Out of home advertising (OOH) is any advertising seen outside the home: billboards, posters, bus and rail sites, retail and airport screens. In the UK it reaches 98% of the population every week and took £402.6m in the second quarter of 2026, with digital out of home (DOOH) now 68% of that revenue.
Updated October 2026. Guide first published December 2020.
Key takeaways
- Out of home (OOH) covers every advert a person sees outside their home. Outdoor advertising is the older name for the same thing.
- Digital out of home (DOOH) is OOH shown on a screen, usually LED outdoors and LED or LCD indoors, with content changed remotely.
- UK OOH revenue was £402.6m in the second quarter of 2026, up 12.7% on the year, and digital took 68% of it (Outsmart and PwC).
- OOH is measured by Route, the UK audience currency, which puts weekly reach at 98% of the population.
- A digital screen on a site you control is an asset: it can carry several advertisers a day and is changed in minutes, not reprinted.
- In England an illuminated advertising screen almost always needs advertisement consent from the council before it goes up.
What out of home advertising covers
Out of home advertising is the umbrella term for advertising placed in public spaces: roadside billboards, posters at bus stops and stations, adverts on buses, taxis and trains, screens in shopping centres and airports, and bespoke installations on buildings. Outsmart, the UK trade body for the industry, defines it as “a range of advertising opportunities located in public spaces and seen by millions”. The Wikipedia entry on out-of-home advertising gives the same scope.
The point of OOH is that people cannot switch it off or scroll past it. It sits on the routes people take every day, so the same person sees the same message many times. That repetition is what builds brand recall.
Dynamo LED Displays supplies and installs the LED screens behind a growing share of UK out of home. One example is the LED video walls at Lift 109, Battersea Power Station, where a 3.5 m by 6 m portrait LED billboard at 3.9 mm pixel pitch carries event advertising for the attraction at the entrance.
OOH, outdoor advertising and DOOH: the terms
The three terms overlap and people use them loosely. Outdoor advertising was the original name, from the days when almost all of it was roadside posters. Out of home replaced it once the industry moved indoors into stations, airports, shopping centres and gyms. Digital out of home, or DOOH, is the share of OOH shown on a screen rather than printed, which lets the advert change by time of day, location or live data. Digital is now the larger part of the UK market.
A short history of outdoor advertising
Public notices go back to the painted and carved signs of ancient cities, but advertising as a business started with lithography in the late 1700s, which made large printed posters cheap enough for any trader. Billboards followed in the second half of the 1800s, first on streetcars and shelters in busy cities, then on dedicated hoardings. The 20th century brought regulation of roadside billboards, and the 21st brought the digital screen, which has changed the economics of the medium more than anything since the printed poster.
Types of out of home advertising
Media owners group OOH by environment. These are the formats a UK advertiser will meet, and where LED fits in each.
Billboards and large-format LED screens
Billboards are the format everyone pictures. In the UK the standard roadside sizes are the 48-sheet (about 6.1 m by 3 m) and the 96-sheet (about 12.2 m by 3 m). Printed billboards still exist, but the prime roadside, rail and shopping-centre sites have been converted to digital, where an LED screen rotates several advertisers through one site. The screen can be any size or shape, which is why building-scale and curved LED billboards exist. Our LED billboards page covers the hardware; the outdoor LED billboard Dynamo built in Cannes for the Cannes Lions festival shows a temporary one, built from 10 mm outdoor rental cabinets on a steel frame above a shopfront for the festival week.
Street furniture and posters
Bus shelters, free-standing units on pavements, telephone kiosks and the 6-sheet poster are the street furniture formats. They are smaller than billboards but sit at eye level in high-footfall spots, so they are read rather than glanced at. Many have been replaced with digital 6-sheet screens, which are double-sided LCD or LED units that cycle through several adverts.
Transport and travel hubs
Transport OOH covers the outside and inside of buses, taxis and trains, plus the stations, airports and concourses people pass through. Airports are the premium end of this market because the audience dwells for a long time and has high spending power. Dynamo’s work at Dubai International Airport arrivals, where LED screens wrap the columns of the arrivals hall, is an example of large-format digital in a travel hub. The LED tunnel at Dublin Airport is another.
Retail and point of sale
Retail OOH is advertising inside and on the outside of shops and shopping centres, where the audience is already in a buying frame of mind. It ranges from screens in a centre’s atrium to a brand’s own shopfront and window displays. Dynamo installed the LED screen in the Arsenal FC club shop, a portrait wall that runs kit launches and player content above the merchandise. For shop windows specifically, see our guide to window advertising with LED screens.
Cinema and leisure
Cinema advertising is counted as OOH because the audience is out of the home, seated and paying attention. Gyms, bars, stadiums and arenas sit in the same leisure group. Stadium perimeter boards and concourse screens are LED because they need to be bright, large and readable on camera.
Guerrilla, stunt and experiential
Some OOH is not bought as media at all. A brand stages something in a public place and lets the press and social media do the distribution. Red Bull Stratos, Felix Baumgartner’s 2012 jump from the stratosphere, is the usual example. Pop-up LED screens, LED cubes and interactive installations at events are the hardware end of this, and they are normally hired rather than bought; see LED screen hire.
How big is out of home advertising in the UK?
Outsmart publishes quarterly revenue figures collated by PwC. The latest set, for the second quarter of 2026, is below, taken from the Outsmart Q2 2026 revenue press release.
| UK out of home, Q2 2026 | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total OOH revenue | £402.6m, up 12.7% on Q2 2025 |
| Digital OOH growth | Up 14.6% year on year |
| Classic (printed) OOH growth | Up 8.8% year on year |
| Digital share of revenue | 68% |
| First half of 2026 | Up 13.7% on the first half of 2025 |
| Weekly reach | 98% of the UK population (Route, via Outsmart) |
Two other figures explain why the medium keeps growing. Route, the industry’s audience measurement body, finds the average UK adult spends over three hours a day out and about. And Outsmart cites a 2018 PwC estimate that around 40% of OOH revenue goes back into the UK economy, because the medium pays for bus shelters, station infrastructure and other public assets.
Why advertisers use out of home
Reach is the first reason. Almost everyone leaves the house, and the big roadside, rail and retail sites are seen by hundreds of thousands of people a week. The second is frequency: commuters pass the same site twice a day, so a campaign gets repeated exposure without the advertiser paying for each impression separately.
The third is trust. OOH is a public medium, cannot be blocked or skipped, and does not rely on cookies or personal data, which matters more each year as online tracking is restricted. The fourth is measurement. Route measures who passes each site and how likely they are to see it, so media buyers plan OOH against the same audience numbers as other channels.
For a business, OOH is used for four jobs: launching a brand in a new area, promoting a product, event or offer, building long-term recall through repetition, and driving people to a shop, venue or website. Digital screens add a fifth: reacting to the time of day, the weather or a live feed, so a coffee advert runs at 8 am and a bar advert at 6 pm on the same panel.
Digital out of home: how an LED advertising screen works
A DOOH site is an LED or LCD screen, a controller that maps content onto the pixels, and a media player or cloud content management system that decides what plays and when. Outdoors it is LED, because LCD cannot reach the brightness or the size. The screen is built from weatherproof LED cabinets fixed to a steel frame, fed by power and data, and dimmed automatically at night. Our guide to LED advertising screens goes through the components; our outdoor LED displays page covers the products.
At the large end, Dynamo installed the 14 m by 10 m curved LED billboard at Muscat Grand Mall in Oman, 20 mm pixel pitch, mounted 10 m above a highway on a curved facade and updated remotely over a fibre-optic control system. Three Dynamo engineers installed it in five days.
Brightness, weather rating and pixel pitch
Three figures from the datasheet decide whether an outdoor advertising screen works. Brightness has to beat daylight: Dynamo’s outdoor DFA Series is rated at 4,000 to 5,000 cd/m² with black-face LEDs and 6,000 to 8,000 cd/m² with white-face LEDs, and the large-format DVO Series at 6,000 nits and above. Weather protection is an IP rating; DFA is IP65 front and rear. Pixel pitch sets the resolution and the minimum viewing distance: 2.97 mm and 3.9 mm for a screen read from a pavement, 6 mm to 16 mm for a billboard read from a road. The complete guide to outdoor LED displays explains how to pick each one.
Owning a screen versus buying media
Most advertisers buy OOH as media from a media owner, by the week or by the impression. The alternative is to own the screen. A shop, venue, petrol station or landlord with a busy frontage can install an LED screen, run its own messages and sell the remaining time to other advertisers, with the content management system logging proof of play. Pricing for the hardware is per square metre and is driven mainly by pixel pitch; our LED display cost guide sets out the bands.
Planning and advertisement consent in the UK
In England, adverts are controlled under the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007. An illuminated digital screen facing a road or public space almost always needs express consent from the local planning authority, which looks at brightness, animation, size and driver distraction. The content itself falls under the CAP Code administered by the Advertising Standards Authority, the same as print. Our outdoor LED planning permission guide explains what councils ask for, and the LED Planning Support Pack gives you a planner-ready statement to submit with the application, delivered within 48 hours and refundable against the LED order.
Examples of out of home advertising that worked
Red Bull Stratos is the stunt example: one jump, broadcast live, covered by every news outlet, and still cited over a decade later. Carlsberg’s beer-dispensing billboard in London turned a poster into a product sample. The poster for the BBC’s Dracula used wooden stakes that cast the vampire’s silhouette once the lights came on at night; Creative Bloq’s round-up of billboard advertising has that one and others.
From Dynamo’s own work, the Battersea Power Station billboard shows how a permanent LED screen at an attraction entrance earns its keep: it sells lift tickets and runs event advertising such as the Light Festival from one screen that is updated in minutes. The Cannes Lions screen shows the other model: a billboard built for one week, in front of the exact audience the advertiser wanted, then removed.
Where out of home advertising is heading
Three things are changing the medium. Digital is taking share from print, which the Outsmart figures show quarter after quarter, and more of it is bought programmatically, in the same way as online display. Creative is using the screen’s shape: large LED walls on building corners run three-dimensional content that appears to break out of the frame, and curved and column-wrapped screens are no longer unusual. And measurement is catching up with online, with Route’s audience data joined by footfall and mobile data that tie a campaign to visits.
For anyone planning a site, that means two things. Specify the screen for the content you want to run in five years, not just today, and get the data and power infrastructure right at installation, because that is what makes a screen saleable to other advertisers.
Related Dynamo out of home projects and guides
- LED video walls at Lift 109, Battersea Power Station
- Outdoor LED billboard at Cannes Lions
- 14 m by 10 m curved outdoor LED billboard in Oman
- Outdoor LED display at Liverpool FC
- LED advertising screens: what they are and why they work
- Outdoor LED planning permission in the UK
Out of home advertising: frequently asked questions
What is out of home advertising?
Out of home advertising, or OOH, is any advertising a person sees outside their home: billboards, posters, bus and taxi sides, station and airport sites, screens in shopping centres and cinemas. It is a public medium, planned on audience data from Route, and in the UK it reaches 98% of the population every week according to Outsmart.
What is the difference between OOH and DOOH?
DOOH stands for digital out of home and means OOH shown on a screen rather than printed. The site, audience and planning are the same; the difference is that content is changed remotely, can rotate between several advertisers and can respond to time, weather or live data. Digital took 68% of UK OOH revenue in the second quarter of 2026.
How much does out of home advertising cost?
Media costs depend on the site, the format and how many people pass it, and are quoted by the media owner per week or per thousand impressions. Owning the screen is priced differently: an LED screen is quoted per square metre, with pixel pitch the biggest driver, plus structure, power, data and installation. Our LED display cost guide sets out the typical bands.
Do I need planning permission for a digital advertising screen?
In England an illuminated digital advert facing a road or public space almost always needs express advertisement consent from the local planning authority under the Control of Advertisements Regulations 2007. This is separate from planning permission for the building. Councils assess brightness, animation, size and highway safety, so allow time for the application before ordering hardware.
How bright does an outdoor advertising screen need to be?
Bright enough to read in direct sunlight. Outdoor LED is specified in the thousands of candelas per square metre: Dynamo’s DFA Series is rated between 4,000 and 8,000 cd/m² depending on the LED type, and the large-format DVO Series at 6,000 nits and above. The screen is then dimmed automatically at night, which councils usually require as a condition of consent.
Can a business own its own out of home screen?
Yes. A shop, venue or landlord with a busy frontage can install an LED screen, run its own messages and sell the remaining time to other advertisers. The content management system schedules the playlist and logs proof of play. It needs advertisement consent, a structural fixing, power and a data connection, and a screen specified for the viewing distance.
Get a quote for an out of home LED screen
Tell us where the screen will go, whether it faces a road, a pavement or an indoor space, and the size you have in mind, and we will come back with a pixel pitch recommendation and a price. Get a quote or call 020 3489 9878.
