Indoor Billboard Advertising in Southport and Oak Island, NC

The Market

Two Towns, One Waterway, Two Different Audiences

Southport and Oak Island are treated as a single market here because the geography makes them one. Southport sits at the mouth of the Cape Fear River; Oak Island is the barrier island immediately west, across the waterway. About 4,150 people live in Southport year-round and roughly 9,600 on Oak Island — an island figure that has climbed some fourteen percent since the 2020 census and is still adding around two and a half percent a year.

That growth is the fact most advertisers underweight. Brunswick County was the fastest-growing county in North Carolina between April 2020 and July 2024, adding about 33,000 residents for a 24 percent increase, according to the state demographer; the county has more than doubled since 2004. A meaningful share of the people who will see a screen here next season did not live here five years ago. They have no dentist yet, no roofer, no insurance agent, no restaurant they always go back to. Very little of this local market is locked up, which is unusual and worth moving on.

The seasonal layer sits on top. Visitors spent more than a billion dollars in Brunswick County in 2022, sixth among North Carolina’s hundred counties, and travel and tourism directly employs over five thousand people locally. The sharpest single spike is Southport’s N.C. Fourth of July Festival, which draws forty to fifty thousand people into a town of about four thousand. Two ferries feed foot traffic through Southport year-round — the state-run Southport–Fort Fisher crossing and the passenger boat to Bald Head Island out of Deep Point Marina. Southport also carries a steady trickle of location tourism that inland towns its size never get: A Walk to Remember, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Dawson’s Creek, Under the Dome and Safe Haven all filmed here.

So the buy splits cleanly. To become the default provider for a household that just moved in, run year-round across the restaurant and brewery rooms on both sides of the waterway. For seasonal capture — rentals, charters, tours, beach retail — concentrate on the weeks either side of the Fourth, when the resident-to-visitor ratio inverts entirely.

Running a Campaign Here

Pick a Side, or Take the Waterway

The most common mistake in this market is treating it as one beach town. Oak Island rents out to visitors; Southport is where the year-round households, the ferry queues and the film-tourist wandering are. Which five or six venues you take should follow which of those two you are actually selling to.

• Year-round household services — weight toward the six Southport-side rooms
• Rentals, charters and beach retail — add the five Oak Island placements before June
• Brand launches — take all eleven through the run-up to the Fourth of July

No rate card appears on this page because the figure depends on venue count and how long you run; the current structure is on the billboards page. If you run a restaurant, bar or shop on either side of the waterway and want a screen in your own room, the venue partner programme installs one at no cost to you.