There are so many things we take for granted we don’t even much think about them: they’re part of our daily life so we may not even really pay them much attention. For example, a billboard we pass on the side of the road, or the bar of soap we pick up to wash our hands.
What separates creative entrepreneurs from the rest of us is the ability to take those everyday things and come up with a way to reimagine them and make them better so they can reach more people. They’re generally the kind of innovations that engender a “Wow, now you come to mention it” response in the rest of us.
David Rollins, his Aura Ad Company puts billboards on taxis and ride sharing cars and thanks to the phone in your pocket he knows if you’ve looked at them
David Rollins is co-Founder and Director of Sales at Aura Ad Company, a south Louisiana ad agency that has a unique niche in the out-of-home advertising, or what we used to call outdoor advertising, space. Aura specializes in cartop digital billboards. That’s right, Aura puts digital signage on top of ride-sharing vehicles or taxis, then pairs the technology in its signs with the GPS technology that most people unwittingly enable on their smart phones, to get an idea of how many people are exposed to the sign and who, demographically speaking, those people are.
It’s a whole new type of advertising. And it’s particularly attractive to small businesses who may not have the budget to hire an ad agency or buy billboard space on the side of the interstate.
David is a Baton Rouge native and graduate of LSU, who was working in Austin doing sales for an IT firm, when he came up with the idea for Aura Ad and came home to Louisiana to launch it.
Chastity Sanders is Founder and Owner of Bathphoria, a company that sells all-natural organically sourced soaps and bath products. Chastity founded the company in 2019 because she was allergic to many of the soaps commercially available on the market, so she decided to create a line of her own, using non GMO materials.
Chastity Sanders, founder of Bathphoria, the designer soap that’s made it all the way from Baton Rouge to WalMart
Chastity is a native of Baton Rouge whose background and training as a certified pharmacy technician gave her a first-hand familiarity with the crossroads of chemical science and retail. Since her launch, Bathphoria has been featured on Walmart’s online platform and in national magazines, though most of Chastity’s sales come from pop up markets and local events.
Stephanie Riegel hosts Out to Lunch Baton Rouge at Mansurs on the Boulevard
Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. Photos by Erik Otts.