DIGITAL OUT-OF-HOME

Digital drives out-of-home recovery in the US market

By our News Team | 2021

Digital OOH (DOOH) advertising is showing big gains in the United States, although non-digital out-of-home still dominates.

Digital out-of-home advertising (DOOH) grew twice as fast as the overall out-of-home market (OOH) in the US during the second quarter of 2021.

This is according to figures from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. DOOH refers to any type of digital billboards used for advertising and, seemingly in line with all things digital, has become a hot trend in marketing.

Fun fact: the word ‘billboard’ originally meant ‘any sort of board where bills were meant to be posted,’. ‘Bill’ means a ‘written public notice’.

OOH by the numbers

The Out of Home Advertising Association of America says the broader category of OOH was up 38% on the same period a year earlier. Furthermore, 80% of the top 100 OOH advertisers increased their OOH spend from Q2 2020, and 45% more than doubled their spend. The sub-category, digital out-of-home, meanwhile, rose by almost 80%.

According to a report by US market intelligence firm eMarketer: “Billboards have experienced much smaller ad spending declines compared with other OOH ad formats, which is why billboards’ share of total OOH ad revenues increased from 67.7% in Q1 2020 to 85.7% in Q1 2021.”

Industry forecasts

The eMarketer report says it expects US OOH ad spending to increase 14.5% this year for a total of US$6.96-billion. It adds that, while outdoor advertising is becoming more digitised, the DOOH component of ad spending will account for just less than a third of the total in 2021, creating space for still more growth in the digital space.

Slightly more bullish than eMarketer, World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) data expects the US OOH market to rise 16.5% this year to a value of US$7.1-billion. Digital is set to rise 29.2% to US$2-billion – 28.8% of the total.

Sourced from Out of Home Advertising Association of America, eMarketer and WARC Data.

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