Billboards are massive and immovable. As a result, once they’re built, they’re built. Since the cost to move a billboard – even an inch – is thousands of dollars at best, it’s important to understand some simple tricks to make sure you’re not making a mistake in sign placement and construction. And that’s what we’re gong to explore in this Billboard Mastery podcast.
Episode 112: It’s Too Big To Guess Transcript
There are some things in life you can finagle. You can squeeze them, they're malleable. You can push them into certain situations where they don't really exactly fit, but you can get the job done. You can make it happen. You can squeeze that sofa cushion that doesn't really fit on that sofa into the position and over time, as people sit on the cushion, it will somehow ultimately conform to the shape that it really wasn't intended to be. But that's not true of billboards.
This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're going to talk why you can't just morph and push around giant 10 and 20 and 30,000 pound objects. And since you can't move them, it would cost you thousands of dollars if you even legally could move it over an inch, a centimeter. The different steps you can take to help ensure that you don't have those kinds of problems, let's start off with the location of the billboard.
Now, when it comes to location, there are some things that are absolutely set in stone. You can't push them around. For example, setback. The setback of the sign typically is going to be measured from the edge of the right of way, although sometimes the law will be by the edge of the street service itself to the front of the sign. And by front of the sign, it means the farthest forward part of the sign, including the catwalks in most states. Now, if you get audited on the setback and you are off by 1/1 millionth of an inch, what happens? Well, your sign's illegal. You may have to take it down. You do not dare mess with setbacks, whether it's front setback, side setback, or in rare occasions, even rear setback.
So how do we make sure we don't get in trouble for that? That would be terrible. Build that giant sign and find out that you are an inch too close to the right of way or to the street. On that one the best thing to do is, number one, make sure you know exactly where that setback line is. And number two, go a little farther back than is required because there's no penalty to being if the setback is 10ft, there's no penalty to being 11ft or 12ft. And that may give you a little extra peace of mind as far as where the right of way is. If you need to, you may have to have a survey or mark it for you or at least put in a lot more effort to figure out where the right of way actually is.
Just because there's a fence there that doesn't mean that's where the right of way ended. Sometimes a property owner put a fence where they weren't supposed to in either direction, too far into their property, too far in front of their property. But you got to nail down those setbacks because the law is very unforgiving. It's not like the sofa cushion. You can't just squeeze it to fit. You have to make sure your setback is correct. And the best thing to do on setbacks is simply that. Go a little farther back.
Now, remember, the farther back you go though, the farther your sign will be from the street. But if you really look at it visually a few feet, no one is even going to be able to figure that one out. So I would suggest to you maybe better off when it comes to setbacks just to go a little farther back. I would think it'd be very foolish if it's a 10 foot setback to be 10ft to the bazillionth of an inch from the right of way to the front of the sign. Give yourself a little more comfort than that.
Next, let's talk about the height of the sign. This is one item that many people make a mistake and they make the mistake because of either ignorance or laziness. One of those two factors, because you can visually see what the sign will look like well before it's ever built. But it will require one of these two items. Number one was called a flagging pole. You can buy them at surveying companies. It's a fiberglass pole. And you pull out these sections, typically 5ft long, and then you turn them and they snap into position. And flagging poles will typically take you... They make flagging poles that go 35, even 45ft in the air. Now, they're not sturdy and they sway in the wind to some degree. But the whole point of the flagging pole is to allow you to see real life, real time, what that height looks like. It will require two people to do this now. You'll have to have one person to hold the pole, preferably not you. And then one person drive the car, preferably you. And I would take pictures of them the entire time. I would not do it just one time, eyeballing, because you may have second doubts yourself. If you get that flagging pole in position, you get out on the highway and you drive that sign in both directions, taking lots of photos or even videos of it.
That is going to show you where the bottom of the sign is. Because most signs bottoms are 35ft off the ground. Now if your sign is going to go higher than that though, that flagging pole may not cut it for you because you can't just guesstimate at what a 70 foot tall billboard looks like from a 35 foot flagging pole.
So now I'm going to have to put out a little extra cost. I'm going to have to get what's called a skyhook crane. That's the lightest load crane that's out there on the market. And what you'll do is now we need a fiberglass tape measure which you can buy at any Home Depot, and an old red rag of some type. Even a T-shirt will do. And here's how it works. When the crane gets there, you have them let out on the boom, which is that ball on the metal piece, the total height of the sign as far as the panels that will go on the sign.
So let's say your sign is 14 by 48. So you're going to have him let off 14ft and you're going to tie a red rag on where that 14 foot point is. The ball of the crane is the lower part of that, what the sign would look like. And then the red flag is the top. Now you have them raise that unit in the air to whatever height the sign is supposed to be. So if it's a 70 foot tall sign, it's 14ft. Well, what does that tell us then? That means we're going to go up, what, about 56ft from the ground of the ball.
Those fiberglass tape measures typically are 100ft in size. You should probably never need one longer than that. You repeat the exercise now. This time you don't need a second person with you. The crane operator sits on the crane. Now you get out of the road and you drive it back and forth. Take lots of photos, lots of videos. So you have that as your permanent record. And now guess what? When you build a sign, it will look just like what you saw on your photos and videos. It gives you incredible peace of mind. There's no longer any guesstimate on it.
Now I was lazy a couple times I didn't go through the exercise because I didn't want to. Maybe the weather was bad or for me normally what really scared me was I didn't like going out in chest high weeds, particularly in floodplain areas, all kinds of spiders and snakes and stuff.
So I just kind of eyeball it and say, oh, yeah, I think this will work. But one time I really screwed up. I built a sign that was blocked. About a half of the sign was blocked by the roof of a church nearby. There's some very strange angles that happen when you look at things from long distances. And remember, most billboards, you're trying to read them from 500 or 1000ft back.
Hold up your thumb. If you hold your thumb up against a giant skyscraper and you have your thumb real close to your eye, your thumb is bigger than that skyscraper visually, right? So that's the problem. There's all these parallax angles, and you can't ever really guesstimate what you have going until you properly flag it. And that doesn't even include all the obstructions out there. Tree lines, power lines, other signs.
You have to make sure you've got plenty of room to navigate those too, because the last thing you want to do is build a sign that you're all excited about and have it permanently ruined from blockage, because now you can't even rent the sign.
The third area that we don't want to guess at because we can't fix it is, in fact, when they go out to build the sign, what the overall height ultimately is. Because billboards have very, very thorough engineering. You needed the engineering to get your permit to begin with. But also, there's too many forces at bay not to have good engineering.
And you'll see in the engineering that the pole is going to be a certain depth based on the height of the sign, all done by a structural engineer. It's 100% accurate. But here's the problem. When you give that plan to the guys to go out and build the sign, what do they do? Well, let's assume they're drilling the hole, but, hey, they want to get over to Wendy's because they want the Baconator. So what do they do? They don't go as deep as you're supposed to go. They're supposed to put the thing in the ground 12ft. But by gosh, if they don't hurry up, they're going to miss lunch special. So they're going to go ahead, and instead of going 12ft, they're going to go 11. And the end result is your sign is going to be one foot too high. And now we go back to the same problem as we had on the setback, which is the state is not going to be very happy with that or the city, whoever governs that sign.
They're not going to say, that's fine. You almost had it right. Just a little fudge off a little bit. No, no, no, no. They're going to say, oh, my gosh, if you're off even by an inch. Oh, my gosh. You got to take the sign down. Now, remember, just like said back, though, there's no punishment if you're shorter than what the height was supposed to be. I once built a sign out of an area. It was very competitive. And one of the people that I guess didn't get the deal, they turned me in, claiming my sign was too high. And I got a letter from the state saying they were going to audit me. They were going to survey the height of my sign. I was absolutely terrified because I didn't really know for sure that the sign was the correct height. Lo and behold, at the end of the movie, I was so insanely lucky. It turned out I was literally like an inch shorter than it needed to be. I don't think I would err only an inch. If that engineering calls for that sign to be 13ft deep. I would probably make sure that hole is 14ft deep if it were me.
Now, how do you do that? Get your fiberglass tape measure and then just drop the thing down the hole while they dig it. Don't trust them. It's trust but verify. You can trust them to the point that you know, hey, they can probably build the sign. Okay, but verify what they're doing. And again, this is one like the setback that there's no forgiving. You're either there or you're not. So you need to be there when they drill the hole.
The rest of the fabrication process, not so important. I wouldn't want to be there when they set the V of the sign. That's when they put the giant pole into the hole before they cement it in, because you can't ever fudge that either as far as the angle of the V to the street. But the angle of the V to the street typically isn't going to get you in trouble, like being too tall might be. And you'll be shocked how many of the guys that build those signs who are more than happy to not do what the engineering says if it's more convenient for them, and that could always be a big issue for you in the end.
The bottom line is that signs can't be moved. You can't go over in the dead of night. You can't get out a shoehorn and move it over a couple inches. But if you use good forethought, if you follow the rules I just told you, then you shouldn't have those problems.
This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.