WOO president calls for boost to 'classic' out-of-home
Classic out-of-home media doesn’t get the “love it deserves”, the World Out of Home Organization’s president Tom Goddard has warned at the the trade body’s annual global congress.
Despite the sector recovering strongly from the pandemic when sales “sank like a stone”, Goddard told 400 delegates at last week’s conference in Toronto that OOH is losing ground to a digital tidal wave.
Classic OOH accounts for 63% of revenues worldwide despite the rapid growth of digital OOH, WOO has reported. Meanwhile, OOH has a 6% share of global media-buying.
Goddard (pictured, above) told the conference: “We can rightly sing about the growth of Digital OOH and programmatic trading but when we factor in the fortunes of Classic OOH I am reminded of my school report which all too often said: ‘Doing Fine But Could Do Better.’
“For sure, some of this is due to digital conversion but it still seems to me that Classic doesn’t get the love it deserves. You can’t deny that we have a much clearer vision for Digital OOH than we do for Classic OOH, which, after all, still accounts for two-thirds of our global revenues.”
Goddard went on to lament how there is no commonly-agreed definition for “classic” OOH media, which is also often referred to as “traditional”, “analog”, “paper” or “static”.
US OOH company Lamar Advertising, which is the world’s biggest by value ($13bn), now gains 27% of its revenue from its digital estate, despite it comprising just 2.5% of its 356,000 displays.