If I Were A Billboard Baron - A Win (x4) Transition

There is a fascinating chart on page four about vehicle accidents in a recent comprehensive analysis of autonomous vehicles that have the potential to revolutionize road travel including what is already the mode of travel for 2 billion visitor person-trips each year.

Of the 5.5 million crashes a year, 31% involve alcohol and 7% involve drugs, 30% involve speeding, 21% involve distracted drivers and 14% involve failing to keep in the proper lane etc.

Distractions include decisions to text while driving which is just stupid.  But some distractions to drivers are purposeful, such as state-sanctioned commercial outdoor billboards that contribute significantly to the $300 billion annual cost of vehicle crashes (2% of GDP.)

In total, of the 5.5 million crashes per year,  2.2 million result in fatalities or injuries.

If this isn’t reason enough to ban billboards along publicly-built and owned roadways from which they parasitically draw their only value - to be seen - billboards are also responsible for the clear cutting of hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned trees, robbing the nation of their public health and ecological benefits.

It may sound a lot like corruption, but like most, it is legal corruption.

Will autonomous vehicles further enable billboards by making the consequences of distracted driving moot?  My guess is that freed from worrying about this particular distraction, billboards will become even more irritating to the nearly 8-in-10 drivers and passengers who see them as blight, robbing them of a scenic viewshed.

Advertisers are becoming sensitive not only to the negative return on investment from that marketing tactic in general, but that it also makes no sense to turn off such a high ratio of consumers for every one you serve.  Not a very smart business plan.

And then there is the increasing value of the trees they desecrate to global climate regulation.  So what will happen to those whom Americans deemed “billboard barons” almost a century ago?

And what about the 1-in-10 people traveling on the roadways who still find them useful or entertaining?

Enablers come from ironic places.  On a recent trip to Birmingham, Alabama, anticipating the Birmingham skyline around a bend at the top of a rise, not far from “dead man’s curve,” I was greeted instead by a Realtor’s message on  a huge billboard heralding her expertise in curb appeal while marring that community’s visual aesthetics.

In North Carolina where I live, a group worried about the desecration of proposed fracking is utilizing a billboard that desecrates roadside mountain views as the means to get their message out to the public.

What a win-win for the out-of-state billboard company which provided this comp I assume, in a deliberate strategy to glean some much needed credibility. But the lack of credibility is likely to rub off on the advertiser instead.

Their excuse is that fracking is an even bigger potential blight.  That’s lame and hypocritical.  Roadside forests along the national highway system alone amount to the equivalent of 14 national forests and the equivalent of sequestering emissions from 2.6 million cars a year.

It is a “dot” some of us had to connect a few years ago for Keep American Beautiful when officials there suffered a lapse in judgment and forgot that scenic preservation is more than reducing roadside litter.  It also includes what many Americans call “litter on a stick.”

The group that generates funding for the arts in Charlotte has succumbed to billboard subterfuge first perpetrated by billboard companies in the 1920s and 1930s when billboard barons justified blight by claiming to to be the “art gallery to the masses.”

The group, which should be more, not less sensitive to visual blight, is utilizing billboards to showcase the work of local visual artists probably provided comp or at a discount, again to reap much needed credibility.

Lost on those who should probably best understand scenic preservation vs. blight is that the billboard companies there are simultaneously slashing trees and vegetation meant to prevent erosion and eliminate toxic chemicals from storm run off while pressing the state to be able to clear cut trees planted by that community to beautify boulevards.

As Jeff Buddle noted in the publication ArtsEditor several years ago (paragraph breaks are mine):

“The term ‘artist's billboard’ is an oxymoron.  While not seeming to, the two words cancel each other out.

As artists, critics, or simply art-fans, we hope that artists are powerful enough to conquer their media bending an unconventional form to their will.

But a billboard’s semiotic associations are strong to the point of impenetrability; they are perceived as a ground whose sole domain is owned by advertising companies.

If an artist takes over a billboard, his or her artwork is bent and skewed by our expectations…the road diffuses the images, the gallery infuses them.”

State Farm agents (including my own) and Harley-Davidson dealerships (with the exception of mine in Durham, NC) are also ironic enablers of billboards.

The former should be concerned about distracted drivers and the  latter, for which scenic preservation and enjoyment is a primary reason to ride, should both know better.  But most marketers never think about the downside or net effect.

All of these enablers seem more like hostages strapped to the front bumper during desperate escape attempts.  But they are keeping an obsolete and increasingly negative-return technology on life support by providing the misperception of credibility.

While binging on movies over the holiday, I may have glimpsed what will be a win-win-win while watching Parker, an action-drama released a year ago starring Jennifer Lopez and Jason Statham, and set  primarily in West Palm Beach, Florida.

As shown in the image in this blog, the director superimposed the name of the community, whenever a change of location occurred.

In the future, when we have autonomous vehicles and when both the billboard barons and their state-sponsored enablers have determined that these grossly impractical sources of blight are just not beneficial or cost effective, they will hopefully transition to “virtual” billboards.

Like the movie special effect that superimposed the name of the community on the West Palm Beach skyline, billboard companies could soon transition to producing and selling virtual billboards along highways instead of blighting the landscape with the physical versions of today.

Rather than disgusting the nearly 8-in-10 Americans who view physical billboards as a desecration, these virtual billboard would be visible on prompt by only the 1-in-10  passengers who desire to have them superimposed on the route, using the windows of autonomous vehicles much like Google Glass is today.

I have a good friend who finds billboards useful primarily as a means of breaking monotony.  Have at it, but hopefully in the future with the use of virtual billboards and without desecrating roadsides and compromising public health for everyone else.

This would be much less expensive for the billboard barons than maintaining millions of physical billboards.

It would also be better for advertisers who would finally have a reliable metric of effectiveness or lack thereof, better for the environment and for those who prefer a blight-free experience.

Best of all, it would still be license-able by states, cities and counties for user fees but hopefully indexed to the revenue reaped by the billboard companies rather than based on physical real estate value as they are now.

I’ve always driven vehicles with manual transmissions because I like the feel of the road driving that way and the control it gives me over the vehicle, but I’ll willingly give that up for safety just to get rid of billboards as a major source of scenic  blight.

Besides, there will probably be a feature in automated vehicles that would give me the same sensations.  And my friends traveling with me who may enjoy billboards can look at as many of them as they wish but without desecrating views for the rest of us and creating havoc on nature.

Autonomous vehicles are not as far off as you think.  According to the report, which lays out a series of policy recommendations, the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto is already using the technology for its huge Komatsu ore trucks and plans to add another 150 to its feet over the next few years.  Caterpillar also offers autonomous hauling, dozing, drilling and other heavy equipment.

The promise for tourism, or the promotion of visitor-centered economic and cultural development that communities use to leverage and promote sense of place is immense including the benefits of fewer accidents, elimination of driving while intoxicated as an issue, virtual wayfinding and roadside scenic preservation, to name only a few.

If I were an investor in the hedge funds that now own or bankroll most billboard companies, I’d be pushing now for autonomous vehicle research and the beginning of a related transition to virtual billboards.

If I was a researcher doing future reports on the impact of autonomous vehicles, I’d begin incorporating the public health and other sequestration values of eliminating the need for physical billboards and the reversion of roadsides to nature.

If I were still involved in community destination marketing, I’d begin strategic preparations now for this and other near-term transitions in tourism and ensure that I wasn’t enabling roadside blight by using billboards, even if the blight is created elsewhere.

If I were a state of federal official including those responsible for roadways, I’d be pushing billboard companies to begin the transition to virtual forms and begin the reforestation of roadsides by recognizing the much higher priority on scenic preservation as a far more valuable resource for sense of place and economic development.

This isn’t magic -Just sayin’.

A Scar Above The New Hope

I was a passenger last week on a short jaunt with a friend down the boulevard that runs southwest from Durham, where I live toward Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

As we passed over the new bridge over New Hope Creek, I saw a sight we could be seeing all over Durham.  For a mile along the highway as we climbed up from the New Hope, clear across to the steep slopes that drop down to Dry Creek, an entire urban forest had been clear cut.

I don’t mean clear cut like developers unfortunately often practice or selectively cut while also making the forest more healthy and sustainable.  I mean entirely clear cut to a sea of stumps, I am told to just harvest the timber.

It was all perfectly legal I am told. 

Denuding that landscape apparently doesn’t violate soil erosion ordinances and a plan for the cutting had apparently been approved both by the NC Forest Service and the county agency responsible for forest protection.

The irony is the ravaged area notches into a corridor the City and County of Durham along with Orange County and the Town of Chapel Hill have spent the last quarter century trying to protect in the public interest including 1,100 acres of floodplain, 45 acres of step slopes and 54 acres of uplands similar to those that were deforested a few weeks ago.

Further irony is that the huge rubber wheeled timber harvesters (probably like the one shown in this blog) were laying waste at the very time volunteers were working on the opposite side of the New Hope to spruce up a park converted in its watershed from an old sewer plant.

The deforestation illustrates the dilemma Durham faces.  Its tree ordinances are fragmented.  No agency, not even the city’s urban forestry division, is adequately equipped or inspired to safeguard Durham’s overall tree canopy.

Any ordinances or processes involving trees, soil and other assets obviously fall pitifully short.

The clear cut trees had public health value far in excess of their value to a pulp or lumber mill, but apparently the owners weren’t aware of the many stewardship alternatives, incentives or practices available.

Or I’m afraid it may not have mattered.

More trees were probably destroyed in a matter of days along that mile than the city and country have reforested here in a decade.

This is not only because Durham has shorted urban forestry but because officials refuse to accept that urban forest management involves both public and private lands as noted in this 2010 white paper.

Across the nation, there are 3.8 billion trees in urban forests such as Durham’s. Collectively, they are worth nearly $3 trillion in structural value alone.  In terms of overall forestland in the United States, 35% is owned by families, including individuals, married couples, estates and trusts.

In the South, this percentage zooms from 35% to 59%, or 128 million acres, more than twice that held by the forest industry.  Much of what many of us love about Durham, much of why it is so coveted by relocating businesses or the talent they pursue could disappear overnight, just as it did along the New Hope last month.

It isn’t like this warning is new.  It was sounded about the New Hope in Durham in a 1986 inventory of natural assets.  By 1988, neighborhood activists added grass-roots energy.  By 1991-92, a multi-government master plan had been adopted.  In 1992, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service included it in it regional wetlands plan.

Most Durham residents, if they are like me, believed that these actions, along with ordinances to prevent soil erosion and slow and cleanse storm run-off, screen and scrub pollutants along roadways and the foresting plan reviews would have at least ensured selective cutting on that mile-long stretch south of the New Hope and west of its tributary Dry Creek.

Either in the letter or the spirit or the execution, something isn’t working.

The land is private land, but even among the most conservative that doesn’t mean it is immune from self-restraint or the consequences of actions that harm others.  New Hope is not just one of many creeks and rivers in Durham.  It is a primary tributary to Jordan Lake, the drinking water for scores of cities, towns and counties.

New Hope was a river until the 1970s.  From its headwaters near Kimbro Road below Orange Grove, along where I often take Harley excursions, an approximately 20-mile stretch of the creek was left when its valley namesake just below Durham was flooded to create the more than 14,000-acre Jordan in the 1960s which was known as New Hope Lake until 1973. 

The deforested area I saw is part of the New Hope Creek’s watershed close to the lake, which drains Duke University campus and southwest Durham.

It marks in part the beginning of the Cape Fear River basin, North Carolina’s largest, populated by 27% of the state’s residents.

Durham in the north is also located at the beginning of the Neuse River watershed, the state’s third largest, and the two massive watersheds break along a ridge that runs through downtown Durham.

This is the only major city and county straddling both watersheds, reason enough for the 187 municipalities downstream including half of the state’s 100 counties to invest in Trees Across Durham as a means of protecting these sources of water, much as New York City does in the Catskills.

It is also another reason that Durham must deepen its urban forestry ordinances, incorporate both the city and county and take a holistic approach by addressing both privately-owned as well as publicly-owned forest.

In Durham, we often view public health efforts such as those along our streams and rivers through only the lens of recreation.  But the extraordinarily far-sighted City Council led for two terms by then-mayor Wib Gulley grasped that urban forest was also about economic development.

They banned billboard and other sign blight for the benefit of trees and vegetation that were being sacrificed, established a best practice forest and scenic overlay along I-40 as it passes through southern Durham and established the Durham Service Corp to teach nature-related skills and provide work for disadvantaged youth.

In concert with the Board of County Commissioners, led by then chair and now long-serving mayor Bill Bill, they also solicited and adopted plans to protect streams such as the one for the New Hope and its tributaries.

To leverage these place based natural and historic assets, including urban forest canopy, into visitor-centric economic and cultural development, they established as a provision to state legislation a free-standing, self-funded agency to champion and promote sense of place.

Obviously from what I saw recently, their work is not quite finished or something has been lost.

Today a new generation of Durham officials needs to set about to reinvigorate not only ordinances, but practices and incentives, so that the desecration in the image above remains more as it was captured below by Google before the deforestation took place.

Infograophic - Homelessness Since 2007

For the related story click here.  For the full report, click here.

“The Globalization of Indifference”

I have it on good authority that many of those people who line up days in advance outside of “big box” retailers for Black Friday sales specials endure the wait so they can buy tens of thousand of dollars in merchandise.

The items are quickly shipped to other countries where resale will double the return on their investment.  Puts a whole new spin on the holiday spirit and an exclamation point on what Pope Francis recently bemoaned as the “globalization of indifference.”

However, studies have shown that making actions transparent backfires as a means to discourage ethical behavior due in part to what Dr. George Lowenstein, a behavioral economics researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Behavioral and Decision Research calls “motivated bias.”

He is famously quoted as saying, “Transparency is well and good, but accuracy and objectivity are even better.”  It turns out that one person’s transparency can be an enabler for other people to not only cross the line but feel good about it.

I know - I’ve always been drawn to the counterintuitive when revealed by data, which explains my interest in a great website, EthicalSystems.org, a collaboration by more than 20 researchers, most at business schools, including Dr. Dan Ariely in Durham, North Carolina where I live.

Ariely gave a speech a year ago about “what makes us feel good about our work.”  His research shows that motivation is about much more than payment.  It also involves “meaning, creation, challenge, ownership, identity, pride etc.”

This was certainly true in my now-concluded forty-year career in visitor-centered cultural and economic development, and one reason I always employed MBWA (management by walking around).

It wasn’t to monitor employees as much as to answer questions they might have, give feedback, encourage entrepreneurial thinking and help resolve any obstacles, including the need for any additional resources or support.

A few may have viewed it as micromanaging but as Hertz CEO Mark Frissora explained in an interview this month for McKinsey and Company (paragraph breaks are mine):

“I have to get ‘too involved’ in the business because I’m setting the strategy.

If I don’t understand the business, then I’m a poor manager and I’ve failed as a leader. It’s critical that leaders spend a lot of time where the work actually gets done—that they get into the guts of the business and see what happens there.

The further down the chain you go, the easier it is to see how your strategy might not work the way you’d intended. You might even discover that the strategy itself is backwards.

You always walk away with a new insight or a new opportunity.”

He manages 41,000 people.  In my career I never managed more than 30 and the average was below 20, but one of the reasons I found MBWA effective was to resolve any ethical issues in real time.

Ethical behavior has always been important to community destination marketing.  In fact, the association of community marketing organizations (DMOs)was organized 100 years ago primarily to create and embed a code of ethical behavior for members.

Up until a decade ago, every employee of each member organization was required to sign and return this code of behavior.  This process seems to have fallen through the cracks during a leadership change or worse, vetoed by those walking too close to the line.

However, at the organization where I worked up until retirement, we deepened the code and continued the practice of re-signing it each year.  The organization's governing board adopted a similar practice for each newly appointed member.

It would be a good idea on the 100th anniversary for Destination Marketing Association International to update that code and to reinstitute having the staffs of member organizations sign it annually.  As a template, it could use this best practice example.

Research shows that a code of ethics is more effective if signatures are required and especially if the signature is at the very top of the document rather than at the end, which is more customary.

During the latter stages of my career there were persistent rumors within the development sector of another community with which I was familiar that one of my peers in economic development was taking money off the books from a special interest.

I never gave it credence because I knew that money was far from being the primary motivation for this peer, but a soon-to-be published study by Harvard researchers explains why “reputational risk” may be the best way to ensure ethical behavior, especially among very “successful, higher-status” executives.

The more successful a person becomes and the higher they climb in the social hierarchy of an organization or a community, the more likely it becomes that they will be tempted to engage in deception to maintain the appearance of success.

This is why a code of ethics, especially in smaller organizations, must be backed up by a strict separation of accounting and performance reporting controls and board officer review of the CEO’s expense account.

Also essential is that CEO performance evaluations involve each member of the entire board through a mechanism that provides anonymity and eliminates politics.  And if need be an examination of personal bank accounts if questions of objectivity are ever raised.

Much of what we call corruption is perfectly legal, including Black Friday.

5 + 1 Insights For Young Community Marketers

While I am not a consultant and it has been four years since I’ve had any involvement in community destination marketing, I still receive questions from time to time from young people who think they might be interested in a career in visitor-centric cultural and economic development.

Below are a handful of the things I pass along:

Build work experience during college.

It doesn’t matter if it is with a destination marketing organization or even visitor-related.  Find something fast-paced and learn everything you can about data-driven decision making, critical thinking, technology and project management/process.

A recent study of employers shows that they rank internships and working during college as top attributes when evaluating recent college graduates, more than 40% higher than they rank college major or volunteer experience.

They also rank working during college more than 50% higher than they rank extracurricular activities and more than 60% higher than they rank college reputation or grade point average.

Get used to not being in control.

Different than marketing other kinds of services and products, when you are marketing a community, not only do you  have no control of any of the facilities, features or events, you don’t have control of the “manufacturing” process either.

In community destination marketing you spend as much time persuading local officials and visitor-related facilities, features and events to understand marketing as you do marketing to visitors.

The community’s brand (distinct personality) you will be sworn to protect and promote is influenced as much by the process of getting through the maze of highways, airports and means of transit needed to get to you as it is things like how easy it is to get around and the community’s overall appearance.

These are things no amount of quaintness or marketing alone can overcome.

Keep in mind that marketing is not as simple as fishing.

It is about helping people make the decision best for them, not just about proselytizing.  For every marketing action, there is also a downside.  Advertising is like “yelling at people” which if not very carefully used, is enough to turn people off.

For example, use a medium such as outdoor billboards and you turn off 7 people for every 1 who finds them useful.  Even Super Bowl ads, where the ads are touted mostly as entertainment, turn off 5 viewers for every 1 who finds them appealing.

Marketing is finding the sweet spot where the tactics you use have credibility and a high turn on to turn off ratio, such as earned media, sometimes still known as publicity.

Even there, the downside potential must be weighed whenever there is a temptation toward hyperbole to which the reality cannot measure up.

Good marketing is more than “me, me, me.”

A good product without good marketing is like “winking in the dark.”  You know you’re doing it but no one else will.  But marketing is also about understanding limitations.

Even the goal of “economic value-added,” which is at the core of community destination marketing, is subject to trade-offs.  A recent study of 2014 travel trends revealed that 88% of Americans will sacrifice other spending in order to take a trip including:

• 54% will cut nights out and related entertainment
• 48% will cut down on eating out
• 42% will cut down on clothes shopping
• 29% will cut down on buying gifts
• 23% will cut down on home improvements
• 18% will reduce charitable giving

Community destination marketing is a “pull” approach but marketers must recognize the “push” effect of tourism on residents making these reductions to travel elsewhere.

Even within a destination, areas such as arts and culture or sports can easily cannibalize another.  For instance, for more than a decade the proportion of the population attending popular concerts has hovered around 22%, including 5% of travelers.

Of this, 52.6% are attending rock concerts, 31.9% are attending country music concerts and 15.4% are attending R&B or Rap or Hip-Hop concerts.  All of the marketing horsepower in the world can move the needle a percentage point or two, but it will be at the expense of leisure dollars going to festivals and other cultural features.

The development of more facilities and programming has not been shown to change the mix of discretionary spending, only tradeoffs within a category.  The same holds true of spectator sports.

A destination is made up of many different silos, each desperately seeking a bigger share of the pie, but a community marketer must be sensitive to balance and what’s best for overall appeal.

Sometimes, the decision not to visit has nothing to do with competition from other communities.

At its essence, community destination marketing is about lowering barriers to a visit to your community by telling its story and then proving a platform for hotels, restaurants, stores and entertainment events to harvest their share using their own marketing.

But sometimes the barriers are more about what’s going on in people’s lives than it is about which destination to choose.  A recent vacation deprivation study revealed that 10% of Americans find they can never relax on vacation (I was always amazed at the number of people who called in sick after a vacation because they were exhausted.)

More than a third cancel or postpone trips due to something that came up at work, 24% find it a hassle to coordinate family schedules, but 44% either prefer to take cash instead or bank the days (most places no longer permit accrual because it shows as a liability on the books) ostensibly to cash them out later on, e.g. retirement.

If these young folks are still interested, then I get into what may be the biggest litmus test of all, ethical behavior.  By this I don’t mean just transparency, which is shown to have little effect on ethical behavior.  I mean the ability to do what is right in the face of powerful special interests or pressure from the news media.

The ability to treat others (including competitors and potential customers) as you would like them to treat you.