Easter is over, so why is the billboard still up?

Easter is an odd religious celebration. Odd because the dates move around quite a bit. At the Council of Nicea in 325 the date was established as the first Sunday following the first full moon following the vernal equinox. As a result it can fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25.

In 2012, Easter Sunday was April 8th as the billboard above notes. Now that is not all that remarkable, but I took this photo on April 17th.

Why was this billboard still up a week and half after Easter? There could be a couple of reasons.

1. The client, Purdy's may have purchased the placement for the period after Easter.
2. The billboard company, Pattison, has not sold the billboard space for the subsequent block of time.

Either situation does not make much sense. The benefit for Purdy's, given the products they are promoting on the billboard, pretty much ends on April 8th. And for Pattison, the fact that old billboards are still up tells me that they have not sold all of their available space. If I'm a media buyer and I see this billboard up it tells me that I can negotiate a better price because Pattison has some excess inventory available.

I have found one method that Pattison uses to mitigate this problem. Quite logical and one that will be the subject of a subsequent post.