Clear Channel Outdoor today announced a partnership with Rainbow Labs, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit serving LGBTQ+ youth, in which students participated in a structured workshop series and produced original out-of-home (OOH) billboard concepts centered on Pride themes. The program, disclosed on June 15, 2026, placed young people directly inside the creative production process - from initial concept development through to visual execution - giving them exposure to the fundamentals of professional advertising work.

The initiative sits at the intersection of two persistent pressures in the advertising industry: demand for more authentic community engagement and a broadening conversation about who gets to shape public messaging. For marketers who work with outdoor inventory, the program offers a concrete example of how OOH formats can function as vehicles for community investment rather than pure commercial inventory.

How the workshop program worked

According to Clear Channel Outdoor, the collaboration with Rainbow Labs was structured across several virtual and in-person sessions held in Los Angeles. Students were introduced to the mechanics of out-of-home advertising starting from scratch - concept development, copywriting, typography, visual hierarchy, and layout - before moving into the production of actual campaign ideas.

Daniel Herrera, Corporate Art Director at Clear Channel Outdoor and the creative professional who led the sessions, described the initial atmosphere in a blog post published on June 9, 2026, on the Clear Channel Outdoor website. "Like many creative sessions, our first meeting started quietly," Herrera wrote. "As we began discussing Pride and what it meant to them, the students gradually opened up."

The early workshops used word association exercises and group discussions to establish shared vocabulary around identity, belonging, joy, and self-expression. Those exercises were not decorative warm-ups. According to Clear Channel Outdoor, they served as the generative foundation from which campaign language eventually emerged. The distinction matters practically: the phrase that became the central campaign idea did not arrive from a brief or a creative director's prompt, but from the students talking to each other about what Pride meant to their lives.

Herrera noted in the same post that the program deliberately discouraged competitive individual work. "Early on, we established that this wasn't a competition to see who could create the best billboard on their own," he wrote. "Instead, we focused on building ideas together." Students who gravitated toward writing worked alongside those drawn to illustration, typography, or visual design - a structure that mirrors how professional creative teams actually function.

One session was specifically devoted to the technical properties of billboard advertising as a format. According to Herrera, a key early lesson was that billboards operate under constraints that almost no other design format shares: "Billboards are seen in seconds, not minutes. You have a brief moment to communicate an idea, which means clarity matters." Students learned to compress complex thoughts into public-facing messages capable of resonating with audiences who encounter them from a moving vehicle or a busy street corner, with no opportunity for a second read.

The "Keep Sparkling" concept

The strongest concept to emerge from the workshops centered on the phrase "Keep Sparkling." According to Clear Channel Outdoor, the language developed organically from student conversations about themes of shimmering, maintaining light during difficult times, and the desire for a message that felt hopeful rather than declarative.

"They described wanting a message that felt hopeful and encouraging," Herrera wrote, "not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for anyone who might encounter the campaign." That dual intent - legible to a specific community while remaining accessible to the broader public audiences a billboard necessarily reaches - is a genuine creative challenge in OOH advertising. A message that speaks only to one group risks feeling exclusionary in a medium that is, by definition, shared. One that speaks too broadly risks losing specificity and emotional weight.

The students resolved that tension by building a system rather than a single phrase. According to Clear Channel Outdoor, variations including "Sparkle Your Way," "Sparkle Together," "Sparkle Brighter," and "Sparkle All Day" developed from the original idea. Each version articulated a different dimension of the underlying concept: individuality, community, optimism, joy. The final visual system paired those phrases with vibrant rainbow graphics and typography across billboard and transit shelter formats.

The work appeared as rendered mock-ups on Clear Channel Outdoor inventory in Los Angeles, including digital billboard placements and a transit shelter panel photographed in what appears to be the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco, based on street and signage visible in the published images. The transit shelter version used a green background with the phrases "sparkle" and "together" stacked vertically alongside the rainbow graphic and a secondary tagline reading "sparkle with pride."

Rainbow Labs: the nonprofit context

Rainbow Labs was founded in 2020 by Jacob Toups and Luis Vasquez to address challenges specific to queer and gender non-conforming youth in Los Angeles. The organization runs after-school programming - both in-person and online - for LGBTQ+ youth between the ages of 12 and 18, structured around mentorship from LGBTQ+ adults.

The scale of the population Rainbow Labs addresses is significant. According to the organization's own data, 10% of youth in California schools - more than 600,000 students - identify as queer or gender non-conforming. Within the juvenile justice system, that figure rises to 15%, or approximately 13,000 young people. The organization also cites data showing that 39% of queer and gender non-conforming youth seriously considered suicide in the previous year, and that the group is five times more likely to have attempted it compared with their straight peers.

Rainbow Labs operates programs across several formats: a Storytelling Lab, an Accelerator program, and a Youth Council through which participants serve as advisors to the organization's staff and board. According to the organization, youth in the council contribute to decisions about programming, recruitment, and community needs from October through June each year.

That organizational profile matters for understanding what the Clear Channel Outdoor partnership was actually connecting students to. The program was not simply a design workshop open to young people generally - it was a structured opportunity offered to LGBTQ+ youth who were already participating in mentorship programming designed around their specific circumstances.

What Herrera's account reveals about the creative process

The blog post Herrera published on June 9, 2026, is more candid about the experience than a standard press announcement would be. He described the program as personally significant, noting that he grew up in Los Angeles and did not come out until his early twenties. "Being able to work alongside LGBTQ+ youth who were exploring their identities, expressing themselves creatively, and finding community at a younger age felt both inspiring and hopeful," he wrote.

That personal dimension shaped how he led the workshops. Rather than prescribing what Pride should look like in advertising, the sessions encouraged students to begin from their own experiences. According to Herrera, some students connected Pride primarily to visibility and self-expression, while others associated it with chosen family, acceptance, or belonging. The campaign system that resulted reflects that multiplicity - there is no single master message, but a set of related phrases that different people can enter at different points.

Herrera's account of the typography and font work is also instructive. The sessions included time spent examining typefaces, discussing visual hierarchy, and exploring how design decisions affect how a message is received. For students who had no prior exposure to professional creative work, those sessions were their first look at how a concept moves from conversation to finished public-facing material. "For many of them, this was their first opportunity to see how professional creative work is developed from an initial idea into a public-facing campaign," Herrera wrote.

Clear Channel Outdoor's corporate context

Clear Channel Outdoor is the largest out-of-home advertising company in the United States by reach. The company's portfolio spans digital billboards, transit advertising, and airport inventory across American markets. As PPC Land has tracked, Clear Channel is currently undergoing a significant ownership change: in February 2026, Mubadala Capital and TWG Global agreed to a $6.2 billion take-private transaction at $2.43 per share - a 71% premium to the company's unaffected closing price of $1.42 on October 16, 2025. That deal is expected to close by the end of Q3 2026, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval.

PPC Land's coverage of the acquisition noted that digital revenue represented 42.1% of total consolidated revenue during Q3 2025, up from 39.4% in the same period of 2024, reflecting the company's accelerating shift toward digital inventory. In 2026, US out-of-home ad spend is projected to reach $4 billion, up 4.1% year-over-year, with digital out-of-home growing at 14.5% - though that growth rate is decelerating from prior years.

The company has also pursued non-revenue applications of its inventory. In May 2026, Clear Channel Outdoor and Maricopa County launched a third consecutive year of a public-health campaign using donated digital billboard inventory to direct Phoenix-area residents to heat relief resources. That campaign generated an estimated 220 million impressions across the county at no cost to taxpayers.

The Rainbow Labs partnership belongs to a different category of community engagement - one focused on talent pipeline and creative education rather than donated inventory for public-service messages. But both programs deploy the same underlying asset: access to large-format public media.

Why it matters for the marketing and advertising community

The advertising industry has had sustained conversations about diversity in creative teams and authentic community representation in campaigns. Those conversations have produced a body of evidence about the commercial stakes involved - not only the ethical dimensions.

Research tracked by PPC Land from LG Ad Solutions published in September 2025 documented that 85% of LGBTQ+ Americans were more likely to watch accurately representative content, compared with a range of 70-85% across other diverse demographic groups. The same research found that 55-70% of respondents paid more attention to advertising they considered representative. Those figures give media buyers and creative teams a quantified rationale for programs that invest in authentic representation.

The mechanics of how authentic representation gets produced are less often examined. Creative programs that bring community members into the production process - rather than consulting them at the end or relying on internal teams to represent them - address the gap at the source. The Clear Channel Outdoor and Rainbow Labs model is one structural answer to that problem, though it operated at small scale and over a limited timeframe.

For agencies and brands that place OOH inventory with Clear Channel Outdoor, the program also raises a practical question: what does it mean when the media owner is directly shaping the creative development pipeline for underrepresented communities? The company's position as both the media platform and, in this case, the creative partner is unusual. In standard OOH transactions, the media owner sells space and the advertiser supplies creative. Here, Clear Channel Outdoor's creative team ran the workshops and developed the campaign concepts alongside the student participants.

The OOH market's performance data adds further context. Research from Keen Decision Systems released in October 2025 found that OOH advertising achieves a $7.58 marginal return on investment - outperforming many saturated digital channels, including search and social. As OOH continues to attract more budget share from national brands, the creative talent that produces OOH work becomes more commercially significant. Programs that introduce young people to OOH-specific creative skills - the particular constraints of large-format outdoor advertising - may have an impact on the quality and diversity of that talent pool over time.

Clear Channel Outdoor operates across a very large installed base. The company holds media contracts at 55 commercial airports in the United States, has recently extended its presence with a 10-year, $1 million LED display deal at Omaha Eppley Airfield, and secured a multi-year exclusive media contract with CapMetro in Austin covering more than 400 buses across 71 routes and 10 rail stations as recently as January 2026. That footprint means campaigns developed through community programs like the Rainbow Labs partnership can, in principle, be placed in front of genuinely large and diverse audiences - not only in the neighborhoods where students live and work.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Clear Channel Outdoor, the largest out-of-home advertising company in the United States, partnered with Rainbow Labs, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit founded in 2020 that serves LGBTQ+ youth ages 12-18 through after-school mentorship and programming.

What: A structured series of virtual and in-person workshops in which LGBTQ+ youth participated in the development of original Pride-themed billboard campaigns. Students learned OOH advertising fundamentals - including concept development, copywriting, typography, and visual storytelling - and produced a campaign system built around the phrase "Keep Sparkling," with variations including "Sparkle Your Way," "Sparkle Together," "Sparkle Brighter," and "Sparkle All Day," rendered in vibrant rainbow graphics across billboard and transit shelter formats.

When: The workshop series took place prior to June 9, 2026, when Clear Channel Outdoor's Corporate Art Director Daniel Herrera published a detailed account of the program. The partnership was publicly announced on June 15, 2026.

Where: The workshops were held in Los Angeles, the home market of Rainbow Labs. Rendered billboard mock-ups and transit shelter placements appeared across Clear Channel Outdoor inventory, with at least one transit shelter panel photographed in what appears to be a San Francisco neighborhood.

Why: Clear Channel Outdoor described the program as part of its ongoing commitment to community engagement. The initiative introduces LGBTQ+ youth to careers in advertising and creative fields while producing Pride-themed public creative that reflects participants' own experiences and perspectives. The program arrives as the OOH industry faces persistent questions about who shapes public messaging, at a moment when research consistently shows that diverse audiences pay measurably more attention to advertising they consider authentically representative of their communities.