As CEO, Sean Reilly leads Lamar Advertising Co. with an adventurous spirit and an emphasis on maintaining a community-focused attitude among employees.
Lamar is one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in America. And as Business Reports details in its latest Executive Spotlight feature, since succeeding his brother Kevin Reilly Jr. as CEO in 2011, Reilly has led the company through tough times while maintaining focus on fostering growth.
“The hardest period I’ve gone through as a CEO was the Great Recession in 2008,” Reilly tells Business Report. “It was a tough time for everybody, not just outdoor advertising. We had to manage the company through the rough times including layoffs—that was the most difficult. We came out stronger than we went in, and today we are in a great place.”
His next big challenge: managing growth and leading the way into a new era of outdoor advertising.
Reilly has managed to stay ahead of Lamar’s competition by focusing on new technologies like solar panels and 3-D printing, while also eyeing new markets to organically grow the company’s presence in airport advertising.
Since taking the reins of Lamar, Reilly says the outdoor advertising industry has gone through significant changes, most notably the breakthrough in digital technology.
“In 2005, we deployed the first digital billboard ever at I-10 and College Drive, and now we have over 2,500 digital billboards. I could take a photo with my iPhone and have you in front of 60 million eyeballs in about five minutes,” he says. “It was really cool.”
Reilly says Lamar integrates everything customers do socially on their iPhones into outdoor campaigns, including integrating Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts.
“After we perfected the business model, lots of other outdoor companies adopted it. And you know, if you do get out front, customers will take note,” Reilly says. “We want to be known as being very creative. Again, if our customers can dream it, we want to be able to make it happen for them in a really big, real way, and that is fun.”
Read the full Executive Spotlight Q&A. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:
What is the next challenge you have planned for Lamar?
We are managing growth. We just bought five big markets: Cleveland, Seattle, Memphis, Des Moines and Reno. These are new markets for us, so we have to integrate them. We have to bring the Lamar way of doing business to those communities. That is the challenge we face, and we are up to it. We’ve done it before—our business model is proven and time tested.
