UK out-of-home posts a record second quarter

Outsmart, the UK trade body for out-of-home, published its second-quarter revenue figures on 3 September 2026. The numbers, collated by PwC, put UK OOH advertising revenue at £402.6m for April to June, up 12.7% on the same quarter of 2025. Digital OOH grew 14.6% and classic grew 8.8%, and digital took 68% of the quarter’s revenue. Trade coverage calls it the highest second quarter on record and the second-highest quarter of any kind, just behind the final quarter of 2025. This is the first time we have reviewed a UK quarterly revenue release, and it arrives a month late in our cycle, so treat it as a read of the first half rather than breaking news.

PwC credits part of the lift to World Cup activations. That is worth separating out, because a tournament is a one-off and a shift in the digital share is not.

What happened

Two quarters of double-digit growth in a row. Q1 2026, published on 2 June, came in at £341.2m, up 15%, with digital up 17.6% and classic up 10.1%. Q2 slowed slightly to 12.7% but was bigger in absolute terms. Outsmart’s chair, Justin Cochrane, called it “another strong quarter” and pointed to brands’ confidence in the medium’s “creativity, reach and effectiveness”.

The context matters. In 2025 the UK market grew only 2.6% for the full year to £1.44bn, and the first half of 2025 grew just 1.2%. So the 2026 first half is being measured against a soft base. Strong growth is real, but some of it is a recovery from a flat year rather than a new trend line. For the wider picture of where out-of-home sits against other media, see our DOOH share of ad spend tracker; the UK-specific landscape is in the UK & Ireland market brief.

The World Cup spike versus the digital shift

The tournament kicked off on 11 June, so Q2 carries less than three weeks of it plus the build-up campaigns. Outsmart does not say how much revenue it added. But the timing gives a rough test: Q1 grew faster (+15%) than Q2 (+12.7%) with no football on air. The World Cup did not create the growth; at most it added to a quarter that was already strong.

The structural signal is quieter and more consistent. Digital has outgrown classic in every period in these releases: +17.6% vs +10.1% in Q1, +14.6% vs +8.8% in Q2, and +3.2% vs +1.3% across 2025. The digital share itself moves slowly, from 67% for full-year 2025 to 68% in Q2, with seasonal swings (69% in Q4 2025). That is the shape to plan around: not a leap, but a steady tilt where every year a little more UK out-of-home money is spent on screens. Germany showed a similar pattern from a different angle when OOH topped 10% of its ad market in a flat year.

What it means for beauty

• Two-thirds of the UK market is already bought on screens. Buying systems, creative workflows and planning tools increasingly assume digital inventory. Indoor beauty screens are digital by default, so a salon or clinic network plugs into how the money is already moving rather than asking buyers to change habits.
• The growth does not flow to venues automatically. Outsmart’s release does not split revenue by environment, and nothing in it is about salons. National OOH revenue is dominated by roadside, transport and retail owners. Our work on why place-based is the fastest DOOH segment explains the indoor case, but a growing digital share only reaches a beauty network that is buyable the way the rest of the market is bought.
• The UK venue base is large and barely screened. Our UK brief counts around 51,600 hair and beauty enterprises on the ONS register, and our screen penetration analysis puts the screened share at low single digits. A market spending more on screens each quarter, with that much unscreened indoor space, is where supply can be added.
• Don’t build a network’s revenue on event money. World Cup budgets buy mass reach around a fixture list. Beauty’s calendar runs on party season, summer and wedding season, which our seasonal and event planning guide covers. A beauty network should expect its demand peaks from beauty’s own seasons, not from a football tournament.

The caveat that keeps us honest

These are total UK out-of-home figures from a trade body, collated by PwC from its members’ reported revenue. They are not DOOH-by-environment, not place-based and not beauty data. We read the two-page release and Outsmart’s news page; the detailed Q2 breakdown on Outsmart’s site was not reviewed. The release body also says “first quarter” where it means Q2, a typo the headline and figures make clear. The H1 total of about £744m is our sum of the two quarterly releases, not a published figure. The real test of the trend comes later: Q4 2026 against the £404.8m record, and H1 2027 against a World Cup-boosted base. Nothing beauty-specific is asserted here beyond what the linked Research supports.

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Related: Beauty DOOH in the UK & Ireland · DOOH share of ad spend · Place-based: the fastest DOOH segment · Beauty venue screen penetration · Germany’s OOH tops 10% and outgrows the market · Regional ad-spend roundup