OAAA CEO Anna Bager did a thoughtful interview this week with Tom Goddard the Chairman of Ocean Outdoor and President of the World Out of Home Organization.  Goddard is bullish on out of home, bullish on vinyl and he thinks there are private equity opportunities in Latin America, China and India.

When will growth resume for global out of home?

It’s a great question…Will it come back.  For sure.  All the fundamentals are there…What we have to remember is that since rock bottom on April and May, every month we get better.  We’re climbing back up that curve…And all of the feedback I’m betting from our member countries is that that will continue up to September an then we will have a really strong Q4.  Everybody is feeling that the out of home community will be back…in Q4…If things continue to be stable in the COVID world we will get back in 2021 to the position as the fastest growing medium behind online and the fastest growing traditional medium.

Is out of home in the US fundamentally different in the way that it’s operated. 

There’s one big similarity…the main specialist media buying agencies all operate globally…I think the big difference when I look at the US market is around market share.  If you look globally on average out of home commands about 7% market share.  And in some markets like Australia and…France and even the UK it’s nudging 10%.  If you look at the US its hovering around 4.5%…I think that may be partly due to another big difference which is the mix of business.  In the US your have 70% local and regional…in the international markets it’s 80% national…I also think that there’s a high proportion of digital inventory in a lot of the more major mature international markets.

What do you think of vinyl out of home?

I’m a huge fan of classic.  It’s a fantastic medium…Digital out of home enables the medium to be more flexible and more connected.  But there are still big brands who need 24/7 coverage…Take McDonalds.  A classic example of why classic or printed media is going to continue to prosper.  If you look at that campaign doing three things…it’s doing a supreme branding job, and it’s also doing an incredible directional job…and it’s also doing an activational  job…So I think out of home classic has a great future.  It’s still more than 50% of global out of home revenues.

Will Covid-related economic pressures cause out of home consolidation?

I think that’s going to vary around the world.  Some of the markets like Germany and Australia and France are pretty concentrated already…even the UK.  I think the competition authorities will restrict further consolidation…In markets like Latin America, China and India there are literally hundreds of thousand of media owners.  I think that holds the market back.  You can’t get to a scale position…so I think there are opportunities for consolidation in those markets…if I were in private equity, I would be setting up my camp in those markets…In the US you’re kind of somewhere in between.  The big three account for…60% of the market.  The next 10 account for 10-15% of the market.  And then you have a lot of niche players…I personally think that consolidation is good in helping us to compete with big tech.

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