Outdoor advertising in Los Angeles: what runs, who sells it, what Metro allows, and what third parties publish on cost

Los Angeles out-of-home inventory is roadside billboards from Lamar, Clear Channel Outdoor and OUTFRONT, Metro buses sold by OUTFRONT and Metro rail sold by Intersection under two 2018 contracts, JCDecaux's concession at LAX, and the widest set of moving formats in this archive: car tops, wraps, LED and hologram trucks, in-car screens. The archive holds 192 photographed Los Angeles campaigns.

Los Angeles is the market where the vendor map is most often written down wrong. The transit authority sells its buses and its trains through different companies, the airport concession is not held by the operator a marketplace names, and the most expensive corridor in the region is in a different city from the one whose code most people cite. This page is the Los Angeles row of the archive behind this site: 192 photographed frames from 44 brands, grouped by format and checked one by one, then each inventory owner on the owner's own page or Metro's, the rules Metro and the city publish, and every third-party rate range for the market with its retrieval date. The category is explained on out-of-home advertising; this page is only about Los Angeles.

What has actually run in Los Angeles?

Every frame is a photograph of a live campaign in Los Angeles County. Captions are brand, city, format and year as the archive records them. Nine frames that passed the manifest filter were dropped after inspection, including two photographed in the Coachella Valley and one in Anaheim that the manifest had filed under Los Angeles.

Digital car tops

Wrapped vehicles carrying tops

LED and hologram trucks

In-car screen

Who owns the inventory in Los Angeles?

Each row was read on the owner's own page or on Metro's or LAWA's on September 14, 2026. Nobody in the table publishes a rate. Rows are in asset order.

Two of these rows contradict a marketplace page that was read the same day. AdQuick's Los Angeles page states that OUTFRONT holds "all rail, bus, and station advertising in the Metro system" and that Clear Channel Airports holds LAX exclusively. Metro's own page names Intersection for rail and stations, with a named contact, and the two contracts were awarded on one board file in January 2018 with different guarantees. LAWA's concessions list names JCDecaux Airport Inc, and Clear Channel's own Los Angeles page talks about Burbank. Where a marketplace and the authority disagree, this page follows the authority. The concession mechanics, unit sizes and window rules are on bus advertising.

Lamar's Los Angeles page is unusually specific for a billboard operator: 14 digital faces on six freeway arteries, an exclusive on junior posters across two counties, and sales offices at Hollywood Burbank and John Wayne airports. Clear Channel's is specific about reach rather than units, 85% of the DMA monthly and 26% weekly on freeway displays, citing Geopath. Neither figure is checkable against a unit count, and neither page carries a price.

What rules change what can run in Los Angeles?

Metro's policy is one of the more detailed transit content codes in the country and it was revised three times between 2023 and 2024. The city's parked-vehicle rules are the ones that touch moving formats. Both were read in the primary text.

Three things in COM 6 are easy to miss. The commercial-only rule is tested on four factors, including whether the sale of products is "the primary source of the advertiser's total annual revenue", so a nonprofit's ad is judged by what it sells, not who placed it. The alcohol rule is about imagery, not category: a beverage event can be advertised so long as no container or act of drinking is shown. And the window rule fixes the perforation ratio at 50/50 and keeps the front window bare, which is a more precise specification than most authorities publish. The Sunset Strip, where the priciest published faces sit, is in West Hollywood, whose sign code is not the LAMC. The national format-by-regulator table is on transit advertising.

What do third parties publish on Los Angeles cost?

The ranges below are market-level figures compiled from publicly published vendor and industry sources. They are not quotes, and they are not the rates of any single network, including the operator whose campaigns the archive on this site documents, which prices per campaign and does not publish a rate card. Always get a written quote before budgeting.

The spread is widest on digital and on wallscapes. Blue Line's digital bulletin runs $6,500 to $24,000; AdQuick's runs $3,500 to $15,000, a floor almost half as high and a ceiling well below. Blue Line's wallscape stops at $150,000; AdQuick's Sunset Strip spectacular goes to $200,000 or more. AdQuick's own two pages give two floors for a static bulletin, $4,500 on the Los Angeles page and $3,000 on the national one. business.com names Los Angeles as an example of its top tier rather than pricing it, and its Sunset Boulevard figure is a CPM, not a rate. Blue Line's face counts by road are inventory it resells, not the market's. None of the four states a method; the three operators that own the boards publish nothing.

How is delivery counted in Los Angeles?

A face on the 405 is priced on Geopath impressions: traffic counts, a visibility adjustment, the people modelled to notice it. A car top on Santa Monica Boulevard or an LED truck outside Crypto.com Arena is counted by the route the screen travelled and how long it stayed in each place. The structural difference, without any multiplier attached to it, is set out on how out-of-home impressions are measured. Blue Line's and AdQuick's Los Angeles pages both publish impression figures per format; they are the publishers' own and are not repeated here.

What this archive can say about Los Angeles is which formats have run here. Each cell is the number of documented frames of that surface or carrier photographed in the market.

Reflects campaigns documented in this archive; absence is not evidence of unavailability. Counts are photographs, not campaigns or units, and a frame tagged with two surfaces is counted under each.

Los Angeles is the only market in the archive besides New York with a golf-cart screen, and one of three with a hologram truck. It has no fixed spectacular; the golf-cart frames were left off this page because the brand tag is the venue rather than an advertiser. The full matrix across all 21 markets is on the campaign archive.

This page exists because Los Angeles passed a four-part gate: at least twelve verified frames photographed in the market, the transit authority's advertising policy read live, at least two named third-party rate sources for the market, and a real row in the format-by-market matrix. Markets that fail any part do not get a page.