Classic OOH stopped growing, started shrinking
Ströer's H1 shows digital out-of-home up 24.3% in Q2 while classic out-of-home fell 1.3%. Set beside JCDecaux's billboard line two weeks earlier, it is no longer one operator's mix shift — it's the moment the analogue half of out-of-home turned negative while the same salespeople sold both.
Ströer reported first-half 2026 results on 13 August. Group revenue €1,037.4m, +6% reported. A solid, unremarkable half — until the out-of-home segment is opened up, where two lines run in opposite directions:
Digital out-of-home: €115.6m in Q2, up 24.3%. Classic out-of-home: €138.2m, down 1.3%.
Same country, same sales organisation, same advertisers, same quarter. One format is compounding, the other is contracting. And two weeks earlier JCDecaux reported the same shape — digital +14.5% organic, classic billboard +0.8%. Two operators, two continents’ worth of inventory, one divergence.
What happened
The temptation is to read “digital up 24%” as growth and stop. The more useful reading is the pair.
Reallocation, not expansion. If total out-of-home spend in a market is roughly flat and digital is up 24% while classic is down, the digital gain is substantially the classic loss, re-spent. Advertisers aren’t discovering out-of-home; they are moving the out-of-home budget they already had onto inventory that can be targeted by daypart, swapped mid-flight, verified, and bought through a DSP. A static poster cannot do any of those things, so it loses share by default rather than by decision.
Programmatic is the accelerant inside the accelerant. Digital screen revenue grew 18.5% in the half; programmatic on those screens grew 29.3%, and 45% in the quarter. The automated layer is growing at roughly double the rate of the surface it runs on, which is the same relationship JCDecaux disclosed (programmatic +30.9% against digital +14.5%). Two independent operators reporting the same 2:1 ratio is about as close as this industry gets to a law.
The crossover is close. At 45% of out-of-home revenue and a ~25-point growth gap, digital passes classic at Ströer within a couple of years on current rates. That is a date on a calendar, not a trend.
What it means for beauty
- You are not competing for new money — you are competing for reallocated money. A beauty network’s pitch is not “add out-of-home to the plan.” It is “the out-of-home line you already have is moving to addressable inventory, and salon screens are addressable.” That framing is the one that survives contact with a planner, and it’s the spine of how to add beauty DOOH to your media mix and how to plan a campaign.
- Non-addressable is the disqualifier. The screens losing share are the ones that can’t be targeted, verified or traded programmatically. A beauty network that runs on a signage CMS with no ad server, no proof of play and no SSP connection is structurally on the classic side of this chart — the failure mode catalogued in platform vs signage CMS and proof of play vs display.
- Wire up programmatic before you need it. Growth is concentrating in the automated layer at roughly twice the rate of digital overall — the pattern our adoption curve and programmatic share tracker have been plotting. Integrating with SSPs is a months-long job; starting it after a buyer asks is starting it too late.
- Germany is a live, buyable market with an owner in play. Ströer is simultaneously posting these numbers and fielding an infrastructure-fund bid — a reminder that the operator layer in Europe is consolidating around exactly the digital, contracted inventory this report describes.
The caveat that keeps us honest
These are issuer-reported figures in a half-year statement, not audited segment accounts, and the DOOH/classic split is Ströer’s own definition. One country, one operator, one half: German out-of-home has its own contract structure and street-furniture concessions, and the −1.3% classic line is a single quarter that could revert. The comparison with JCDecaux is directional — different segment definitions, different geographies, different reporting bases. None of it is beauty-specific. No beauty CPM, share or growth rate is asserted here; the beauty-side economics are modelled separately in the Research, and there is still no reliable public beauty CPM to hang on this trend.
Related: Programmatic DOOH: the adoption curve · Programmatic share of DOOH tracker · DOOH share of ad spend · Proof of play: scheduling vs display · Integrating with SSPs · Programmatic is 12.3% of JCDecaux’s digital