By Nick Coston
Out of home media is surrounded by acronyms and it’s getting worse. When I began my journey into “out of home” way back before the term OOH came on the scene, we called most everything billboards, posters or transit. They all fell under the name “outdoor”.
“Hey Jack, what are you selling these days?
Jack: “I’m selling outdoor. You?”
See how easy that was? One name told it all. You knew what Jack was referring to. There was no gray area, no ambiguity, no outdoor advertising categories messing up media plans. No confusion on multiple platforms, be them direct, programmatic, programmatic-direct, programmatic-guaranteed or PMP’s. Whatever those are.
My simple thinking is that if advertising is not in your home, it’s outdoor. All of it. The second you step outside shutting that door behind you, that’s where we take over. It’s our turn now.
You are not in your home. Or mine.
Ok, so now that we’ve established the ground rules of outdoor, can’t we just hit the easy button and keep that way? Shortening it to OOH is cute, a few less letters, we can handle that. That acronym can stay. It’s still outdoor advertising. All of it. Easy street, right?
But no, we had to complicate it, didn’t we. By my count we now have OOH, DOOH, pDOOH, POS/POP (point of sale/point of purchase in-store ads), RTB (real-rime bidding), MOOH (mobile outdoor), Retail Media, Place-Based Media, Urban Panels, On and Off -Premise Signs, Street Furniture, Lifestyle and my favorite outdoor term, Spectacular.
We can keep that last one.
All measured by TRP’s (total rating points) DEC’s (daily effective circulation-traffic counts), Weekly Impressions, Target Audience, OTS (opportunity to see), LTS (likely to see), GeoPath Ratings, Effective Reach, PerView CPM, CPP and CBSA (core based statistical area).
I passed out mid-way through that last paragraph.
Yet in 2025, with all these formats, acronyms and measurement tools, out of home advertising still only snags just a hair less than 5% of total global spend. It’s even lower here in the U.S. where OOH hovers around 3% of the total media market.
Which brings me to this week’s big question; if we simply stuck with the term “outdoor” and bagged all those acronyms especially when describing the increasing amount of varied formats, be them static of digital, would we still be better off with our share of the U.S. pie?
Probably not. In 1980, outdoor spend topped off at 3% of total ad dollars. No digital, no TV screens in windows, no Gas Station TV’s, no seat-back screens in taxis. Just signs on the side of the road, transit and well, spectaculars.
Same outdoor advertising spend, forty-five years apart. Of course we also had tobacco copy back then too, eating up nearly 20% of the OOH space.
A very wise outdoor media fellow back in 2023, will call him Brian since that his name, while serving on an OOH panel at the NYC Advertising Week said it bluntly: “everything should be called OOH, combine them all”.
All being the outdoor media products mentioned earlier.
I may have taken a little liberty with his exact quote, but you get the point. Less acronyms make it less confusing making us easier to buy.
After all, It’s Still Out of Home to Me.
Insider’s Note: Nick Coston has been writing opinion pieces for the OOH industry for 10 years now. His weekly pieces also appear on Substack where you can view the last 2 years worth. Full-time, Nick is the VP, Sales and Sales Strategies for Moving Walls, the Singapore based media and ad tech giant, here in The America’s.
If you are interested, here is Nick’s Substack LINK
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