Our thoughts on the new IAB UK Compass Report

The new IAB UK Compass DOOH report is a great piece of work, and it raises a question we think the whole out-of-home industry needs to sit with: are we growing the out-of-home pie, or are we just turning the same pie digital?

What the numbers say

DOOH hit a record £964m in 2025, 67% of all UK OOH spend, up from 32% in 2015, and forecast to reach 76% by 2031. On the surface, that looks like explosive growth.

But look at the total market. In 2015, total UK OOH spend was around £1.06bn. In 2025, it's around £1.44bn. Over that same period, digital spend went from £337m to £964m. So the digital share has exploded, but the total market has barely moved once inflation is accounted for. That's conversion, not expansion.

We see the same pattern with programmatic. prDOOH is forecast to grow from 9% to 24% of OOH spend, which is genuinely exciting. But the real question is whether it's driving incremental spend, or simply making it easier for the people who already buy OOH to transact. Those are two very different outcomes for the industry.

There's a coverage question underneath all of this too. Is the industry building national reach, or is more and more money being pushed into London, Manchester and Birmingham, markets that are already saturated? We believe the real growth opportunity lies in the towns and high streets that never appear on a media plan.

A different way to grow

We think the industry needs to look at this differently. Social media didn't grow by getting better at serving the brands who already advertised. It grew by opening the door to the long tail, millions of small businesses who could never have afforded a media agency suddenly had a self-serve route in. That's where the new money came from.

That's why Smart Outdoor exists. Opening up out-of-home to the businesses it has always shut out is at the heart of our vision, and we're using the famecake.com platform to do it. Self-serve, accessible, no agency required, no minimum spend that locks out the local gym, the independent restaurant, the recruiter, the artist. And it's working. We're seeing genuinely new customers and genuinely new money coming into OOH, not budget shuffled from somewhere else.

Who's driving it

What's striking is who's making it happen. The long tail is being unlocked by the long tail. The independent and regional OOH market is doing the collaborative work the industry keeps talking about. Media owners including Elonex Outdoor Media, Crystal Clear Media Group Ltd, Route Media, Outdoor Platform, Buy Me Media, and All City Media Solutions are all now on the platform and seeing new customers and new spend.

That, in our view, is the real growth story. Not a bigger slice of the same pie, but a bigger pie.

An open door

To be clear, this is not an exclusive club. Every OOH media owner is welcome, large or small, and not just in the UK. Wherever you operate, there's a route in. The more media owners who open the door, the bigger this market becomes for everyone.

If you own screens and want to reach the customers who've never been able to buy them, come and talk to us.

Worth a read: the IAB UK Compass DOOH report