the attorney.
Sticking to our script, our Knoxville lawyer walked into the auctioneer’s office just before noon, dressed in a cheap, unpressed suit and scuffed-up shoes. Cummings was sitting there in the lobby with his lawyers, and thinking they would have no competition they had yet to submit an offer. When they realized that this scruffy-looking guy was walking past them to submit a competing bid, they panicked. After a flurry of activity between him and his team, Cummings scribbled down a number, stuffed the paper in an envelope, and handed it to the lawyer for the estate.
A few minutes later the bids were unsealed. Sure enough, Cummings had offered $50,000. He had lost by $300 to Turner Advertising of Atlanta and he was stunned. He called me later that afternoon screaming bloody murder. He told me he’d pay me $110,000 for the business—
doubling
my money in a matter of hours. I let him know that I was serious about the Knoxville market and wouldn’t sell to him for anything less than $250,000. He said that was too rich for his blood and he passed. Once we took ownership I sent Peter Dames to Knoxville to run the company and he turned things around, expanding the business from three hundred signs to four hundred. We had a lot of fun competing with Cummings and quickly became a serious player in the Knoxville market.
Our business was hitting on all cylinders and I was really in my stride. Outdoor advertising wasn’t the most glamorous business but we did manage to be creative. I remember one time when a marketing person at Coca-Cola declared that billboard advertising was old hat and that they were going to redirect their dollars into television. They were one of our biggest customers and probably had about a hundred signs in Atlanta alone.
By coincidence, around the time they made this announcement, rumors were circulating that Coke was considering moving its headquarters to New York. Their executives vehemently denied this but the stories wouldn’t go away. That gave me an idea. I went to our creative department and told them to draw up a simple billboard design that said, “Goodbye Coca-Cola, We’ll Miss You!” I figured this would stir up some controversy and when it did, it would prove to Coca-Cola that people really did pay attention to billboards! Our lawyer at the time, Tench Coxe, convinced me that this was not a good idea. We argued about it and even though we’d already had several signs printed, those boards never did go up. (The lawyer was probably right. Coke never did leave town and they remained great clients of Turner for the next forty years.)
We continued to grow our billboard, but I wanted to expand into new lines of business. By the mid-1960s, outdoor advertising was increasingly under attack. While her husband was president, Lady Bird Johnson actively promoted a variety of environmental initiatives. One of the most high-profile of these was the Highway Beautification Act, which called for the banning of billboards from all federal highways. The billboard business had taken off during the 1950s when the federal highway system was built and losing these signs would be a devastating blow to Turner Advertising and the entire billboard industry. As it turned out, the law as it eventually passed was watered down significantly. It continued to allow signs in commercial and industrial areas along the highways and offered compensation to companies whose signs were removed.
Still, this pressure at the federal level, combined with constant threats from local municipalities, made me think I didn’t want all my eggs in the billboard basket. At the same time this legislative pressure was building, more and more advertisers—like Coca-Cola—began to see television as more glamorous than outdoor signs. I was trying hard to stay focused on the road ahead and to me it seemed pretty clear that the medium with the brightest future had to be television.
Looking around the industry I found two companies
Sticking to our script, our Knoxville lawyer walked into the auctioneer’s office just before noon, dressed in a cheap, unpressed suit and scuffed-up shoes. Cummings was sitting there in the lobby with his lawyers, and thinking they would have no competition they had yet to submit an offer. When they realized that this scruffy-looking guy was walking past them to submit a competing bid, they panicked. After a flurry of activity between him and his team, Cummings scribbled down a number, stuffed the paper in an envelope, and handed it to the lawyer for the estate.
A few minutes later the bids were unsealed. Sure enough, Cummings had offered $50,000. He had lost by $300 to Turner Advertising of Atlanta and he was stunned. He called me later that afternoon screaming bloody murder. He told me he’d pay me $110,000 for the business—
doubling
my money in a matter of hours. I let him know that I was serious about the Knoxville market and wouldn’t sell to him for anything less than $250,000. He said that was too rich for his blood and he passed. Once we took ownership I sent Peter Dames to Knoxville to run the company and he turned things around, expanding the business from three hundred signs to four hundred. We had a lot of fun competing with Cummings and quickly became a serious player in the Knoxville market.
Our business was hitting on all cylinders and I was really in my stride. Outdoor advertising wasn’t the most glamorous business but we did manage to be creative. I remember one time when a marketing person at Coca-Cola declared that billboard advertising was old hat and that they were going to redirect their dollars into television. They were one of our biggest customers and probably had about a hundred signs in Atlanta alone.
By coincidence, around the time they made this announcement, rumors were circulating that Coke was considering moving its headquarters to New York. Their executives vehemently denied this but the stories wouldn’t go away. That gave me an idea. I went to our creative department and told them to draw up a simple billboard design that said, “Goodbye Coca-Cola, We’ll Miss You!” I figured this would stir up some controversy and when it did, it would prove to Coca-Cola that people really did pay attention to billboards! Our lawyer at the time, Tench Coxe, convinced me that this was not a good idea. We argued about it and even though we’d already had several signs printed, those boards never did go up. (The lawyer was probably right. Coke never did leave town and they remained great clients of Turner for the next forty years.)
We continued to grow our billboard, but I wanted to expand into new lines of business. By the mid-1960s, outdoor advertising was increasingly under attack. While her husband was president, Lady Bird Johnson actively promoted a variety of environmental initiatives. One of the most high-profile of these was the Highway Beautification Act, which called for the banning of billboards from all federal highways. The billboard business had taken off during the 1950s when the federal highway system was built and losing these signs would be a devastating blow to Turner Advertising and the entire billboard industry. As it turned out, the law as it eventually passed was watered down significantly. It continued to allow signs in commercial and industrial areas along the highways and offered compensation to companies whose signs were removed.
Still, this pressure at the federal level, combined with constant threats from local municipalities, made me think I didn’t want all my eggs in the billboard basket. At the same time this legislative pressure was building, more and more advertisers—like Coca-Cola—began to see television as more glamorous than outdoor signs. I was trying hard to stay focused on the road ahead and to me it seemed pretty clear that the medium with the brightest future had to be television.
Looking around the industry I found two companies
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