Indications

I was out shopping, and came across this billboard:

Still preaching to the choir, I see...

So far, so normal. I've been seeing the Christian Aid Ministries billboards in and around the Seattle area for years. They wander like lost souls, looking for people to lead to someone's most recent attempt to plant a megachurch in the area. While the "Unchurched Belt" has shifted, Washington State is still a part of it (even if it perhaps rightly belongs in New England), and so given Christian Aid Ministries' tactic of placing "billboards around a number of highly populated cities in the U.S. and Canada. Anywhere [...] where people seem to be 'walking away from God and truth'," it makes sense that they'd still be trying to put butts in pews.

But what I started to notice is that there were a lot more of the billboards then was usual. As I noted, previously, they tended to wander around the area; appearing to do slow circuits of a given set of billboards around a given locale. Recently, however, it seemed that they, and the Pro-Life Across America billboards, were showing up in all of their usual places at once.

Again, I really didn't think much of it. After all, Donald Trump is starting a new term as President, and Evangelicals appear to see him as some sort of positive influence on the country; and so maybe this was what was afoot... A hope that an apparent shift towards the Republican Party (even though it didn't manifest around here) would result in more receptiveness to Christian messaging. Not what I would have recommended, but then, I'm not in advertising, so what do I know?

But then I cam across another billboard. This one, unfortunately, in a bad place for me to photograph it. It was advertising billboard space. And then another, and another. And it clicked. Perhaps what this was really about was a slump in outdoor print advertising, which allowed organizations like Christian Aid Ministries and Pro-Life Across America to buy up more than their usual number of billboards cheaply. Maybe I wasn't the only person who tended to pay little attention to billboards. I think the most common subject for billboards are the local Native American-run casinos, and I've been hearing recently (via Michael Lewis' "Against the Rules" podcast) that the rise of legalized sports gambling has been damaging their revenues. Sports betting is legal in Washington State, and so this may be playing into things.

It may, however, be the case that there is a more prosaic explanation... the technology economy hasn't been doing very well recently, and so potential advertisers are pulling back as their overall revenues shrink. Advertising dollars for billboards are, accordingly, drying up, and this is allowing less well-funded operations like religious groups to inhabit more of the space. If so, it would be just a another example of an economic indicator that's unintuitive on its face, but that points to useful information.

I don't have access to the numbers that would help substantiate that theory. So it could simply be a wild, and inaccurate, guess. But I will have to pay more attention to the billboards in the coming months, and see if it's borne out.