Indoor Digital Billboards in Holly Ridge & Surf City, NC

Market Notes

Two Towns Keeping Two Different Clocks

Holly Ridge and Surf City sit about five miles apart on the same short run of road between US 17 and the beach, and they could hardly be less alike. Holly Ridge is a mainland Onslow County town that spent the 2010s as one of the fastest-expanding places in North Carolina — its population grew by roughly 228 percent over that decade, second only to one other municipality in the state, and it has continued adding residents at around six percent a year since the 2020 count of about 4,200. That is permanent growth: subdivisions, school-run traffic, commuters, and an industrial park sitting on the ground the Army once used for Camp Davis, the anti-aircraft artillery training base that closed in 1944.

Surf City is a different animal entirely. It straddles the Pender and Onslow county line, occupies the middle of Topsail Island, and stretches back over the Intracoastal Waterway to meet the highway. Its resident population is smaller than Holly Ridge’s, but from May through August the number of people on the island multiplies several times over. Run a campaign here in July and you are talking to renters, day-trippers and second-home owners. Run one in January and you are talking to the people who will still be here in July.

The eight placements deliberately straddle both. Three sit at the Holly Ridge end near the highway junction, four sit on the Surf City side, and one falls between them. The advertisers who get the most out of this corridor are the ones with something to say to both audiences — roofing and HVAC, dentists and urgent care, self storage, property management, and the restaurants that need year-round residents to carry them through the shoulder months.

Type Breakdown

Food, Sport And One Auto Shop

Six of the eight are places you eat or drink: four restaurants, one cafe and one sports bar. That skew is honest to the corridor — food service is what a beach-adjacent economy runs on. The other two are a general-listed venue and an auto service shop, and the auto shop is the outlier worth noticing.

Eight venues is a corridor buy rather than a metro buy. Priced and scheduled the same way as everything else on the network — see the billboards page for formats and rates.