When Jeremy Male rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday, he became one of a handful of chief executives to have performed that ceremonial duty, marking a corporate milestone, twice in one year.
Male, who is British, had already stood on the dais in March, at the side of Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, as they celebrated the spin-off of billboard advertising group CBS Outdoor from its parent. Male was then six months into the post of CBS Outdoor’s CEO.
The second Wall Street appearance, complete with change in ticker symbol, finalised the transformation of CBS Outdoor into Outfront Media. It also caps a year in which Male has overseen the group not just shedding its name but adopting a new tax structure and cutting the last ties to CBS as he pursues ambitious growth.
When he arrived in New York from France’s JCDecaux, one of the leading outdoor advertising companies, to head the group, it was very much in the shadow of CBS, the US broadcaster best known as the home of David Letterman, Survivor and The Big Bang Theory. “Coming over to the US, with a British accent, I’d say ‘CBS Outdoor’ and people would say, ‘Oh, what show is that?’”
Outfront’s reinvention comes as the out-of-home advertising sector – billboards, subway ads, bus shelters – is being reshaped by data, technology and the ubiquity of mobile devices, like the rest of the media industry.
It is also growing: global outdoor spending is projected to expand 4 per cent this year, and to maintain its 7 per cent share of the total advertising market over the next five years, according to Magna Global, Interpublic’s ad buying and research group.
Interest in outdoor is driven at least partly by operators converting their signs to more profitable digital displays, such as the often animated adverts illuminating Times Square and Piccadilly Circus like oversized television screens.
While just 1.5 per cent of Outfront’s inventory has been converted to digital signs, they already account for 10 per cent of its revenue. A single digital board can carry several ads a day and campaigns are cheaper and quicker to produce than traditional billboards. Male expects digital to reach 25 per cent of sales within three years, especially as the declining cost of electronic displays means advertisers can get more bang for their buck.
Additional digital inventory means Outfront can offer advertisers flexible and timely campaigns, including the ability to react fast to an event, such as flashing a message when a local team scores in a football game. “We’re not too far away from having an app where [marketers] could just say, ‘OK, I want this message on all of our screens across the world for a 10-second period’.”
Technology will enable billboard owners to use data to improve audience targeting, make campaigns interactive and connect outdoor messages to the other media people see, especially on the mobile phones carried by so many consumers wherever they go.
“What you can tell from the handsets that go past is where it started out, what it did, what websites it visited . . . The data mobile devices capture is allowing us to add far more value to our locations,” says Male. Outfront has collaborated with Dash Labs, a mobile app maker, to collect demographics on drivers passing a billboard in Los Angeles.
Such data collection raises privacy concerns, but Male says it is collected in aggregated form without personally identifiable information, or taken from apps where consumers have opted to share location information.
“I don’t think it’s quite going to be Minority Report,” he says, referring to the film where ad displays target individuals, using their real names in real time. “But I do think being able to give that enriched audience data will add value for advertisers and therefore for us because what you’ll find is that each board has a personality of its own” – based on the types of people passing by.
The increasingly mobile-driven, fragmented media landscape offers a “fascinating” opportunity for Outfront, Male says. He acknowledges that “huge swaths of money” are going into digital advertising budgets that can narrow their target down to individuals.
But marketers still want to reach mass audiences too, and with traditional viewership for television shows fragmenting and declining, especially among younger people, Male says outdoor is poised to help reach huge groups of people with ads that cannot be fast-forwarded with a remote control. Commuters stuck in a traffic jam gaze up at big striking billboards; in cities such as London and San Francisco, pedestrians pass displays on bus shelters.
“We are one of the few media that, in a low-cost way, still has that one-to-many opportunity . . . We are reaching young, urban, affluent people on the streets, and they’re the people that advertisers want to reach. It’s no coincidence that brands such as Apple and Google are significant users of out-of-home.”
Apple spends some 10 per cent of its US marketing budget on outdoor ads, while the top 100 US advertisers together spend 2 per cent, he says. (The figure in Europe, is closer to 8 per cent.)
In his office on the 17th floor of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building, the tall, silver-haired Male looks relaxed for someone giving up one of the most recognisable brand names in US media. His purple tie matches the balloons festooning the entrance and the signs proclaiming Outfront’s new name and logo.
When he first arrived in New York, one part of his task of transforming the operation was clear: Moonves had announced at the start of 2013 that CBS Outdoor would be spun off as a real estate investment trust. Reits pay almost no corporate tax but must pay at least 90 per cent of their taxable income as dividends. The conversion into a Reit was completed in July.
The next decision – rebranding – was, Male says, necessary for the group’s increasingly digital future. In CBS, “you had this incredible brand that, in a way, we felt slightly parallel to. We knew we were never going to replace CBS as a consumer brand but we always felt we could go out and create a great new media brand.”
It was not the first time Male has taken on reshaping a company. In 1994, he made the leap from Germany’s Tchibo Coffee to outdoor advertising when he joined TDI, a US-based advertising group focusing on transportation that had just won the first private contract for London’s Underground and buses. Male was responsible for turning the London transport network’s in-house marketing division from “a civil service” operation into a competitive ad agency. Over six years, he built TDI’s UK and European business, before moving to JCDecaux, where he led the UK, northern Europe and Australia business.
Amid the corporate changes of recent months, Male also bought the US’s largest private portfolio of billboards from Van Wagner, including boards in New York’s Times Square and Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Overall, Outfront’s aim is to become the top billboard own¬er in the US’s 25 biggest markets. Male says it is still pursuing acquisitions to round out its holdings.
Along with the new name, the company is signalling its ambitions with a new in-house creative studio and a consumer insight service to help brands design their outdoor campaigns.
“That’s absolutely where we wanted to position the brand, which is a new market-leading brand that is associated with media. We’re now Outfront rather than outdoor or out-of-home.”
Second opinion: Insider on an outsider
As CEO of Omnicom’s Outdoor Media Group, North America’s largest buyer of outdoor advertising, Dave Yacullo advises marketers on billboard space.
He says Male “brings this track record of leadership and results in Europe and abroad” from his time at JCDecaux and TDI. But at the same time, “he hasn’t come in with the mindset of, ‘we had this great success over in Europe and we will just apply what works to the US’. He really understands the nuances of the market.”
Male, who is British, had already stood on the dais in March, at the side of Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, as they celebrated the spin-off of billboard advertising group CBS Outdoor from its parent. Male was then six months into the post of CBS Outdoor’s CEO.
The second Wall Street appearance, complete with change in ticker symbol, finalised the transformation of CBS Outdoor into Outfront Media. It also caps a year in which Male has overseen the group not just shedding its name but adopting a new tax structure and cutting the last ties to CBS as he pursues ambitious growth.
When he arrived in New York from France’s JCDecaux, one of the leading outdoor advertising companies, to head the group, it was very much in the shadow of CBS, the US broadcaster best known as the home of David Letterman, Survivor and The Big Bang Theory. “Coming over to the US, with a British accent, I’d say ‘CBS Outdoor’ and people would say, ‘Oh, what show is that?’”
Outfront’s reinvention comes as the out-of-home advertising sector – billboards, subway ads, bus shelters – is being reshaped by data, technology and the ubiquity of mobile devices, like the rest of the media industry.
It is also growing: global outdoor spending is projected to expand 4 per cent this year, and to maintain its 7 per cent share of the total advertising market over the next five years, according to Magna Global, Interpublic’s ad buying and research group.
Interest in outdoor is driven at least partly by operators converting their signs to more profitable digital displays, such as the often animated adverts illuminating Times Square and Piccadilly Circus like oversized television screens.
While just 1.5 per cent of Outfront’s inventory has been converted to digital signs, they already account for 10 per cent of its revenue. A single digital board can carry several ads a day and campaigns are cheaper and quicker to produce than traditional billboards. Male expects digital to reach 25 per cent of sales within three years, especially as the declining cost of electronic displays means advertisers can get more bang for their buck.
Additional digital inventory means Outfront can offer advertisers flexible and timely campaigns, including the ability to react fast to an event, such as flashing a message when a local team scores in a football game. “We’re not too far away from having an app where [marketers] could just say, ‘OK, I want this message on all of our screens across the world for a 10-second period’.”
Technology will enable billboard owners to use data to improve audience targeting, make campaigns interactive and connect outdoor messages to the other media people see, especially on the mobile phones carried by so many consumers wherever they go.
“What you can tell from the handsets that go past is where it started out, what it did, what websites it visited . . . The data mobile devices capture is allowing us to add far more value to our locations,” says Male. Outfront has collaborated with Dash Labs, a mobile app maker, to collect demographics on drivers passing a billboard in Los Angeles.
Such data collection raises privacy concerns, but Male says it is collected in aggregated form without personally identifiable information, or taken from apps where consumers have opted to share location information.
“I don’t think it’s quite going to be Minority Report,” he says, referring to the film where ad displays target individuals, using their real names in real time. “But I do think being able to give that enriched audience data will add value for advertisers and therefore for us because what you’ll find is that each board has a personality of its own” – based on the types of people passing by.
The increasingly mobile-driven, fragmented media landscape offers a “fascinating” opportunity for Outfront, Male says. He acknowledges that “huge swaths of money” are going into digital advertising budgets that can narrow their target down to individuals.
But marketers still want to reach mass audiences too, and with traditional viewership for television shows fragmenting and declining, especially among younger people, Male says outdoor is poised to help reach huge groups of people with ads that cannot be fast-forwarded with a remote control. Commuters stuck in a traffic jam gaze up at big striking billboards; in cities such as London and San Francisco, pedestrians pass displays on bus shelters.
“We are one of the few media that, in a low-cost way, still has that one-to-many opportunity . . . We are reaching young, urban, affluent people on the streets, and they’re the people that advertisers want to reach. It’s no coincidence that brands such as Apple and Google are significant users of out-of-home.”
Apple spends some 10 per cent of its US marketing budget on outdoor ads, while the top 100 US advertisers together spend 2 per cent, he says. (The figure in Europe, is closer to 8 per cent.)
In his office on the 17th floor of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building, the tall, silver-haired Male looks relaxed for someone giving up one of the most recognisable brand names in US media. His purple tie matches the balloons festooning the entrance and the signs proclaiming Outfront’s new name and logo.
When he first arrived in New York, one part of his task of transforming the operation was clear: Moonves had announced at the start of 2013 that CBS Outdoor would be spun off as a real estate investment trust. Reits pay almost no corporate tax but must pay at least 90 per cent of their taxable income as dividends. The conversion into a Reit was completed in July.
The next decision – rebranding – was, Male says, necessary for the group’s increasingly digital future. In CBS, “you had this incredible brand that, in a way, we felt slightly parallel to. We knew we were never going to replace CBS as a consumer brand but we always felt we could go out and create a great new media brand.”
It was not the first time Male has taken on reshaping a company. In 1994, he made the leap from Germany’s Tchibo Coffee to outdoor advertising when he joined TDI, a US-based advertising group focusing on transportation that had just won the first private contract for London’s Underground and buses. Male was responsible for turning the London transport network’s in-house marketing division from “a civil service” operation into a competitive ad agency. Over six years, he built TDI’s UK and European business, before moving to JCDecaux, where he led the UK, northern Europe and Australia business.
Amid the corporate changes of recent months, Male also bought the US’s largest private portfolio of billboards from Van Wagner, including boards in New York’s Times Square and Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Overall, Outfront’s aim is to become the top billboard own¬er in the US’s 25 biggest markets. Male says it is still pursuing acquisitions to round out its holdings.
Along with the new name, the company is signalling its ambitions with a new in-house creative studio and a consumer insight service to help brands design their outdoor campaigns.
“That’s absolutely where we wanted to position the brand, which is a new market-leading brand that is associated with media. We’re now Outfront rather than outdoor or out-of-home.”
Second opinion: Insider on an outsider
As CEO of Omnicom’s Outdoor Media Group, North America’s largest buyer of outdoor advertising, Dave Yacullo advises marketers on billboard space.
He says Male “brings this track record of leadership and results in Europe and abroad” from his time at JCDecaux and TDI. But at the same time, “he hasn’t come in with the mindset of, ‘we had this great success over in Europe and we will just apply what works to the US’. He really understands the nuances of the market.”
