No Lawyer in America Has Their Face on More Billboards Than This Guy
These days, billboards feel like a delightful throwback to a time when advertising was simply telling you to buy something. Sure, most people would rather see a picturesque view than a bus-sized bottle of Grey Goose, but at least they stay in their lane (pun unavoidable). They’re not tracking you every time you pick up your phone and then selling you whatever an algorithm has decided is the most likely sale to make to someone with your specific spread of fears.
One classic bit of billboard content is the smiling, besuited lawyer — staring down like an hourly-billed, benevolent guardian angel, hoping you’ll remember their face in case you ever slip on a patch of ice in front of a public library. Now, do they actually work? One man that sure seems to think so is a lawyer in Alabama named Alex Shunnarah, whose face is plastered around the area with a frequency that rivals Big Brother. In fact, he's referred to as the “Billboard King,” which, while I’m sure he’d prefer the nickname “Really Good Lawyer,” certainly gives him assurance that people are seeing them.
How many billboards, exactly? According to an interview with Business Alabama, Shunnarah’s face appears on over 2,500 billboards peppered across the American Southeast. Forget a recognizable lawyer, his face is now basically a recognizable part of the geography. (His billboards even have their own Facebook fan groups.) To help you understand just how many billboards that is, if you were to distribute them equidistant from each other across his native Alabama, you would never be more than roughly 10 miles from a Shunnarah billboard. Even Shunnarah himself has made videos making fun of how many billboards he has.
As you might expect, he’s also omnipresent in the form of TV ads, only adding to what I imagine must be a haunting feeling that Alex Shunnarah is behind every door in Alabama. There are probably Aztec gods pictured less frequently within the walls of Tenochtitlan than Shunnarah is featured amongst the civilization of Alabama.
Will he ever stop?