Introduction
Founded in 1902, Lamar Advertising Company (Nasdaq: LAMR) is one of the largest outdoor advertising providers in North America, with more than 315,000 displays across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. As its digital billboard network and data volumes grew, Lamar needed a more scalable, automated data warehouse on Microsoft SQL Server. With WhereScape RED, the company re-engineered its core data warehouse, accelerating reporting for digital displays and creating targeted business solutions for stakeholders across the organisation.
Pre-WhereScape Challenges
- Aging, fragile warehouse: The existing SQL Server data warehouse, built by former staff, was functional but increasingly difficult to manage and extend.
- Scalability issues: As data volumes grew, especially from digital billboards, overnight jobs struggled to complete in a timely manner.
- Data integrity and documentation gaps: Hand-coded processes were poorly documented and hard to trace, increasing the risk of errors and making change management difficult.
- New digital initiatives: A project to upgrade billboard software meant richer files and more granular play-log data, further stressing the legacy architecture.
Why WhereScape?
Lamar needed a faster way to re-architect its warehouse than untangling and fixing thousands of lines of legacy SQL and procedural code. WhereScape RED offered a way to generate SQL Server objects automatically, standardise design patterns, and self-document the environment. Instead of patching the old system, Lamar chose to rebuild with WhereScape, gaining a consistent, flexible platform for future data marts and reporting solutions.
“We used WhereScape RED to reengineer the existing data warehouse and have also used it to create several new data marts to address specific business needs.”
– Jude Robert, Director of IT Operations, Lamar Advertising
The Solution
Re-Engineering the Core Warehouse
Lamar used WhereScape RED to re-engineer its company-critical Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse. Rather than trying to repair undocumented stored procedures, triggers, and message queues, the team rebuilt the warehouse using WhereScape-generated stored procedures and standardized patterns.
Handling Digital Display at Scale
The Lamar Digital Display (LDD) application captures play-log files from more than 2,000 digital billboards. Every creative change on a screen generates a row of data: image, time, and duration. Play logs from each billboard are sent daily to corporate IT, producing millions of records and around 25 million rows of raw data for aggregation. With WhereScape, Lamar created a detail fact table with 90 days of play logs and an aggregate fact table for all-history analytics.
Consistent, Self-Documenting Architecture
WhereScape RED’s automation generates stored procedures and keeps metadata and lineage current. This self-documenting capability means Lamar can easily trace fields back to sources and manage changes without hunting through outdated code. Change management now happens through controlled, repeatable processes in WhereScape.
Building Targeted Data Marts and Dashboards
Using WhereScape RED, Lamar built multiple point solutions, including proof-of-performance marts, an A/P portal, the Lamar Training Library, and an account executive portal. These are surfaced via Tableau and Excel pivot tables, giving stakeholders better access to out-of-home and digital campaign performance metrics.
The old system we had in place could take up to eight hours to process the Lamar Digital Display data. It now takes 1.5 hours since our new process and architecture developed with WhereScape was put in place.”
– Jude Robert, Director of IT Operations, Lamar Advertising
Results
🚀 Major Performance Improvements
- The previous process for Lamar Digital Display could take up to eight hours to complete.
- With the new WhereScape-based architecture, the same data now processes in about 1.5 hours, despite significantly more digital assets.
- The four-terabyte SQL Server data warehouse now scales more effectively as new digital boards and formats are added.
🚀 Better Reporting and Analytics
- Proof-of-performance reporting across 2,000+ digital billboards and millions of play-log records.
- A dozen targeted data marts feed dashboards and analytics for sales, support, and executives.
- Tableau visualisations highlight outliers and key business trends, improving campaign and inventory decisions.
🚀 Lean, Productive Development Team
- A core team of two developers, with one focused mainly on BI, manages and extends the warehouse.
- Standardising on WhereScape RED as the development platform simplifies onboarding—new team members learn RED and can contribute quickly.
- Less time is spent tracking down legacy code or relying on outdated documentation.
🚀 Reliable, Future-Ready Platform
- Self-documenting processes improve reliability and reduce operational risk.
- Lamar’s SQL Server data warehouse now underpins current and future targeted solutions, including expanding digital and transit advertising analytics.
- The company plans to roll out Tableau to roughly 800 account executives, further extending the value of the data platform.
“Lamar is now able to provide much better reporting and analytics to our stakeholders. New insights are also enabling us to identify new business opportunities.”
– Jude Robert, Director of IT Operations, Lamar Advertising
Scaling a Digital-First Out-of-Home Business
Lamar’s network includes more than 315,000 advertising displays, with 144,000+ billboard faces, 2,000+ digital billboards, 40,000+ transit displays, and 130,000+ interstate logo signs. As advertisers demand more granular proof-of-performance and near-real-time insight, Lamar’s data warehouse must keep up with rapidly growing digital out-of-home data, creative rotations, and impression-level logs.
Proof of Performance at Enterprise Scale
The Lamar Digital Display application demonstrates how WhereScape supports high-volume, time-sensitive workloads. Daily play-log files from each digital billboard are ingested, aggregated, and prepared for reporting that shows customers exactly when and where their creatives ran. This transparency builds trust and strengthens relationships with local businesses and national brands, as they can see they got exactly what they asked for.
Enabling Business Agility
Beyond digital displays, Lamar uses WhereScape RED to power targeted solutions such as A/P portals, training data marts, and executive reporting. With faster delivery cycles and consistent architecture, IT can respond quickly to new business questions, helping the company uncover new revenue opportunities and optimize inventory.
