7 www.signlink.co.uk Issue 267 - October | November 2026 INDUSTRY | NEWS New OOH agency aims to expose inflated billboard pricing An independent out-of-home (OOH) advertising agency has been making waves in the UK industry, with a now viral campaign which aims to promote price transparency. Launched in 2026, Loud! OOH plans and buys billboards and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising across the UK on a zero markup basis. The company prints all of its own price lists publicly, with the goal of promoting more transparency in the industry. In early July, Loud! OOH booked two adjacent 48-sheet billboards on York Street in Leeds city centre and printed its own price list on them as part of a disruptive advertising campaign. The first board read: “I was quoted £650 for this billboard.” An arrow pointed right to a second billboard, which described itself as being half the price through Loud! OOH, despite being the same size and directly adjacent. The campaign received notable coverage in news outlets, with publications including AP News, Prolific North, and Ads of the World writing up stories and Loud! OOH founder, Jamie Roberts, subsequently publishing an article with The Drum covering pricing secrecy in the industry. In his Drum article, Roberts said: “I know why the rates stay hidden because I’ve spent the last six years on the inside. Opacity is the margin. I’ve watched the same panel quoted at two different prices, and the only variable was who was asking. “Internally, it gets called commercial flexibility. What it actually means is that the buyer with an agency and a benchmarking tool pays one price, and the plumber in Leeds pays another – if the plumber even gets as far as asking.” Roberts argues that a shift towards more transparent OOH pricing with fewer overheads can positively impact the UK signage and wideformat sectors. He comments: “Every billboard campaign is a print job before it is a media booking. If the media cost halves, far more small businesses say yes, and somebody still has to print and post the thing. The bottleneck for SMEs was never the print bill. It was the quote they got for the space.” He also argues that by openly publishing its price list rather than hiding it behind a contact form, companies will be prioritised in AI searches, which are increasingly becoming the main way that potential clients conduct research. The agency has rebuilt its pricing and insight pages so that AI tools can lift exact figures straight from their webpages. According to the company, this resulted in a 266% rise in enquiries from people who found Loud! OOH through AI tools between May and July. A viral billboard campaign in Leeds compared Loud! OOH’s transparent £325 rate against a competitor’s £650 quote By Jonathan Pert Programmatic DOOH advertising reached £1bn in 2025 The World Out of Home Organization (WOO) has published its inaugural Global pDOOH Expenditure Study 2026, revealing that global programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) advertising reached $1.339bn (£0.99bn) in 2025. According to the study, the market for automated and dynamic out-of-home (OOH) advertising now represents 7.0% of total global digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising spend. The study, independently aggregated by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), covers more than forty markets across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific, aiming to represent the first credible, supply-side measure of pDOOH revenue at global scale. Charles Parry-Okeden, vice president and global lead, Audience Measurement & Data, for WOO, says: “This study marks a genuine first for our industry – a credible, independently aggregated baseline for programmatic DOOH at global scale. “The headline figure of $1.339bn matters, but the structural insights are equally compelling: the stark divergence between volume and penetration, the scale of the untapped opportunity in Eastern Asia, and the dominance of PMP as the transaction model of choice. For the first time, the global pDOOH market has a benchmark it can build from.” Regional findings suggested that the US remains the world’s largest pDOOH market by volume, but with pDOOH still accounting for only 15.9% of total DOOH advertising spend. By comparison, Germany leads globally on a penetration rate at 31.8%, nearly double the US rate. Western Europe as a whole holds a 21.3% penetration rate, but still represents less advertising spend by volume in comparison to the US market. Belgium and France also rank in the top five by programmatic penetration with 25.5% and 16.7% respectively, which WOO says demonstrates “that absolute market scale and programmatic adoption do not necessarily advance in lockstep.” Eastern Asia, comprising of Japan, South Korea, and Mainland China, holds a $7.3bn (£5.4bn) DOOH advertising base, but with just 0.6% of pDOOH penetration. WOO highlights this as representing “the single largest structural growth opportunity in global programmatic out-of-home (OOH).” Twelve supply-side platforms participated in the study, each one submitting confidential, marketlevel revenue data directly to PwC for independent aggregation. The full report can be accessed on the World Out of Home website. Tom Goddard, president of WOO adds: “WOO exists to advance the OOH industry globally – and that requires credible data. The level of SSP participation in this inaugural study, with twelve platforms submitting confidential revenue data directly to PwC, is a testament to the industry’s commitment to transparency.” By Jonathan Pert The new study represents the first independently verified, supply-side measure of global pDOOH revenue
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