires consistency across the test.

Did it ring the register? — Sales Attribution. The bottom of the funnel. The one that makes CFOs sit up. Link OOH exposure to purchase behavior — loyalty data, credit card panels, retail analytics — and draw a line from the digital panel to the buy. This is where OOH stops being a “brand awareness play” and starts competing for performance dollars. Data partners exist. The methodology exists. What’s been missing is the confidence in a consistent currency that connects to the transaction.

Four questions. Four disciplines. One prerequisite: a workable agreement on the value of an impression. Not a perfect one. An exchange rate that lets us get on with commerce.

Every other channel has long been focused on these conversations, and the buy-side isn’t waiting for us to enter the forum.

A Call to Move Forward

I’m not arguing for sloppy measurement. I’m not saying we should accept garbage data. I’m saying we should do what every functioning market in the world does: agree on a standard that is good enough to transact on, then improve it through the act of commerce.

The trinkets I bought abroad? I probably overpaid for a few and got a deal on others. Over the course of the trip, it likely evened out. And the experience — the discovery, the participation (yes, haggling), the commerce — was worth far more than the marginal currency discrepancy.

Agree on the exchange rate. Buy the trinkets. Start proving that this channel works — not by counting impressions more precisely, but by connecting them to outcomes more decisively.

The buy-side isn’t waiting for us to perfect the currency. They’re waiting for us to show up with results.

I work with operators and platforms every day who are ready to have this conversation. The ones who aren’t asking “how do we count better?” but “how do we prove it works?” Those are the ones winning budgets right now.

Let’s stop refreshing the app and start shopping.

----------------------------------------------------

Eric Kung is GM of the Americas at Moving Walls, a global digital out-of-home platform enabling media owners and advertisers to plan, activate, and measure OOH campaigns at scale.

April 14^th: 2026 IAB Connected Commerce Summit, Convene, 117 West 46^th Street, NYC. https://www.iab.com/events/connected-commerce-summit-2026/#venue

April 14^th-17^th, IBO Independent Billboard Operators 2026 Spring Conference, New Orleans, LA. https://ibomembers.org/page/venue-location-ibo-spring-conference-2026

April 27^th: DPAA Global DOOH @ POSSIBLE, Miami (time/location TBA) https://dpaaglobal.com/event/dpaa-global-dooh-possible-miami/

April 27^th-29^th: POSSIBLE 2026, Miami Beach, FL https://possibleevent.com

May 11^th-13^th: OAAA Media Conference, The Human Medium, Dallas, Texas. https://www.ooh2026.com/register

May 14^th: Digital Signage Federation, Washington DC Mix & Mingle, 3:00pm, location TBA. https://digitalsignagefederation.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=2016198

May 27^th -30^th: Media Post Out of Home Insider Summit, Hotel Fraye, Nashville, TN https://events.mediapost.com/event/outofhome-nashville-2026/home

June 3rd-June 5th: World Out of Home Organization Annual Congress, London 2026.www.worldooh.org

June 17^th-19^th: IC26: InfoComm Show, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas. https://www.infocommshow.org/

June 22nd -June 26th: Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity, Cannes, France. https://www.canneslions.com/

This Week’s Possible Attendee Announcements

Whatever. Hope to see you this upcoming show season and yes, I accept hard cash bribes.

___________________________________________

My Magnificent Seven

(originally posted May, 2025)

by Nick Coston

By now you must be sick of reading all these spring conference posts on LinkedIn. There was the IBO in Salt Lake City, POSSIBLE in Miami Beach and the OAAA in Boston and 6575 posts in between, over a five-week period. I did the trifecta, attended all three and thoroughly loved them all. We have some truly good people in OOH. I’ll state at the end of this ramble which show I thought was the best, meaning most informative, best pacing, most relevant to our industry and of course the best food.

However, the most important take away from these last four weeks is to bring attention the Top Industry peeps who best caught my attention as they contributed the most during each show. This isn’t your normal Top Twenty List, in fact it’s limited to seven, and I consider them all friends. Most weren’t on the stage or any panel, they were just there working. Most don’t work for the big companies; some even work alone, on their own. They have no idea I’m mentioning them in this piece until now. Sorry ‘bout that. What I will tell you is that most of these seven peeps you’ve never heard, maybe never even met. If you have, you probably attended at least one of these shows, and you’ll get right away where I’m coming from. They are engaging, bright, personable, happy souls who when they enter a room immediately raise the “in play” level of any conversation. May I encourage you to get to know them. Forget what you read online about OOH being an old, crusty form of advertising, past its prime, with non-verifiable analytics, and crappy copy. Wake up, stop paying attention to naysayers, they’re just jealous as those days are well behind us. Based on the enthusiasm of just these seven, the future of OOH (meaning DOOH, Place-Based, Transit, you know, the usual suspects) is mind-boggling bright. I may even work an additional ten years just to see these seven continue raising their game and pushing the envelope on OOH.

I’ll be 90 by then.

Nevertheless, bear with me a moment while my attention issues take over. I’d be amiss if I avoided commenting on these three shows, IBO, POSSIBLE and OAAA so here’s my quick, running my mouth comments:

1. Please, for the love of God, stop with all these expert panels that clogged up some of POSSIBLE and much of OAAA. It’s an easy way out to fill time but terribly boring. It’s much less difficult for industry audiences to focus on one engaging speaker at a time, specifically a short time such as 12-15 minutes each. Save room for some Q and A, get that damn audience up out of their seats asking questions, even 3 audience questions will ignite a spark among the dead. Make the conversation two-sided. Enough of these snoozer panels where even the panelists run out of intelligent things to say.

2. The best session among all 3 shows I saw featured an industry veteran, that only really insiders are familiar with. He’s not a show-off, not a sexy celebrity type, speaks in plain English not industry jargon, and yes is based in West Virginia. I implore you if there’s a tape of this somewhere, and hopefully IBO has this bad boy recorded, then catch Bill Lodzinski’s “Points to Ponder: Sales, Leadership and Life” talk. Covering a span of roughly 25 minutes, Bill’s talk was a spellbinding mix of industry takes, personal travels and family, all wrapped into what seemed like a one-on-one conversation. This is a guy who’s worked at Link Media Outdoor, Associated Posters (API), Fairway Outdoor, Outfront, and Lamar. Heck, he’s his own panel wrapped into one. Any who, it was the best session out of all 3 conferences, professional, personal, entertaining and to the point. No big, new-age industry phrases and certainly no nappers in the crowd. Hope you can find a copy of it, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Plus Bill is a snappy dresser. Although a completely different personality, my dear friend David Shing comes in second to Bill. “Shingy” is a show of his own, and I love how he uses the whole stage and makes eye contact. Also, a great storyteller, he has an amazing command of our industry. Although there’s only one, OOH needs more Shingy’s.

3. I know you’ve been waiting for this one: best food presentation and eats at all 3 shows. All were good mind you, but a bit of a tie between IBO’s sports bar night and fab Taco Bar and Lamar’s Closing Night bash complete with Cirque du Solel style performers and awesome snack foods and appys. I gotta lean towards IBO’s Flanker Kitchen & Sporting Club night. A huge sports bar with bunch of screens, big open bar and waitress service for drinks too. Hard not to pass up that fresh guacamole and make your own nacho’s. I’m a cheap date.

Surprise! The IBO is the sleeper here among the other two larger conferences and takes the win. Make no mistake, they were all outstanding, but IBO was that much better.

Ok, enough show talk, back to my Top Seven Amazing Peeps list. Hope I matched the pictures right. These are in no particular order, so if you are at the top of my list, well…

1. Bill Durden, VP, Durden Outdoor, Dothan, Alabama. One of the most dynamic OOH individuals to come along in years with his ability to own a room while relating to all aspects of outdoor. Bill, who won an automotive Obie in 2024 was described by Billboard Insider as “giving a one-of-a-kind OBIE acceptance speech”. I was present for that moment realizing that this was an enlightened OOH colleague to watch. Saw Bill and his huge smile again at the IBO recently in Salt Lake City where he was a presenter at the 2025 Indie Awards Show. Watch out OOH, he’s one of many up-and-coming OOH peeps to keep an eye on.

2. Jules Folkers, currently working as SVP, Product at Chameleon Digital Media, Jules has a pedigree OOH background with 5 plus years at Motionworks, then a whopping 12 years as a Managing Director at Omnicom Media Group. She’s a walking-talking encyclopedia of all things OOH, she’s forgotten more than I’ve ever learned. After scoring and experiencing a wonderful lunch at POSSIBLE this past April with Jules my colleagues, I made the one man’s opinion that she should be head of an agency, one that specializes in data management and digital transformation. She also has a wicked sense of humor, so listen up. Jules is a huge, under the radar contributor to DOOH and thankfully will be for some time.

3. Deakin Bell, CEO, Media Boss Group, Deakin has quickly become a very loud and effective industry mouthpiece. With his intimidating height and flashy ball caps, Deakin is on the fast-track to building his own brand. Bright, quick witted with a deep baritone voice, Deakin has been commanding industry attention even before he went on his own this past September. As Director of Member Engagement for the IBO, Deakin masterfully handled the MC duties at the recent Spring Conference and most recently as Director of Heli-D, North America, the groundbreaking flying digital screen out of Australia, soon to debut here in U.S. Yes, I said flying digitals. While building his own advising company, Deakin is also an amazing OOH sponge. He listens, chimes in with feedback and always remembers your name. This 8-year Group Director vet from oOh! Australia’s largest OOH company in Sydney has a huge future here. Besides his IBO Conference foghorn, Deakin introduced his Heli-D client at Possible and was a fixture with them at the recent OAAA in Boston. Watch him and his fast growth, he’s easy to spot. He too has a lot in common with this Top Seven List.

4. Melody Roberts, Founder, Chief Creative Officer at OOHC. Melody, in a short time has become one of most creative OOH copy designers in the industry. Take it from experiences with me alone, she’s clever, lightning fast, and always extends you choices of copy to consider. A Silver OBIE Award Winner at the OAAA Media conference in Boston, she also was honored with the IBO Best & Brightest Indie Impact Award in April at the Salt Lake City Conference for her work on the Bushnell Campaign on behalf of Meadow Outdoor Advertising. How many other individuals do you know that nailed both OOH award shows this year? Without any intimidating ego, she’s awesome and I’m glad to call her my best creative buddy.

5. Mehul Mandalia of Moving Walls, is the co-founder and head of product at the Singapore based global media tech group. I’ve only known and worked with Mehul since early March of this year and there’s zero doubt he’s the brightest and most forward-thinking OOH player I’ve ever worked with. Unassuming, Mehul can talk OOH tech with the best of them, from programmatic to planning & proposals, to revenue management, OOH measurement, verification and connecting inventory. As are the others mentioned above, Mehul isn’t a show-off, he doesn’t try and impress the industry with techy words and often used catch phrases. I’ve been on over 25 industry meet-ups in the last 4 months and never was he stumped, rattled or used the term “let me get back with you”. As are the others listed here, he’s not an industry household name, yet. But give him time, he’s busy building a global OOH tech platform without breaking a sweat.

6. Jeff Powers, Advisor, OOH Connect is another unassuming yet familiar face, as evident by his always smiling mug and friendly approach at both Possible and the OAAA Conferences this year. I met Jeff almost 2 years ago at a DPAA Town Hall in NYC and quickly remembered him from his previous gigs at Evergreen Trading, and years at Outfront. Mostly on the sales and marketing sides, Jeff also is one the bright stars in OOH that still flies under the big-name radar. When I see Jeff at conferences, Town Halls and related events, it reminds me of peeps that consistently show up. Talented and smart enough to head a team or OOH related company, the guy’s a true grinder. Anyone who knows him likes him. Task oriented and awesome at customer relations, I value his kinship and the stealth ways he navigates OOH. He can work a room better than anyone I’ve ever seen. That’s Jeff on the right at Possible standing next to Alex from Ivee.

7. Alexis Garrett, who’s now working at the massive place-based digital network, NRS Digital as their Director of Advertising, has been an OOH colleague of mine since 2015 when she was our regional rep for Clear Channel in Tampa. Tenacious, professional, and always in ad sales, nobody fits the mold of a successful advertising rep than her. Yet unless you met her at numerous OAAA Conferences, you may never have heard of her since she’s mostly been in similar positions in one market, Tampa-St Pete. No one does their homework better than she does on knowing her product, their locations, keeping in close touch even when there’s no current business, all while balancing home life with 3 small children. If OAAA ever allows OOH salespeople to speak on techniques that makes them the best in the game, she needs to be on that panel. We must applaud our comrades in OOH that have always been on sales side, they are what keeps this industry alive and functioning. Since 2009 that’s what she’s been doing, consistently. If I had to compile a team of OOH advertising reps/directors, she would be among my top 3. A team player always, she’s one of the best at making OOH cheerful and easy to navigate.

Today’s ramble broke 2000 words. I could keep going on these seven for another 2000. Additionally, there’s easily another seven behind them and then seven more.

Indeed, our future is young, aggressive, talented and cheerful to work with. OOH is in good hands if we continue to develop and celebrate these under the radar finds.

It’s time we sunset these conference panels and give the real players their due.

The Big Mistake

by Nick Coston

We are a polite industry. At all the shows, DPAA, POSSIBLE, IBO, OAAA, you know the rest, most peeps in our biz say hello, say thank you and say have a nice day. For the most part, we all get along and generally like each other. However, when a change in the OOH atmosphere comes along it’s usually greeted with mistrust, skepticism, and suspicion. But not this time. In fact, this recent change was not greeted with much of anything expect for some rather quiet ambivalence.

That worries me. Quiet is not good.

I’m talking about the 2026 OBIE Awards which has now become a standalone event to be held in October in NYC. Moved from its usual spot in the spring during the OAAA OOH Conference as it has been in recent years, it didn’t really get much press except for the release that the association put out. A few industry editorials but those too were rather wishy-washy. There’s that word again.

Ambivalence.

Please allow me now to throw the dead cat into the room. It always works. The decision to make this move, I believe for one is bad, bad, bad. From all angles. My reasons are not in any order as to why I draw this conclusion, but those who know me know that I like to stick with my first knee-jerk reaction to things. “Wow, would you look at that” is where I’m coming from. No sugar-coating or playing nice with this one, I for one am not a fan. Nope. I also believe that most in our biz agree with me, they just aren’t saying so. Either they are afraid to speak up or worse, they just don’t give a hoot. It’s the latter, I’m afraid.

Silence indicates natives are restless.

Pulling the show away from its usual home during the yearly OOH conference and giving the OBIE’s their own special night is well, like changing Christmas Day to thirty days after Christmas Eve, not the next day as it always is. That’s a bit rough I know, but I must bring in Santa Claus to get my point across. In many instances, changes are hard but necessary. In this case, it just wasn’t necessary.

This seems like a change just to make change.

Want to attend the OAAA this spring? Great, I know I do. Want to attend the OBIE’s this spring at the same show? Sure, except…

You now gotta wait until the following fall when the OOH Award Show of the year posts up in NYC. That’s 1,547 miles away making it two separate trips for anyone outside of the NYC metro area, two separate attendee tickets, separate travel and at least one hotel night. Did this change make the spring conference any less expensive? Doesn’t seem so with the listed admission rates ranging anywhere from $1300 to $4250 per person to attend. With just one less cornerstone event, mind you.

One less free beer.

Never mind that an agency or brand from middle America now must travel to the most expensive city in the U.S to attend the OBIE’s. Never mind that an unforeseen war in the middle east has suddenly broken out, jacking up fuel prices which will no doubt add to the total cost of travel, food and lodging (if needed) for such a second trip.

My knee jerk-first reaction hasn’t changed as I keep seeing this: two shows, two admission tickets, one extra high-cost trip to make both shows, possible watered-down attendance at both and now I hear that I must buy my own cocktail at the OBIES in NYC.

The outrage I tell ya.

Who are we making happy here with this move? I think I know, you probably do too.

The big losers? The media owners as usual, who pay yearly dues and higher admission fees for these shows way higher than the agencies and CMO’s cough up. Especially the smaller and medium sized owners. Make no mistake, they too want to be at both shows.

But are they now priced out? Do they have the time for two trips which for previous years has been combined into one?

You know that answer too.

An that poor dead kitty who got tossed into the room? Sure is gonna smell.

Every so often, I am given the opportunity to pen a more serious thought leadership piece. This time it's to critique a brand new OOH study we helped sponsor through OAAA.
If you are in our industry and looking to increase your revenues, may I recommend you take the time and read the study attached below.

My critique of the study.

I’ve been happily involved in the OOH business for over twenty-five years. With that much time served, I’ve seen all sorts of trends come and go, watching us chase digital dollars, fumble programmatic, and argue over acronyms that would confuse a NASA engineer. When I suggest to you that a new research report stopped me mid -strong black coffee this week, it’s not something that happens often. My strong black coffee is sacred.

The OAAA and Winterberry Group just dropped a study called “The Power of Proximity: OOH Media and its Evolving Role in Connected Commerce.” They surveyed one hundred and six enterprise marketers and agency executives, the big peeps who write the checks, and the numbers are by far the best data points I’ve seen for the OOH industry in a long time.

Here’s the headline: 98% of respondents now view OOH as either core or supporting to their connected commerce strategies. Ninety-eight percent. Not a typo. That’s basically everyone except the person who accidentally clicked the wrong box. Maybe it was me?

Eighty-six percent said they’re “extremely focused” on building integrated, cross-channel engagement models. Not “somewhat interested.” Not “thinking about it at next year’s offsite.” Extremely focused. Enterprise-level priority. That’s C-suite language for “we’re spending money on this”, and money does the talking.

What’s the Catch?

There’s always a catch. You didn’t think I was just going to hand you good news and call it a day, right?

The same study found that while brands are all-in on the idea of OOH in connected commerce, they’re still wrestling with three big barriers:

67% cite limited availability of the OOH inventory, while 60% say budget constraints are holding them back, not because they don’t want to spend, but because the monies are already committed elsewhere. And 53% point to measurement gaps. They can’t prove impact the way they can with digital or CTV, and their CFOs aren’t signing off on faith.

There’s that darn measurement issue again.

Sound familiar? It should. We’ve been talking about measurement in OOH since I was selling 30-sheet posters in downtown Baltimore. The difference now is the brands are telling us exactly what they need, and it’s specific: 59% want integration with retail partner sales data. 53% want advanced audience segmentation. 51% want foot traffic measurement. These are far from abstract wish-list items. They’re roadmaps.

The Programmatic Door Is Wide Open

Here’s the part that caught my attention most, especially given what many of us are into every day here at Moving Walls.

62% of brand marketers said the single biggest thing that would advance their ability to capitalize on OOH is integrating it into programmatic media buying platforms. That’s an important statement. The biggest hurdle isn’t better creativity; it’s not more billboards. It’s making OOH as easy to buy as the rest of their media stack.

They also said that 54% also said they want OOH planning and production built into their existing media tech tools. 49% want creative production support for dynamic, location-specific content. While they’re not asking for a revolution, they are asking us to plug into the systems they already use.

Why This Matters More Than Usual

I’ve read plenty of industry research, perhaps too much. An awfully large amount of it is self-congratulatory noise designed to make us feel better about ourselves. However, this study is different as it came from the buy side. These are the brands and agencies telling us in their own words what it’ll take to move more money into OOH.

Isn’t more money what we’re pushing for?

What they’re saying lines up perfectly with where the industry is headed: proximity-based targeting, digital formats that support dynamic creative, and measurement that connects exposure to actual sales outcomes. Digital billboards 65%, in-store POP screens 63%, and digital promotional displays 57% are the formats brands value most for connected commerce. That’s where the money wants to go.

There’s that word again. Money.

86% plan to increase their OOH spending over the next two years. 37% are projecting growth of 15% or more. That’s not incremental. That’s a step change. That, however, depends only if we, the operators, the platforms, the sales teams, the ad tech companies, complete our part.

What We Should Be Doing

The report identifies three keys to unlocking OOH’s future: measurement and attribution standards, addressability across all formats, and programmatic integration. That’s not news to anyone in the OOH world. Conversely, having it validated by one hundred and six enterprise decision-makers in a third-party study? That’s powerful ammunition.

May I politely suggest that you print this report, absorb it, then place it in your pitch deck while referencing the stats in your next client meeting. When a media planner hits back that they are unable to justify OOH spend because they can’t measure it, show them that 56% of their peers say improved measurement is the number one driver of increased investment.

Then offer them a path to get there. We must give them something back.

This certainly isn’t about any one company; instead, it’s about the whole OOH industry stepping up. Allow me to say this: here at Moving Walls, we are proud to be a founding sponsor of this research as the findings reinforce exactly what we’ve been building: a platform that brings measurement, programmatic buying, and media activation together under one roof.

We put our money where our mouth is as we believe the data backs the direction.

The brands are telling us what they want. We should strongly consider accepting that hint as we listen intently.

You all know how to play it, aye matey’s?

“Never Have I Ever” is the best game ever especially for us cheap OOH media types. It’s free, requires zero props, and you can play it virtually—plus, as you play, you'll quickly realize why you are crushing on someone or better yet why you can’t stand them. Or their product.

It’s like a lie detector test, truth serum and a martini all once.

It's also a great way to get to know someone new. If you’ve never played it before, the premise is simple: Each person holds up a hand (or two) and takes a turn sharing a statement about something they have never done, while saying: “Never have I ever...” If anyone has done the action, they put down their finger. Or, if you want to mess it up, peeps who have, say, skinny-dipped, can take a drink. The last standing player wins.

You get to make up your own rules.

For references, it was famously endorsed by Oprah and my gal pal, Gayle. There are videos of them playing.

OMG, my life has become so sad. Anyway…

Here, I’ll even help you start. Here are my Top 20 “Never Have I Ever…” questions to ask fellow outdoor people. These hints apply to both the sales size and buying side, media owners, agencies and brands. Tech heads welcome too.

Maybe consider playing my version after the upcoming DPAA Town Hall in NYC this Wednesday?

1. Never Have I Ever butt-dialed Christina Radigan.

2. Never Have I Ever missed the DPAA bus at CES.

3. Never Have I Ever knocked a platter of hot hors d’oeuvres at a client cocktail party.

4. Never Have I Ever pretended to answer your cell phone just get away from Ari Chasen.

5. Never Have I Ever hit on my client, gotten turned down, subsequently losing the business then getting blocked on LinkedIn. Oh never, oh no, not me.

6. Never Have I Ever burped an answer to a client’s question towards the end of a long OAAA Conference cocktail hour, for yucks.

7. Never Have I Ever set a client on fire after trying to light their smoke only to find out it was a lollipop. Those things really stink when lit up. So does the client. Especially when you torch their toupee.

8. Never Have I Ever passed gas during an OOH market ride, with the windows closed, the heat cranked, then blamed it on the fat charting guy sitting next to you.

9. Never Have I Ever said “gracias” to a bartender at an IBO event only to be scowled at, later finding out that they are Persian, from your client who standing next to you wearing for a drink, who’s also Persian. Talk about crawling into a hole.

10. Never Have I Ever told a company head “why did you hire THAT guy, what were you thinking?” only to have said company head tell the guy he just hired you said that minutes later.

11. Never Have I Ever showed up for a conference breakfast with shaving cream remnants all over both ears. Yes, that happened.

12. Never Have I Ever had your biggest potential client waiting by an airplane bathroom door, for a very long time, only for you to walk out and before looking up exclaiming “whooooo, what died in there?” waving your hand in disgust. Whoopsy.

13. Never Have I Ever shown up at an OOH conference party, uninvited, wearing someone else’s name tag, of the opposite sex, just to get in. Then gotten busted in front of a client you’ve been crushing on and tossed out. It happens.

14. Never Have I Ever been engaging in a deep conversation with the Editor of OOH Today only to notice he has a French Fry stuck in his beard and have your drink come out your nose trying to hold a huge scream in. Yes, I have photos.

15. Never Have I Ever won a raffle, a gift certificate or a free billboard at any OOH conferences. Never. Just has never happened. The big L.

16. Never Have I Ever said hi (say their name) to someone walking by you, having them look at you like you're nuts ‘cause it wasn’t them, nor was it their name. They also were walking with others who rolled their eyes. Really now.

17. Never Have I Ever requested to connect with someone on LinkedIn only to realize it wasn’t the right person, in fact it was someone who utterly can’t stand you, but you don’t realize it for 2 months.

18. Never Have I Ever been in an intense conversation with your boss at a company party, only to spit out a piece of an egg roll onto their nose, never telling them.

19. Never Have I Ever walked up and said hello to a well-known OOH influencer at CES by name, only to realize immediately you called him by the wrong influencer name. Oh come on now, you know after a few pops you did.

20. Finally, Never Have I Ever during a speaker panel at an OAAA Annual Conference, texted the person sitting in front of you “OMG, can these know-it- all’s get any more boring, I mean this yak fest is heading into triple overtime” then minutes later when they don’t respond realize you sent the text to Anna Bagar, who was on stage at the time. Seriously.

It’s free, all true, and you can play the same game while sitting besides a fellow industry peep on your next flight to a conference when you want to strike up a convo.

Which do you think of the 20 “Have I Ever’s” listed here am I guilty of?

You’ll just have to ask me when you see me at the next event.

Just don’t call me “Brent” when you do.

I'm the grandson of five Greek immigrants. Both my parents parents were born in Greece and came to America anywhere between age 14 and 25. In fact, when my fathers birth father, Sam Coston, died suddenly at age 45, my grandmother, Mary Coston, a few years later would remarry another fellow Greek, Charley, who had immigrated from the island of Samos and at the time he married my grandmother and became the stepdad to my father and my aunt, was one of the most successful restaurant and nightclub owners on the southside of Chicago.

We learned how to throw big honking parties at a very young age, all with spectacular menu’s.

My maternal grandmother, Vasiliki (Vasou), came to America with her older sister, Demetra, around 1912. They came over on a beautiful ocean liner, the Queen Frederica. They wouldn't stay long as they were traveling with an uncle of theirs to stay with more relatives who already had settled in America. However at Ellis Island, where they landed, the folks at customs didn't believe he was their uncle and thought he was trafficking young girls. Sound familiar? So all three got sent back to Greece. My uncle was pissed, but both my grandmother and aunt were having the time of their lives. With proper documentation, they would come back two years later ultimately becoming American citizens, raising families and owning thriving businesses. Vasou married Nick Kokoris, already a successful Chicago restaurant owner, where they eventually settled, raising four talented children. The eldest daughter, Katherine would die at age 21 from pneumonia. They also lost a son at age one and twins near childbirth. Our grandfather, Nick, who myself and my cousin Nick are named after, would pass at age 65 from heart disease while Vasou would live a relatively healthy life until she was 92. When our grandfather passed, Vasou would live with her daughter Olga Sarantos’s family for over 30 years, spending time with her other children's families as well. My grandmothers sister, Demetra, would marry a successful bar and bowling alley owner in Cicero, IL, his name was also Sam. They never did have any children moving back to Greece permanently with a family uncle who is also Greek Orthodox priest, in the late 1960’s.

It was a pretty cool thing going up with having a family priest around all those years. Not only did he marry my parents in the same west side Chicago church that I would be married in, but he was an avid Chicago sports fan. We were fortunate enough to see Aunt Demetra and Father Nestor, as we would call him, on a trip to Athens, Greece in 1977.

The first question Father Nestor asked us was how are the White Sox doing and did you bring me the sports pages from Chicago?

We did.

Both my grandmother and her sister would become extremely involved with the local church, the same one I mentioned earlier, as well as the two of the best cooks we would ever experience. They would prepare incredible Sunday family dinners and throw lavish parties, including holidays, baptisms, and engagement parties. It was through both of them and onto my mother, and her sister that we became extremely good in the kitchen and it definitely inherited their talents at throwing lavish dinner parties.

I never met both my birth grandfather's, as they both succumbed to heart disease well before I was born. I did have the honor to know and be around our step grandfather, Charlie Trahadis, who would pass away in 1963 to cancer, making the majority of my grandparents memories through my grandmothers, the their stories which we continue to pass on. Back in Greece they would all leave behind even larger extended families of whom we continue to be very close to.

Our paternal grandmother, Mary, would live to age 85, living happily with Aunt Evelyn Georgis, her daughter and family only 1 mile from where Vasou and my mother's family lived.

While my paternal grandfather, Sam, who was in the motion, picture industry from the settled here in the states, and owned a few smaller's on the south side of Chicago, his younger brother Jimmy Coston would become one of the most successful businessman in Chicago. You've probably read my Uncle Jimmy stories, name dropping the Kennedy’s, the Daley’s, all three Warner Brother assorted politicians, entertainers and real-life gangsters along the way.

In fact, a little unknown story from my mother side, usually overshadowed by Uncle Jimmy's fame was that Uncle Sam, who was Aunt Demetra’s husband and his bowling alley in Cicero would become a notorious hangout for Al Capone and his associates. Family stories have it that when Vasou, our grandmother, would bring her youngest daughter Olga to the bowling alley for visits, Capone always stopped by her stroller marveling at her beauty and would proceed to leave behind a large amount of gold coins as a gift.

Every so often I try to take time and replay our grandparents, remember I had five of them, colorful lives and all the talents and people we were so richly introduced to. As American immigrant success stories go, we are doing pretty good. This extended second generation family of ours has produced numerous medical doctors, attorneys, published authors, highly successful business people, entertainers, real estate entrepreneurs, musicians and one advertising professional, me, who like so to talk about them.

Immigration throughout the years has continually fueled America’s economic growth, ethnic diversity, what we eat, what entrainment we watch and what music we listen to. I imagine that most of you reading this ramble that are close to my age can relate as many of you are also second generation. It’s what keeps America going, it always has and should continue to do so.

I’m the grandson of immigrants and proud as hell to show them off. You should be too.

March 4^th: DPAA Research, Retail & Tech Session, online. 11:00am-12:00pm EST https://dpaaglobal.com/dpaaevents/

March 5^th: DPAA Member Town Hall, Toronto, all day event. (time/location TBA) https://dpaaglobal.com/event/member-town-hall-toronto/

March 11^th: DPAA Member Town Hall, NYC (time/location TBA) https://dpaaglobal.com/event/member-town-hall-nyc/

March 15^th-18^th: Brand Insider Summit: Retail, The Scottsdale Resort @ McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale, AZ https://events.mediapost.com/event/retail-scottsdale-2026/home

March 18^th-21^st: Brand Insider Planning & Buying Summit, McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale, AZ https://events.mediapost.com/event/planningandbuying-scottsdale-2026/home

March 19^th: DPAA Women’s Empowerment (WE.DOOH) Webinar https://dpaaglobal.com/event/womens-empowerment-we-dooh-webinar/

March 23-26, IAB NewFronts, Convene Brookfield Place, NYC https://www.iab.com/events/newfronts-2026

April 1^st: Marketing Automotive Conference & Awards @ NY Auto Show, Javits Center, NYC https://events.mediapost.com/event/automotive-newyork-2026/home

April 14^th-17^th, IBO Independent Billboard Operators 2026 Spring Conference, New Orleans, LA. https://ibomembers.org/page/venue-location-ibo-spring-conference-2026

April 27^th: DPAA Global DOOH @ POSSIBLE, Miami (time/location TBA) https://dpaaglobal.com/event/dpaa-global-dooh-possible-miami/

April 27^th-29^th: POSSIBLE 2026, Miami Beach, FL https://possibleevent.com

May 11^th-13^th: OAAA Media Conference, The Human Medium, Dallas, Texas. https://www.ooh2026.com/register

May 14^th: Digital Signage Federation, Washington DC Mix & Mingle, 3:00pm, location TBA. https://digitalsignagefederation.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=2016198

June 3rd-June 5th: World Out of Home Organization Annual Congress, London 2026.www.worldooh.org

June 17^th-19^th: IC26: InfoComm Show, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas. https://www.infocommshow.org/

June 22nd -June 26th: Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity, Cannes, France. https://www.canneslions.com/

Each year as an OOH media buyer and salesperson, I try my best to see which products, which revenue streams, which companies, which brands are the hot ones. Year over year, that trophy doesn’t change all that much as it appears to only move the needle every few years or so.

While I like to think of myself as a graduate student of OOH media, reflecting on the past three years alone, I’ve come up with a few lists. Everybody loves lists, easy to write, easy to read and digest. Last May 15^th on my weekly Substack, I wrote a piece titled The Magnificent Seven. Yes, it was a list, titled The Top Seven Amazing Peeps (in OOH).

Big hit, winners well deserved.

However…

…this brings me to today. Recently, a brand asked me what’s the absolute hottest OOH product on the market today? There is absolutely nothing scientific about this top spot, it’s purely based on conversations, who’s showing up at conferences, who’s posting product photos on social media and what brands are using them more. Most importantly, who’s showing up more on OOH media buys.

My answer was quick and simple. Using my crude and completely unscientific criteria, mobile billboard truck advertising companies, whether they are digital or static are in the lead.

By a lot.

Simply do an internet search on “mobile billboard adverting trucks” and you’ll keep busy for a week.

Walk or drive by any large event, be it sports, the auto show, political campaigns, CES, POSSIBLE or OAAA Conferences, you’ll find mobile advertising trucks outside. Nobody else does this better.

Book it.

Simply look at the growth of mobile truck networks in the last 5 years alone, companies like LED Truck Media, Can’t Miss Us, Rolling Box Media, Lime Media, LUX Media, Adgile Media, MVS Media Group, Legion LED Trucks, FLO Advertising, Movie, InMotion Media Group, Rolling Adz, LEDTruck Media, BrightPath Billboards, See Me Rolling, DAT Media FL Mobile Billboard Truck, The OOH Squad, and Do It Outdoors to name a few. In fact, I’ve been working with or around the granddaddy of them all, Do It Outdoors since I got into OOH in 2001 when they were the mobile truck company of choice for Clear Channel Outdoor on the East Coast. In fact, Do It Outdoors has gone a lot further than traditional OOH, developing “Shadowfencing” that provides a true digital aspect for OOH where you walk away with the info on your mobile device, creating a moving geofence, increasing engagement. Shadowfencing sends digital ad display messages, first party data, when shoppers are within 300 ft of their mobile billboards.

Who’s still around since 2001 other than the legacy OOH media owners? They are. Since 1997 to be precise. Nearly thirty years later, look at the impact that mobile billboard trucks have made in our industry and how important they are in today’s OOH media plans. Each year the topic comes up regarding the shrinking of traditional OOH dues to zoning, expanding real estate, the cost of physical property. Each year, there are more non-traditional OOH, taking up the slack of adding units everywhere without restrictions. Each year, there are more mobile advertising trucks doing things we couldn’t do what I started in 2001.

Unmatched visibility, targeted placement, ability to utilize dynamic content, outstanding brand building, instant delivery to the target audience instantly in areas where traditional OOH most likely can’t be reached, save for transit.

As advocacy and political advertising push more OOH-style buys, mobile trucks have become an indispensable ad vehicle. They can get into areas where there’s no political copy allowed, especially the more controversial advocacy copy that some traditional media owners won’t take, and if it’s digital, they can be up and running in a matter of days with multiple copy, using the swarm method (multiple trucks) and without fear of most zoning regs or traditional OOH blackout areas. They can park smack dab in front of the U.S. Capitol or drive up and down the Las Vegas Strip. Some, like Las Vegas based FLO Advertising, use the Hypervsn 3D holographic technology in their displays.

To us media buyers, we see the advantages when launching new products in specific geographical areas with eye-level line of sight. They even have their own association now, an offshoot of DPAA called MOOHA, the moving out of home association, already with 15 recognizable members.

It’s hands down who’s got the hottest hand, don’t you think?