Your Ad, Uh, Here

Southern California’s billboards are among the most pampered outdoor advertisements in the world. The low humidity and lack of subzero temperature extremes lend the glue on L.A.’s billboards a tenacity unheard of in, say, Chicago. Until it rains--or at least rains a lot. “Light rain won’t make the paper come down, but continual rain over a week will,” says Dash Stolarz, spokeswoman for the Eller Media Group, which maintains about 7,000 billboards across Southern California. “When the rain comes,” Stolarz adds, “we send people out to ‘ride the boards.’ They drive around and look at all the boards to make sure they’re not damaged.” As were these, captured after a recent deluge. While Stolarz reports the billboards suffer no ill effects from Santa Ana gusts, she concedes “they make those whirly things on top go crazy.”