Prince Concepts

Prince Media Co - the beginning of Prince Concepts.

The project included starting, building, successfully monetizing and selling a billboard business.

Prince was based in NYC but also had locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Prince Media Co was started in February of 2010 and sold in August of 2015 to Lamar, the largest billboard company in America.

Billboards are real estate.

The same zoning laws that govern what can be built and how properties can be used also govern advertising signage.

In February 2010, during a month long trip to NYC to interview for jobs, I (Philip Kafka) began studying zoning laws, exploring the city - by bike - with a zoning map, and started working to build Prince Media Co.

The name of the company, Prince, came from the location of our first Lease: 49 Prince Street at Mulberry in NoLita.

After doing a deal with Mr. Sidney Rubell, we quickly obtained another location at Spring St and Greenwich St, far West SoHo. Now we had inventory. Time to make business.

We started working within the city's Department of Buildings, getting permits and making cold calls to market the locations.

After 100s of unreturned calls and e-mails, we got some action from the marketing director at the Museum of Modern Art.

They wanted a billboard for their design store at Spring and Crosby. Yes! Prince and Mulberry was sold to our first client, MoMA, for May and June of 2010 - my little idea was now making business.

Shortly thereafter, Corona beer contracted our Spring and Greenwich billboard and we were officially sold out our first summer in New York City.

For the first year, I worked alone. Scouting, negotiating, permitting and selling.

Then I was joined by Stephanie Casin. Stephanie ran the office, while I hit the streets - developing, selling and permitting.

From there, we began to work it, for real.

Between February of 2010 and August of 2015, we developed over seventy-five new sign locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

We wrote Leases, obtained permits, negotiated access agreements with neighbors, marketed the signs and built a company to support all these operations. It was fun. It was exciting. It was doing deals, meeting people, and trying to create value for everyone we worked with.

It's safe to say that in the 5.5 years that Prince Media Co existed, over 10,000 cold calls - seeking locations and clients - led to a lot of deals; how humbling and inspiring for it all to have paid off.

We did business across many different segments. With some great people and some difficult people. We always found a way to make everyone happy. We expanded. We worked with building owners to Lease spaces, cities for permits, advertising agencies and marketing departments to fill the space, architects and engineers to produce plans and Red Hook Signs (Local 137) to build and install the signage.

Liquor, fashion, lifestyle and entertainment companies kept our spaces full, but we also worked with local businesses and tech companies.

We worked to conquer. Coverage. Dots on the map - from SoHo to Chelsea, then to Harlem and back down to Chinatown.

We thought of expansion the same way classic graffiti artists (not the commissioned muralists of today...) think about "tags," we wanted to get somewhere - and mark it - before anyone else, and thereby create new opportunities for advertisers.

We loved side streets and took pride in developing smaller, focused and less expensive billboard opportunities that larger companies didn't understand...yet.

We put together a portfolio of landmark locations - mostly in SoHo - but we were just as excited about the diverse eccentric selection of smaller targeted signs that sat above our favorite restaurants or next to popular hotels.

For us, it wasn't about how many people saw our signs, it was more about who saw them. This strategy was a direct result of the way we ran the business - we took care of everything, so we saw everything.

We worked from the streets, not an office. This was our edge.

We didn't want to compete for the best locations, we couldn't afford to.

We wanted to give clients access to audiences others didn't know how to reach, and we could, because we knew exactly which bars, restaurants, parties and places were relevant.

This strategy took us to Brooklyn where charting unexplored "billboard territory" really helped us make a mark and distinguish Prince Media Co.

More importantly, we built a portfolio of advertising opportunities where clients could reach a more "renegade" consumer. We developed around our favorite destinations in Bushwick, Gowanus, Red Hook, and East Williamsburg.

As we pioneered, Leasing locations wasn't a problem - smaller landlords welcomed extra income; but convincing advertisers of the value in transitioning neighborhoods became the work; we loved this work. It pushed us to study and understand neighborhoods, to explore, discover and then be able to communicate the cultural value of sitting across the street from say, Roberta's in Bushwick before it was "Roberta's in Bushwick."

We were creating value, not buying it.

We expanded this philosophy to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

As an aside, discovering and creating value - instead of buying it - is what eventually led us to Detroit. More on that later....

We grew from an idea, to a couple of locations, to a business, to a small company, to a successful company. It was energizing, fun!

In just five and a half years, we developed over seventy-five sign locations across three major markets, worked with hundreds of international brands and finally negotiated and successfully sold the business to Lamar, a public company and the largest billboard company in the USA.

In the beginning, it was just me, Philip Kafka. As we grew, great people from all over joined and departed, here were a few of the key players:

Ian Rappaport - Sales (1.5 years)

Stephanie Casin - Management (4.5 years)

Byron Appel - Real Estate (1.5 years)

Allison Reynolds - Design (2.5 years)

We became known as the billboard company with the absolute best parties. Everyone we did business with was invited - and came! If you sang well on the street, you were invited to perform. If we liked your food, we asked you to cook. The line between friends, clients and service providers became very blurred.

In fact, I was having so much fun building the business, I never realized how hard I'd been working until we received offers to buy the company.

Our business was all about people, billboards were just the medium that induced a collaborative and productive spirit.

Beyond business, we always enjoyed working with friends and artists, posting billboards for their companies and projects, working to promote creativity and not just consumption.

We believe in billboards, so we used them, too.

Designing and posting ads for our spaces, but most importantly, having fun with it.

Our infamous "billboard cowboy" started showing up around the city. We wrote the copy based on an inspiring passage from the ancient Talmud. A short, simple line that inspired us, and also captured the way, we believed, one should use a billboard.

We began to play around some more and always took the chance to fill a vacancy with something fun.

I first visited Detroit in late 2012, after Prince Media Co was stabilized and running.

The goal: develop an extreme version of what we were doing in Brooklyn and do it in Detroit.

Find undervalued properties in areas people didn't think they should be going, understand which brands might want to advertise there, buy the property (instead of Lease it like we did in NYC) and develop signage where others thought there wasn't value. Carry the property with signage income until we evolve and are able to actually develop.

In 2012, during my first trip, I was young - 26 - I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a lot of energy and tenacity. I rented a car and drove and drove and drove and took down addresses and then went back to NYC and started calling property owners - everyone was shocked that I wanted to buy their property.

I visited Detroit twelve times before I bought my first property (more to come in KATOI --> TAKOI archive). In 2013 I started buying property and did the only thing I actually knew how to do - I tried to build their brand with billboards.

I did this by posting Detroit billboards all over NYC - the New York Times (and many others) covered the idea... I knew I was on to something with Detroit...and, billboards led me there.

Prince Media Co and the neighborhood specific approach to the billboards we developed helped birth a philosophy - create value, don't buy it. This attitude became a cornerstone in all our work.

Billboards don't belong everywhere, but when they go where they should, they become a visually interesting, vibrant and telling ingredient in an "urban soup".

With Prince, we always worked to understand what was around us and we developed signs that enhanced and worked with the surroundings. We studied and respected the "existing conditions."

With Prince, I learned to build a product and sell it. I faced a lot of rejection and developed tenacity. I started to enjoy navigating the difficult obstacles on the path towards creating value. I learned to negotiate and figured out how to have fun and make business, all at once.

Philosophically, creating value and not buying it and studying, understanding and respecting existing conditions are two of the most significant lessons this process taught me.

With Prince Media Co, our tagline was that "We Fill Blank Space," that has evolved into "We Make Space," with our current iteration of Prince Concepts.