From Paper Maps to Agentic AI: A Conversation with John Hollingsworth (Clear Channel Outdoor)

John Hollingsworth from Clear Channel Outdoor explores the evolution of cartography, from paper maps to dynamic cloud-native visualizations. Learn why he advocates for bringing "beauty" back to data visualization and how modern tools like CARTO are enabling a new era of self-service analytics. #cartography #geospatial #gis #datavisualization Transcript: 00:02 What trends have you seen in the geospatial analytics community? I break it into hardware, software, and humanware. For hardware, the continual migration from on-prem to cloud. Even though that's been happening for a long time, there are many legacy stacks that have been waiting their turn to get upgraded. In software, specifically in the geospatial world, it's not just Esri anymore. There are so many players coming onto the scene, which makes the subject matter expert have to dig a little deeper and understand a constantly moving landscape. It is exciting to see the new players coming on, what they offer, and the niches they can provide. Then, humanware: what we understand and expect from a map. I've been doing this a long time, and we started out making paper maps. I'm in outdoor advertising, so we show our clients where we think our inventory will solve their particular goal. That has moved from paper maps to a season of PDF maps, then into the browser, and then into a hybrid where you have Tableau and dashboards with maps making their way in. The map reader has had an evolution as they come to understand what a map is. Also, to see the limits of that, where augmented reality didn't really take off in terms of GIS and wayfinding. I have my own ideas about how people want their own mental model and don't need that much interface as they understand the world around them, or at least we're not there yet. That time may come. That is the more interesting piece for me. The maps I make and am responsible for are front-facing. It's what our sales staff takes to market to show clients. So, looking at the beauty of maps and not just providing the nuts-and-bolts insight, but making it visually appealing to the user. I hinted at it earlier, but this is not going to be standard. 02:22 What geospatial use-cases are you most excited about? I would like to see us as an industry return to beauty in our output. Especially as the data dashboard insights realm has come through the space, the beauty in our cartography has taken a step back. It's not just aesthetics; in some cases, compromises were made that made the map less useful. Specifically, when you have a raster tile in the background, it is very flat, and you can't, for example, insert things like shaded polygons underneath the road layer. You have this transparent shading over the top that, while it does its job, is not beautiful or appealing. I think we have a course correction ahead of us in how we think about building maps: to reintroduce the element of beauty. It's not just aesthetic; it primes the reader that this is of higher quality than something that is muted or requires them to spend more cognitive load to translate and look through the transparency. When you give them something beautiful, the dopamine receptors will light up, and confidence and all the good things you want your map reader to have will be instilled. I think we have work to do there. 04:06 What are your main goals for using CARTO? One of the major use cases we've had is giving frontline staff more self-service opportunities using an app that CARTO professional services built for us. Moving out of the legacy process, which was sending an email to an analyst or sales assistant saying, "I would like a map that looks like this," or "Can you get me all of our inventory that is within 2 miles of that?" That would take a certain amount of time. Speeding up that process was a huge first goal, a low-hanging fruit that we found. More than that, once we got everything loaded into the cloud and understood CARTO's capabilities, other use cases started presenting themselves, some that weren't even map-forward. We saw the power of the entire ecosystem and have started to leverage that. A next app that I'm working on is updating our legacy production cartography. The request I just mentioned from the email used to result in either a paper map or, as I said, a PDF map. We are now taking the next evolution and moving to a browser. CARTO ticked so many boxes and continues to. My objective this year is to build out an "all-singing, all-dancing" mapmaker that, instead of a PDF, outputs a URL that you can instantly send to your client. They have the picture exactly as you want them to have it. All the data comes straight from governed sources. That is where we are right now. With the introduction of Agentic AI, I'm excited to get past the part where our users are clicking dropdowns and selecting from a list, and instead are using natural language to talk directly to the algorithm.