Today, the business marks its 70th anniversary, seven decades of building its handiwork into the landscapes we inhabit.
“It’s a very good feeling,” owner Nick Keyes Sr. said in an interview with the Dayton Daily News.
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
He estimates Key Ads and its subsidiary businesses control some 2,000 billboards along the Interstate 75 corridor from Kentucky to Lake Erie.
As of the week prior to April 11, 89.6% of adults who live in Montgomery County traveled by at least one of the digital billboards in the Key-Ads Digital Network, according to Nielsen ratings, a statistic Key Ads shared.
The company’s digital signage network include about 50 substantial digital signs across Ohio, about 20 of them owned directly by Key, such as the Dayton “Gateway” on U.S. 35 as motorists approach downtown.
“It’s a great medium,” Keyes said. Billboards can stand alone or complement other types of advertising.
The idea behind outdoor advertising isn’t complex: It is routinely visible, seen in the same place each morning as motorists drive to work and each evening as they return home.
“Repetition builds reputation,” as Keyes put it.
Keyes learned to post billboards when he was 15, hiring a 16-year-old to drive him around, pulling ladders out himself, weeding and mowing around billboards and more.
It was work. It was an education. And it was fun.
“Fortunately for me, we didn’t have any really tall, big billboards at that time,” he said. “They were all the smaller ones that you see around town, called ’8-sheet posters.’ There are lots of them. That was my dad’s primary business.”
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
Key-Ads Inc. was founded in 1955. World War II veteran Ed Keyes rented a building on Gettysburg Avenue to build signs. “Some guys learned they wanted nothing to do with it,” Ed’s son, Nick Keyes Sr., recalled.
But the younger Keyes was hooked. He bought the company in 1979 when he was 27. From ’79, he built the business, acquiring larger signs, bringing his three sons — Nick Jr., Stephen and Joseph — in over the years. He also has two daughters, an attorney and a teacher.
Building the “Dayton Gateway” digital sign in 2009 involved more work than Keyes perhaps anticipated. There was initial push-back against the proposed location.
“It turned out by doing all these things, going to meetings ... it became the best project we had ever done to date,” Keyes said.
Though the business has national reach, Dayton itself remains the firm’s “heart and soul,” he said. “We are very much still a local business.”
Clients have included familiar names such as Price Stores, Peerless Mill restaurant, local television stations and more.
Growth has been steady. In 2013, the business said it had 700 billboards in 21 counties along Ohio’s western border from Butler County to Lucas County.
At the time, it had captured about a third of the Dayton region’s billboard market.
“It’s a wonderful business, and we love it,” Keyes said.
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
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