The latest figures from the Outdoor Media Association reveal another year of surging growth for the industry, with a 15.7 per cent increase from 2015, with outdoor spend now topping $800m for the first time.
This follows on from five years of continuous growth, with the market more than doubling in size from only six years ago, it was $400m in 2009 and last year racked up an $820m spend.
Outdoor revenues are nnow larger than both newspapers at roughly $450m, and magazines, which declined to $170m, combined, according to ad monitoring agency Standard Media Index.
Charmaine Moldrich, CEO, Outdoor media Association (OMA) says “This puts us in an enviable position in advertising as we head into 2017.”
Digital outdoor advertising is growing at a huge rate, but print also known as classic or static is also growing, albeit at a much smaller single figure rate. “While 40 per cent of outdoor-media sales were digital, 60 per cent was more traditional print. It is a symbiotic relationship, where messages on digital can be reinforced with the scale that print offers”, says Moldrich.
Modlrich says, “In the next five years my prediction is that out-of-home will keep growing, because of the data we have in play and the environmental factors, with a growing increasingly urbanised population”.
Two years ago, Moldrich made the prediction that the out-of-home industry would reach $1bn, a position that she still holds today. She says, “Given that we have had double digit growth for the past three years we are definitely on track to reach $1bn by 2018.”
According to Moldrich out-of-home does not face the pressures of a fragmented media market like traditional media, nor the metric issues that plague digital. Instead of being disrupted by technology, it has been supercharged by the rise of digital technology, explains Moldrich. With more data on the population available, the location of out-of-home adverts can be chosen more effectively, making outdoor more popular for advertisers. “With digital, advertisers can change the message their audience sees multiple times a day” she says.
Despite the stellar performance and her $1bn prediction Moldrich does have concerns that the growth could plateau.
She says, “I would not be doing my job properly if I were not looking to the future. Everyone else is being disrupted, what is to say we will not be? The double digit growth will get the point where it cannot grow at the same rate. It is finite. There is a capacity. That plateau is beyond the near future, 5-10 years down the track, it is hard to say."
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