What Out-of-Home Advertising Still Gets Wrong About Customers
After two decades in out-of-home advertising, CEO John Murrow has a clear view of where the industry loses the room with advertisers.
TRAILHEAD MEDIA · CEO PERSPECTIVE
After two decades in out-of-home advertising, Trailhead Media CEO John Murrow has a clear view of where the industry loses the room with advertisers: leading with inventory instead of outcomes.
Sell the Outcome, Not the Face Count
Most OOH sales conversations start with what’s for sale — face count, impressions, geography. But the advertiser sitting across the table is thinking about something else entirely: driving store traffic, filling open positions, or shifting how their brand is perceived locally.
“The best sellers in our industry start with the outcome and reverse into the inventory. The rest start with the inventory and lose the room.”
It’s a philosophy that shapes how Trailhead approaches every advertiser relationship across its nine-state network — starting with what a business is actually trying to accomplish, not just what’s in the current billboard inventory.
Renewals Are a Relationship, Not Paperwork
Murrow also points to renewals as one of the most overlooked opportunities in the industry. Treating the months before a renewal as an active check-in — walking the inventory together, reviewing what a campaign delivered, asking what’s changing in the advertiser’s business — turns a renewal into a formality instead of a coin flip.
That same customer-first thinking runs through The Real Reason Trailhead Media’s Growth Worked.
Read the full piece from Trailhead’s CEO: “What the Out of Home Industry Still Gets Wrong About Its Customers” on johnmurrow.com.