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Welcome to the Billboard Mastery Podcast, where you will learn the correct way to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform diligence on, select the construction type, build, rent the ad space and operate billboard signs. And now here is your host – the guy that built from scratch the largest privately-owned billboard company in Dallas/Ft. Worth – Frank Rolfe.
Billboards are big, really large. They weigh 15,000 pounds if it's a steel monopole. The ad face is bigger than a tiny home. And these are not objects that you can really move. They're immovable objects. And that's why when it gets to the word guessing, the guessing can be very, very dangerous. This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about ways to not guess at things when you're building or operating billboards, but using a little simple, inexpensive methods to do a much better job. Now, let me tell you that in my track record as a billboard owner, every time I guessed, it blow up in my face. Early in my career, I didn't know any better. So I was guessing because I didn't know there was an alternative to guessing. But later on in my career, when I realized there were alternatives, I didn't always do them. Sometimes I just got plain lazy. And let me give you some tips. Three main ways to not guess your way into bankruptcy. The first one is how tall should the billboard be? This is one that many newbies into the industry always screw up because things always look smaller from the road than they really are in reality.
None of us are very good at actually gauging or guessing objects at a distance as to what their true height is. And we also can't really guess the parallax angle because if you look at something and put your thumb in front of it, your thumb can be bigger than the Empire State Building based on the proximity of your thumb to your eye. So here's the situation. You're building a billboard along the highway and you gotta get that billboard above all the obstructions. You've got telephone lines, you've got trees, maybe buildings. How high does it need to be? Well, you could guess at the height. You could say, I don't know, gosh, it looks like maybe 30 foot'll clear it. But that's a very, very dangerous guess. Instead, you can buy at a survey store a thing called a flagging pole. This is something that surveyors use to measure height out in the field. It's a fiberglass pole and you pull up in five-foot increments and you twist it and it tightens it and you go up again. And basically you build a giant fiberglass fishing pole looking thing that stretches up to 45 foot in the air.
And if 45 foot in the air clears the trees and clears the telephone poles, then you know the sign face should be at least 45 foot off the ground. If you determine, because you can move this thing in five-foot increments, that you can clear everything only 30 foot, well, then you might go with a shorter sign, but you're not guessing. And you can have someone hold that pole in position and you can drive up and down that road and you can see precisely how tall that is and where that is going to go. And that is a huge issue to you. That should give you so much additional comfort. Now, in some signs you need to go even higher. 45 foot doesn't do it. And in those cases, what you can do instead is you can actually have a skyhook crane come out. That's the smallest kind of crane they make. And you can have them raise the boom of that crane up to whatever the desired height is and again drive up and down the road. And now we've taken the concept of guessing and we've taken it off the table. There's no risk now. We know precisely the height it should be.
Now, another guessing that people get in trouble with is where does the actual sign go? They'll look at the field and they'll say, yeah, I don't know, maybe right over there. But how'd they come up with that? They're guessing. They don't really know. They kind of just look at something and say, well, I think, let's see, I gotta be five foot set back from the highway and I gotta be 10 foot set back from the side property line. So I kind of guess that's what it is. Again, terrible idea. You need to get out there in the field with a tape measure and measure precisely from the side property line and from the front property line as to where that sign should go. I am such a nut on this that to me, the way you do it is you do all that, you put a stake in the ground, but when they come in to put the sign in, you remeasure it one more time just in case a kid moved the stake. What if some kid was driving a bicycle down the highway, sees the stake, thinks, hey, it would be fun if I move that thing over 10 foot?
You can't take that kind of risk. Again, any way you can take guessing off the table is essential. The third way, and this is such, you would think, an easy thing to contemplate, but I find that so many people don't understand this, is how we gauge whether a billboard advertisement is going to work or not. Because as we know, you see billboards from really far back and the final 500 foot is essential. But some of these billboards you see thousands of feet back. And some people just tend to guess, gee, what should the ad look like? I don't know, let's just kind of slap it on there and think that's it. Let me give you a better way to do that. Take and print the advertisement, maybe on a legal-size sheet of paper, stick it on a wall and then stand super far back from it and walk towards it and see at what point is it legible and just how legible it is. Many a future failed advertisement has been spared from being put up on an American billboard because of this one concept. Because you can then eyeball it and you can tell even more.
You can see whether the colors contrast, whether the type style is big and bold enough, if the letters are large enough in scale. And it's so simple, just stick it on a wall and stand back really, really far, just as a car would when driving down the highway. Now, what if you don't do that? What's the downside of that? Well, let me tell you something. If you put up an advertisement that doesn't look good and doesn't draw well and doesn't sell anything, that advertiser is going to, number one, not want to pay you. Number two, they're never gonna renew on the sign. And number three, they're gonna hate you because every dollar they pay you, they'll think is a waste. It's your job as the owner of the billboard to make sure that no ad goes up which is not any good. And if you must, tell the advertiser, hey, I took your ad and I stuck it on the wall and I stood far away from it and it really doesn't work well.
And encourage them to do the same. Go to their office, have them do it. Because even if it's a flop and you had nothing to do with it, if a big ad agency designed the ad, you will still take the wrath of it in the end if it, in fact, is not successful. The bottom line is that guessing in the billboard industry is a most terrible idea because once it's up, you can't do anything. Let me give you the ultimate example of this. This was what really hammered home to me I was a complete idiot whenever I would guess. Later on in my career, I built a billboard next to a church. And I looked at that thing and I was so confident what the height needed to be, so I didn't bother to measure it. I could've. I had one of those fiberglass poles. I could've easily done it. But oh no, I thought I could just guess on the height of that sign. And when we built that sign, that church took out the bottom half of the ad face. It blocked it like you would not even believe.
It was an embarrassment. My banker went out and looked at the sign and then calls me up and says, hey, why is the sign too short? I had no answer for him. Yeah, because I'm a lazy idiot. That's why. Because that is literally what had happened. I ended up having to rent that sign at a bargain price because you could only see from the middle of the sign up. So the ad basically looked like the sign, rather than being 14-by-48 in size, was actually more like 7-foot-by-48 in size. Very, very awkward. Only thing that saved my life was on the flip side, as you went the other way down the road, there was no obstruction, so I got full price on that one side. But every time I ever drove by that sign, it made me sick to think how badly I had screwed things up because, again, I guessed. Guessing can be fun if you're playing a game at home. Guessing can be fun if you're at the fair and they're trying to guess your weight. But when it comes to billboards, you need to leave the guessing at home. This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.