Billboards are well-regarded by advertisers for their giant size and great visibility, and that makes them equally attractive to vandals. In this Billboard Mastery podcast we’re going to review some methods that allow you to minimize vandalism to your sign and the inevitable graffiti that ruins your advertisement.
Episode 154: How To Minimize Vandalism Transcript
When it comes to vandalizing a billboard, when it comes to climbing up on it and spraying graffiti all over it, the epicenter, the biggest stakes on that in America all emanate from California. California is where you'll find people who will bravely climb 50, 60, 70 feet in the air with a can of spray paint to put graffiti over your advertisement, thereby rendering that sign worthless to the advertiser, causing you great expense to replace the advertisement, generally just ruining your day. And there's an army of people at any given moment with their can of spray paint wanting to do this to you. So how do you defend yourself?
This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast, where we talk about ways to thwart vandalism, and they really apply to billboards throughout America, not just those of California. So let's start off by saying that in most of America, people are kind of law-abiding, and in a lot of areas, interstate highways and places, suburbia, exurbia, even more rural areas, you don't see quite as much vandalism as you do in the big city.
And those who like to put graffiti on everything, they hit every bridge, they hit every boxcar on the train tracks. That tends to be an urban environment that really fosters that. But the problem is that's where most of the billboards are. So if you have a wooden billboard out in the country somewhere, the odds of vandalism are very, very small. In fact, I never had any on any of my rural signs. All of the big problems came when you were in the city's core, in the city center.
So not all billboards share this unique ability to have to worry about someone attacking the ad. But here are some givens you need to know that really are definitely true when you are in the urban center of town. Number one, building a billboard that you can reach from the ground is going to definitely get your sign covered in graffiti.
So if someone can simply walk up to the ad with a can of spray paint and spray paint graffiti on it, you know they're going to do it. So you have to have the sign high enough you can't just reach it from the ground. And I'm talking not just you yourself from the ground, but some other guy saying, "Hey, jump on my shoulders, and let's try and put graffiti on it." So what is that height? Well, typically, to feel safe from someone graffitiing it from the ground, the sign needs to be at the bottom of the ad face at least 10 feet off the ground. But even then, that's barely anything.
So it's even safer if you could be up to maybe 15 or 20 feet above the ground. But you definitely don't want to be too low. You would never want a billboard that was four feet off the ground because somebody's just going to wander up to them in the dead of night and spray paint on it. So we got to have signs that are high enough up.
The next given you have with a billboard trying to thwart vandalism is you cannot have a ladder that someone can jump onto from the ground to climb up to the ad face. That won't work for you. So you're going to have to eliminate the ability to get onto the ladder that goes up the sign from the ground in the absence of at least another ladder.
Most people roaming around wanting to spray graffiti on stuff, they don't wander around carrying a giant hook ladder with them. So when your guys go out to put the ad on the sign, when the electrician goes out there, well, of course, he's got a pickup truck with a ladder rack and a big old ladder on it. But most people don't carry that stuff. So that means, particularly in a place like Los Angeles, you have to cut the ladder off such that the ladder is of a sufficient height that nobody can just jump up, grab it, do a chin-up, and climb up the ladder. Or even though the fact that your ad is off the ground, it won't do it any good.
Now, some other ways you can also stop graffiti, and these are in areas of Los Angeles, for example, where it's the most prevalent. One thing you can do is to eliminate the catwalks on the sign because now there's no way that they can get up on that sign face and spray paint on it. So even if they're able to shimmy up the pole, there's nothing to stand on. There's no horizontal platform that they can go to spray paint on it.
Now, this wasn't really possible back in the olden days when signs were hand-painted. You had to have the catwalks for your own painter to access things from. But in a vinyl world, you only have to really put the vinyl on from the back. So it would be possible to have a sign in downtown Los Angeles with no catwalks on it because that way, no one has anything to stand on to cause the graffiti.
And you can also erect barriers to stop people from getting to the sign to begin with. If you have a very, very valuable sign in kind of an urban jungle environment, you could put a whole bunch of barbed wire and stuff at the base of the sign to block people from even getting to the sign. In some cases, that's absolutely essential because if you don't have some barrier for them to get on it, then they're going to find some way because they have infinite time on their hands to figure out a plan. What some operators do is they'll actually have a swinging steel plate with a hasp on the pole, and they'll put this swinging steel plate over the ladder so there's actually nothing to climb up.
All there is is the smooth contours of the monopole, and then a rectangular solid block of metal with no rungs to climb up on. That's another way you can handle things like that. The bottom line is when you've got a sign in more of an urban environment, you've got to think through in advance, "How am I going to block someone getting up to this to cause mayhem?
What do I have to do to stop people from putting graffiti on my sign?" And the combination of how high you put it off the ground on the front end, your configuration of catwalks, the configuration of ladders, and then what you do to block access, even the most extreme case, putting things over ladders, removing catwalks, barbed wire all around the base. That can literally make the difference between a costly attack of graffiti and having a peaceful, happy experience with a sign, even in a very urban environment.
This is Frank Rolfe, the "Billboard Mastery" podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.