Global OOH hits $54bn — the WOO Congress numbers

The global out-of-home trade body just refreshed the two numbers that frame the whole channel. Opening the World Out of Home Organization (WOO) Congress in London, president Tom Goddard put global OOH revenue at ~$54bn, up 15%; two days earlier, WOO and PwC published the first independently aggregated global measure of programmatic DOOH — $1.4bn. Read together, they’re the cleanest top-down frame a beauty network has for where this market actually sits in mid-2026.

What happened

WOO’s Congress (Park Lane Hilton, early June) is the global OOH calendar’s anchor event, and the opening figure — 15% growth to about $54bn — is the trade body’s own top-line read on the worldwide market. It lands alongside a more rigorous, narrower release from a few days before: the WOO/PwC programmatic DOOH study, which for the first time aggregates spend across 11 supply-side platforms to a single global number — $1.4bn in 2025, roughly 7% of all DOOH (WOO/PwC — primary).

That 7% matters because the publisher flags it as conservative — likely under-reporting, with “the majority of the opportunity still ahead.” So the honest frame isn’t “programmatic is small,” it’s “programmatic is early.”

What it means for beauty

Two numbers, two instructions for anyone running or buying salon screens:

The pie is growing — plan against the trend, not the headline. A 15% lift in global OOH is the macro tailwind under any beauty DOOH market-sizing model; it’s why OOH’s share of the ad market holds up while other channels wobble. But $54bn is the whole of OOH — beauty venues are a sliver of a sliver, so size your network bottom-up, not as a fraction of the global figure.
Programmatic is the plumbing, not yet the volume. At ~7% globally, programmatic DOOH is rising but still minority — exactly what our programmatic share tracker and adoption curve have shown. The move for a beauty network is to wire up for programmatic now and sell direct in the meantime, because the curve is climbing, just not vertically.

The “11 SSPs” detail also reinforces a structural point: programmatic supply is concentrating, and premium salon inventory still transacts mostly through curated private deals, not the open exchange.

The one number that isn’t here

What the WOO Congress did not publish — and never will — is a beauty-specific CPM. The $54bn is all venues; the $1.4bn is cross-vertical programmatic. Neither tells you what a salon impression clears at, because no beauty rate is published anywhere. That gap is the whole reason this site builds beauty numbers bottom-up rather than borrowing a blended OOH rate.

So the takeaway from the freshest authoritative data is the same as our evergreen read, now with a current date on it: OOH is growing, programmatic is early, and beauty still has to model its own economics. Believe the direction; don’t import the blended numbers.