Trying to attract more listeners during the summer, radio station KTWV-FM, "the Wave," plastered many thousands of dollars worth of billboards all over town.
The outdoor ads, which said "Because life's too short for ordinary music," were purchased from several big billboard companies for as much as $5,000 a month each.
With those kinds of price tags, KTWV executives decided not to just take the word of the outdoor ad firms that all the boards would magically appear on the prescribed dates. Instead, the station hired a company that specializes in monitoring billboards. What they discovered was appalling. More than 20% of the billboards that the station purchased were not up on time or were in some way damaged.
"It's not that the billboard companies are trying to rip anyone off," said Bonny Benedict, director of creative services at KTWV. "It's just that there are so many billboards in Los Angeles. It's a huge animal to control."
So KTWV, like some others, turned to a relatively small Paramount company, ACI Outdoor Audit, which has made a business out of doing the dirty work for outdoor advertisers.
During the night, ACI sends crews out in trucks to make certain that every billboard, bus banner or transit shelter ad a client pays for is up--and in good condition. Call them billboard police, if you will. Some billboards are damaged by vandals or weather. Some have lights that fail to go on. And worst of all, some ads aren't even up.
Clients are charged 1% to 2% of their outdoor ad budgets. Generally speaking, the company charges $5 each to check smaller billboards and bus signs, and $25 each to monitor giant painted billboards. That can add up fast, considering that many of its clients have from 100 to 500 billboards to monitor.
It is no irony that ACI chose the Los Angeles market. With so many commuters, the Southland is the largest outdoor advertising market in the country, with an estimated 40,000 billboard, transit shelter and side-of-bus ads. As a result, advertising executives say, nowhere is the problem of billboard discrepancies more acute than it is here. Radio station KTWV, for example, was given many thousands of dollars in future advertising credits as a result of ACI's billboard audit.
