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In a keynote speech at the World Out of Home (WOO) Europe Forum in Milan last week entitled “All digital – All Good?!” Christian Schmalzl, CEO of Ströer Media, said that digitization is driving the growth of Out of Home (OOH) advertising but warned against neglecting the potential of Classic (static) OOH.

“Over the last years, the growth of Out of Home advertising has out-performed the ad market growth and especially since COVID, the market share of OOH is growing even faster; the latest public numbers of Ströer as well as Nielsen statistics demonstrate the acceleration of the OOH momentum in Germany,” he said. 

Schmalzl said that besides the structural challenges of other classic broadcasting media of TV, print and radio, it’s clearly the digitization of the out of home infrastructure as well as the seamless integration into the broader digital marketing universe via tech, data and content which are driving this development.

“In Germany, OOH is getting very close to a Nielsen-measured market share of 10%. Nevertheless, it’s still an early phase of that structural shift towards OOH. 

“So all digital – all good? It’s always the times of success when you make most of the mistakes,” he said.

The OOH industry needs to keep an eye on a couple of aspects to further strengthen its relationship with all stakeholders and business partners. Schmalzl outlined three strategies for making OOH work even better with advertisers, cities and other stakeholders:

• Converting classic sites to digital screens need to go hand in hand with leveraging the new opportunities for creative and impactful solutions for advertisers: it’s not about the hardware – it’s about the outcome & ROI for clients.
• OOH and even more Digital Out of Home have the lowest carbon footprint amongst all relevant media channels – so it’s a great opportunity to work with market partners to create more sustainable marketing plans by leveraging the strengths of (D)OOH
• Especially the digital infrastructure of media owners offers many opportunities to create extra benefit for municipalities and the public: it can play a role as an information tool for citizens, an element of traffic management in cities, a feature of public warning systems as well as a marketing platform for cultural life in smart cities.

“And just as most of the current momentum is digital, it’s crucial to not overlooking the importance and USPs of classic Out of Home. Both the impact of large visuals in the public as well as the narrow-casting opportunities for local targeting campaigns and local customers require more focus of sales teams and potentially extra investments to protect the industry’s overall infrastructure long-term.

“OOH becomes more and more digital – but it’s not all digital (yet). And both is good.” 

Christian Schmalzl works for Ströer, the German OoH company that is combining the core out of home business with digital publishing, online marketing, and ad tech as well as e-commerce and data businesses. The company’s strategy is to focus on the integration of a more and more digitized out of home business into a more and more digitized marketing world: Outernet meets internet.