Roadside Attraction

I’ve been scaling my media biz. Like, literally. I am—for seven seconds in a rotating loop—a billboard. Or at least an image of my face is—and by face, I mean the one made for radio, and by radio, specifically The Drive 95.5 FM, which I host from 3 to 6 pm, weekdays.

As a concept, the billboard predates the advent of the ever-shrinking American attention span. Ancient Egyptians carved public notices into stone—arguably the first “out-of-home media buy.” By the 1830s, ur–Mad Man Jared Bell was plastering New York City with oversized posters to hawk circus acts like Barnum & Bailey, thus inventing what we’d recognize as the modern billboard. These were large, loud and impossible to ignore. Which is to say: not much has changed.

My particular incarnation—glowing over Rohnert Park in crisp LED glory—lasts roughly as long as a TikTok clip, but bigger. A lot bigger. It’s a sideways, 48-foot-wide by 14-foot-tall social media post. It’s what multinational ad and PR firm Publicis Groupe’s Rishad…