At highway speed, a billboard gets a handful of seconds to work. Dan Levi has spent much longer thinking about those seconds: who is passing, what they can absorb, why a message stays with them, and how an advertiser can know whether it mattered. His subject is one of advertising's enduring canvases. His toolkit belongs to the present - mobile data, programmatic systems, audience analytics, dynamic creative and artificial intelligence. The interesting part is the seam between them.
Levi is executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Clear Channel Outdoor Americas. He arrived in 2015 with a brief to advance digital integration, partnerships and sales strategy. The title can sound corporate. The job is tactile. A billboard begins with land, steel, permits and a sight line. It may be a fixed vinyl face beside a freeway, a changing digital screen in an airport, or a building-sized display in a city center. Each one occupies an actual place. Levi's work has helped add a second map on top of that physical one: the movement and behavior of audiences.
A career built inside changing screens
Levi's route to roadside media ran through nearly every screen that preceded it. He worked in advertising, then spent more than a decade in marketing at MTV. In 1995, the network sent him to Singapore to help launch MTV Asia. India mattered to the expansion, and he later lived in Bangalore for three months to get the business moving. This was media globalization before a platform could publish everywhere at once. Distribution, local habits and partnerships had to be learned market by market.
That period also set a personal pattern. Levi and his wife lived in Southeast Asia for five years. They had already taken an adventurous honeymoon in Cambodia in 1993, traveling at a moment when the country's tourism infrastructure was sparse. Decades later, they marked their 30th anniversary in Antarctica. His travel stories contain a mix of preparation and surrender: a feather pillow pressed into a suitcase, a dedicated case for every charger, and a belief that a difficult journey can still become a good story.
“I travel to experience our business where it happens, so that I can do my job better.”Dan Levi
The same curiosity appears in his work. After MTV came senior roles at WWE, Monster Worldwide and Zoom Media. By 2008, his attention had settled on the intersection of digital technology and location-based advertising. At Captivate, whose screens reached people in office elevators and other place-based settings, he led marketing, research, programming and creative. He worked to connect that inventory with programmatic exchanges, changing content and mobile engagement. A screen in a building was becoming part of the same buying and measurement conversation as a screen in a browser.
He then started Levi Media Advisory, a firm built around media, advertising, technology and marketing. Founding a company had been a long-held ambition. Yet Clear Channel Outdoor offered a larger version of the problem he had been circling: could a physical medium absorb digital capabilities without losing the properties that made it distinct?
His decision to return to corporate life says something about the scale of that problem. Clear Channel did not need a cosmetic digital layer. It needed a way to make its inventory intelligible to marketers trained by search, social and mobile advertising, while serving businesses that still bought a familiar corner because they knew the neighborhood response. Levi described the opportunity as a personal and professional challenge he could not resist. The appeal was the unfinished bridge: creative talent and physical reach on one side, a fast-changing technology ecosystem on the other. An adviser could recommend the crossing. Inside the company, he could help build it.
The Levi attention map
From selling structures to understanding journeys
Outdoor advertising once sold a fairly intuitive proposition. Put a clear message where many people will pass it. Location, traffic and creative carried the explanation. Digital buyers became accustomed to different questions. Which audience saw an ad? What did those people do later? How did one channel contribute alongside the rest of a campaign?
Clear Channel's RADAR products brought those questions into the physical world. Mobile location data could help planners understand the audiences moving around displays. Campaign measurement could examine outcomes after exposure. The conceptual shift was from the structure alone to the consumer journey around it. A billboard near a store might be useful, but proximity was only a rough stand-in for behavior. The better question was whether the right people moved through that place and what happened next.
“We're just bringing that into the physical world.”On applying the mobile data ecosystem to outdoor media
This did not turn a billboard into a giant web banner. Physical media has different economics and constraints. A standard roadside bulletin is 14 feet by 48 feet. New construction can begin around six figures. A sought-after site can change hands for much more. Rent may cost a local advertiser hundreds of dollars or a national buyer hundreds of thousands, depending on the format and market. Landlords, land use, sight lines and content restrictions all matter. Digital screens add flexible scheduling and more inventory, but they remain attached to one coordinate.
What one outdoor campaign must connect
Creative occupies a brief, unforgiving part of the system. Levi's description of an effective billboard is plain: quick, well designed, clean, and easy to understand, with enough wit or surprise to lodge in the brain. A media plan can find an audience with precision. It cannot make crowded copy readable from a moving car.
The human limit on automation
Levi is enthusiastic about tools. He calls himself a tech nerd. In 2025, Clear Channel described using an AI-assisted workflow to cut roughly 15 hours from each creative request. His public reaction was practical: if a tool makes work smarter, faster and more effective, refusing it would make little sense.
His enthusiasm carries a boundary. Outdoor advertising is local. Clear Channel has teams on the ground working with customers whose businesses may depend on one market and, sometimes, one sign. Automating too quickly can weaken the relationships and contextual knowledge that make the system work. Levi's version of modernization places software around human judgment rather than over it.
The distinction becomes clearer in a creative workflow. Software can route a request, collect the right inputs and remove hours of administrative drag. A person still has to decide which thought deserves the six words a driver may see. Measurement can compare outcomes and reveal a weak execution. A team still has to understand the brand well enough to make the next version better. The point of saved time is not simply a faster queue. It is more room for the choices that require taste, context and a conversation.
He applies that belief by traveling. He averages about two work trips a month and visits local offices to understand what salespeople and customers need. The journey is research. A national summary can report performance; a branch visit explains why a pattern exists. His five years in Southeast Asia offered an early education in that distinction. A market is not merely a smaller copy of headquarters.
Moves to Singapore to help launch MTV Asia, later working from Bangalore on the India business.
Focuses on digital media, technology and location-based marketing in out-of-home advertising.
Leaves Levi Media Advisory to become Clear Channel Outdoor Americas' chief marketing officer.
Receives OAAA's L. Ray Vahue Marketing Award of Merit.
Joins a new national council supporting Big Brothers Big Sisters alumni and champions.
Recognition, then responsibility
In 2025, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America gave Levi its L. Ray Vahue Marketing Award of Merit, an honor created in 1979 for contributions to the industry's marketing aims. The award fits his visible work: helping out-of-home advertising explain itself in the language of contemporary media without hiding what it physically is.
His industry responsibilities extend beyond Clear Channel. He serves on the boards and executive committees of OAAA and Geopath, the independent audience measurement organization for out-of-home media. He is also a board member of the National Summer Learning Association. In 2026, he announced that he had joined the inaugural National Alumni & Champions Council of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.
Mentorship, in Levi's telling, is built from time and care. He credits encouragement, guidance and presence from others with shaping his own path. That emphasis is consistent with his view of marketing. Systems matter, but their value appears through people: the local seller who understands a customer, the creative team that removes one more word, the mentor who makes an opportunity visible.
There is a neat temptation to treat Levi's career as a march from old media to new. The chronology is messier and more useful. MTV Asia required local judgment. Digital advertising required new evidence. Billboards require both. A message still has to meet a person in a place. Technology can clarify the encounter, price it, schedule it and study its effect. It cannot supply the reason to look.
Levi works in that remaining gap. It is only a few seconds wide, somewhere between the road and the screen, intuition and proof, a good location and a good story.
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