Allvision’s Greg Smith Gives His Side Of The Santa Clarita Situation
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Greg Smith, CEO, Allvision, New York, says following his return from London where he was traveling when we wrote about the brouhaha underway in Santa Clarita last week.
“To begin with, we’ve had a contract with the L.A. County Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro) for several years, and were hired to find ways to reduce the number of boards and get more revenue.
“We’ve been looking at this whole scenario, examining the best ways to deal with the situation, the financial conditions, the whole picture. Some 30 or 40 of the existing boards border people’s backyards and are on a 30-day or 24-hour agreement.”
Allvision offers consulting, development and management services to municipalities and public agencies that maximize their revenue from real estate assets through the implementation of sponsorship and advertising based community network initiatives
“We’ve been in business about 14 years,” says Smith. “We manage some 3,000 billboards across the country. We don’t operate the boards. We have hundreds of contracts. We arrange the locations and then usually companies like Clear Channel Outdoor or CBS Outdoor or another company builds the actual boards (or has them built) and handles the advertising. Sometimes we’ve arranged the building of the boards, too. The point is that we’ve unlocked more value for many landlords and outdoor companies.
“We’ve found three good locations for the digital boards on the freeways at the edge of the city of Santa Clarita. It seems counterintuitive to me that Clear Channel and CBS aren’t talking to us right now. We work with them in other cities, and they know that they can get much more revenue from digital screens.
“We think it’s better to work with the current incumbents on the existing boards, but we have no obligation to either of them and are open to all options.”
“Clear Channel and CBS know this. We’ve talked to them in the past and so I’m rather baffled by the fact that they haven’t talked to us about the opportunities the new digital billboards we recommended offer. I don’t see the logic.”
Smith also says that, although they may have done so, to his personal knowledge, Clear Channel and CBS haven’t asked for compensation such as that provided to local firm Edwards Outdoor Advertising.
We asked Smith about the alleged harassment by Allvision and a company it worked with to stop people from gathering signatures to have City Council to rescind the agreements and stop the removal of the static boards or to hold a referendum regarding same.
“It’s not true,” says Smith. “We haven’t harassed or threatened anyone. If there was any fighting, it was between the people hired to gather signatures – which we believe was arranged by the California State Oudoor Advertising Association – because they were paid a lot for each signature and so were competing to get them. We understand that they were very aggressive.”
What bothers Smith is that people were getting misinformation about what was being done, he says. Regardless, apparently enough signatures have been gathered so that either there will be a special election regarding this topic or it will go on a ballot at the regular election scheduled for November – or the City Council could repeal the actual ordinance. A decision is expected on that either this week or in early July, as the Council meets every two weeks.
“The problem is that people haven’t been given the right information,” reiterates Smith.
We mentioned to him that a number of small businesses had joined together to protest the removal of the local signs as well.
“Because of the way things stand, we haven’t been able to proceed on this, but we have a whole package set up through our entitlement with City Council for the local advertisers, that includes a marketing budget and rates for local advertisers on the digital boards.” he says. “It will be affordable. However, we can’t really talk to them it to them until this is settled.”
“All we can do is educate everyone concerned and try to clear up the misinformation that’s out there.”
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