The Silent Legend That Is Jim Spore
by Nick Coston, OOH, DOOH, pDOOH Professional; Industry Writer
You work in this industry long enough, you make a lot of friends. Most come and go, but there’s always a few you never forget, even after you stopped working with them long ago.
Jim Spore was one of those friends. He was also one of the great pioneers in outdoor media buying that most of you never heard of. But you knew his billboards and their contribution to our industry. All you had to do was drive around in your car. You couldn’t miss Jim’s impact from 2001 through 2022, even though he retired in 2006.
He was employed at Geico for 36 years, 15 of which I had the pleasure of working with him on print and OOH advertising. We traveled together, ate out often, golfed, and had some wonderful conversations. We had our best talks at 6:30 in the morning, when he would be arriving into work and things were quiet and contemplative.
In 2001, when I got into OOH, Geico was ramping up its billboard buys. We were his biggest vendor at Clear Channel Outdoor, but when he wanted to buy markets that weren't covered by us, we happily referred Jim to our favorite regional reps at Adams, Lamar, and Outfront. In 2004, Jim started making what were called “100-level showing buys” all over Florida, all over Maryland, and all over Virginia. He expanded north into New York and surrounding states. Quietly, from his cramped little cubicle in the corner, Jim was faxing us six-figure contracts five and six at a time every quarter.
Jim was also a pioneer in riding all these markets where he was buying before the copy was posted. And that wasn’t just an area sampling. He wanted to see every single location. Several times a year, we would go away for a week and ride with our local reps. Sometimes we would bring along a second Geico marketing person for when Jim got a little overwhelmed. The extra rider followed Jim’s protocol of seeing every billboard, rating each 1 through 10.
I named it the “Spore Score.” Hardly any locations received 10s, but because we did our jobs so meticulously, there were hardly any rated under 6. If they were, we found alternatives. And that entire time, outdoor media buying was just one of Jim's gigs while working at Geico. And that didn’t kick into high gear until the end of his career.
The billboard program Geico built into a juggernaut helped spawn three advertising agencies and an intricate local agent program. At the height of Geico’s OOH spending around 2019, they were the No. 2 individual largest OOH spender in the United States. In fact, Jim appeared in a long-running Geico motorcycle TV commercial, cruising by the camera on a curve as the last shot rolled. An avid Harley-Davidson rider, he was in all black, helmet pulled down. Unless he told you, nobody knew the identity of that masked rider. He wore many hats in his years at Geico.
All of this started 20 years earlier by a guy carrying four other marketing positions. Running the burgeoning OOH program was a side gig for Jim, but not for me, not for David from Outfront, Elaine from Adams, or Kim from Lamar. He made us into OOH stars without breaking stride, allowing us to have great sales careers. Mine lasted until 2020 with the last 10 serving as one of Geico’s OOH buyers.
So when I heard Jim died last June, it caught me off guard and made me sad and reflective. He was a spry 77-year-old. Most of us on the sales side of the industry didn’t know about his passing until earlier this week, thanks to an alert from Elaine, now retired from Adams. One of the photos in this piece was from my wedding in 2005. I invited Jim and his lovely wife Sharon. I didn’t invite the ad director, I didn’t invite the VP of marketing, I didn’t invite Warren Buffett.
But I made damn sure that I invited Jim Spore.
Nick Coston has been in the advertising industry for over 35 years. He’s worked at newspapers, magazines, OOH/DOOH companies, programmatic platforms, and ground-breaking ad tech companies, including Washingtonian, Washington Times, New Republic, USA Today Weekend, Clear Channel Outdoor, and The Neuron and Hypercell. He’s also spent 10 years buying OOH for a top 10 national advertiser. Nick resides with his family in Dayton, Maryland. He has been musing about the Outdoor Media industry for over five years.
What a great tribute and a great OOH story to be told!