Government Affairs

Trade Association

An organization associated with the outdoor advertising industry came to us with an important challenge. They needed a more compelling argument for what they instinctively believed: outdoor advertising serves as a catalyst for small businesses and local economies.

We immediately embarked on an exhaustive data collection and cleansing effort to document and quantify, by political jurisdiction, the direct link between billboards and businesses that advertise on them.

We analyzed more than 1,000,000 billboard advertising transactions, correlating information about each advertiser with information in the iMapData Library and other well-vetted sources. We developed an entity resolution tool to more quickly analyze miskeyed or improperly formatted data.

We then designed a web-based tool that allows users to create compelling economic impact reports from this data. For any state or local political jurisdiction they can immediately show:

1. The number of local businesses benefiting from outdoor advertising
2. The number of employees benefiting from outdoor advertising
3. The average number of employees per local business advertising outdoors
4. The location of each business on a map

All information is contained on one page so that it can easily be distributed and digested.

iMapData empowers users to:

• Convincingly demonstrate the role of outdoor advertising in city, county, metropolitan, and state economies
• Persuasively portray the industry as a catalyst for local economies and, by extension, the U.S. economy
• Effectively counter misinformation and political pressure to ban billboards or refuse to rebuild those destroyed by natural events
• Be well positioned for the future with a flexible solution that can easily be adapted for changing needs.

iMapData facilitates an effective form of advocacy based on the intelligent analysis and compelling visualization of quantitative data.