OOH Today’s Stat of the Week – Powered by StreetMetrics
The Out-of-Town Crowd Hiding Inside Your Market
In a few famous neighborhoods, most of the people driving and walking past billboards aren’t from around here.
The Stat This time last year, more than 2 in 5 people who saw a billboard near Nashville’s Lower Broadway lived more than two hours away. That’s more than double the share on billboards elsewhere in the Nashville area. Times Square and the Las Vegas Strip drew out-of-towners at nearly twice the rate of their surrounding areas. Chicago’s Magnificent Mile drew them at about one and a half times.
The Insight When you look at a city as a whole, its visitors get lost in the average. But they aren’t spread out evenly. They cluster in a handful of districts, and in those spots they make up a big slice of the people seeing ads. This was true on ordinary weekdays, not just holidays, and Thanksgiving week looked about the same as any other week. A couple of details stood out. In Chicago, the out-of-town crowd was thickest a little off the shopping strip, near the hotels. In Las Vegas, billboards far from the Strip picked up visitors too, because they sit on I-15, the main highway in from Southern California.
The Takeaway If you own billboards near a district like Broadway or the Strip, you’re selling access to out-of-towners, not just locals. Pitch that directly to hotels, airlines, restaurants, attractions and live entertainment, especially heading into holiday travel. It works the other way too: billboards farther from downtown reach mostly locals, which suits a car dealer or a neighborhood clinic. The same city can be two different audiences, depending on where the board sits.
“Out-of-towners” are people whose home is at least 150 miles from the city center, roughly a two-plus-hour drive, based on where they spend their evenings. Visitors staying in a hotel for several nights can get counted as locals, so the real out-of-town share is likely higher. Source: StreetMetrics measurement of who saw billboards, weekdays in mid-November 2025.
StreetMetrics is a partner with OOH Today
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