I feel like digital billboards have made stuff like this less fun, if only slightly. The investment and energy required to pay for people to climb way the fuck up on a billboard and paint or glue or stretch, or whatever the fuck people actually do with "normal" billboards makes it all feel a little more delightfully unhinged.
Due to JPEGification, I'm only about 75% sure this is a digital billboard, now that I think about it.
It's not cheap, but it's not absurd to rent a billboard in a more rural area. You could probably do this for less than $2000, maybe a lot less of you know someone at the company.
They get built on property usually owned and leased by the city/state. The city/state usually owns a about a square mile around each highway mile so they own the land of the side of the highway and let companies build billboards and rent out the land space. That money is supposed to go to highway upkeep, but that's in a perfect world so who knows where it's going.
Back before my friend's dad's business took off, he had an...interesting...tactic for billboards.
He'd book them under a different business name and then cancel at the very last minute. The billboard company had to sell that spot ASAP or it was "wasted" money so booking it came at a serious discount...for his actual company. The cancelation fee + discounted rate was way less than it would have cost if he just booked it normally.
I don't know much about fishing. How does one suck at fishing? Since it's Minnesota, I'm guessing it's not physically demanding like marlin or tuna fishing, but I could be mistaken.