Mobile Billboard Firm Moves to Camarillo

A company that started as a college class project and grew into a nationwide billboard concern has moved from Long Beach to Camarillo.

Transit Display Network Inc. was born in 1986, when its founder and president, Tom Holm, was assigned a term paper for a marketing class at Cal State Long Beach.

In the paper, Holm suggested using local delivery trucks to display advertising posters, thus offering advertisers constant exposure in closely defined areas.

“My instructor not only liked the idea, he even told me he was sure he could line up investors who would back me if I started such a company,” said Holm, 31.

The firm, then called Transcom Advertising, began as a service to advertisers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area but now places its 6-by-12-foot posters on trucks throughout the country.

Its clients have included Walt Disney Studios, HBO, Chrysler and Re/Max Realtors, Holm said.

Besides extolling trucks as an advertising medium, Holm has great faith in them as freight carriers.

“We run campaigns in New York, Houston, Chicago--everywhere. The most efficient way to get the posters to those places on time, we’ve found, is to load them onto a truck and tell the driver where to deliver them.”