Africa's Billboards Don't Need to Go Digital to Get Smarter

What LOMA 4.0 in Lagos told brands, agencies and media owners across Africa about measurement, creativity and static.

LOMA 4.0, the fourth Location Marketing Conference and Awards, went into Lagos under the banner of Leveraging Intelligence, which you'd assume meant more screens, more programmatic and a slow goodbye to the paper billboard. That isn't how the conversations went. People kept coming back to three practical questions: can we prove who saw the work, was the work good enough for anyone to act on it, and how do we get more out of the static boards that still carry most of this market? Out-of-home is asking the same questions across the continent, from Johannesburg to Nairobi to Cairo.

Nigerian OOH has long been bought on instinct, traffic counts and the media owner's word. That should start to shift now that OOH Academy has unveiled the Nigeria OOH Consumer Penetration and Audience Behaviour Study 2026 at LOMA, a survey of 1,800 people across 12 cities run by Research Brooks with TMKG Consulting, with OAAN on the audit panel. More than seven in ten people had done something commercial after seeing an outdoor ad. Nearly four in ten had talked about the brand, and around three in ten had searched for it online.

Those numbers matter because most African OOH is still measured on impressions alone, if it's measured at all. At Moving Walls, we look past that to reach and frequency, segmentation, engagement, and ultimately, outcomes, and the Lagos study finally puts numbers on the last two. When three in ten people search for a brand after seeing a billboard, that board isn't just building awareness. It's starting a journey that carries on into search and social, and it should be planned and measured that way.

This isn't only a Nigerian problem. Measurement has been weak across most of Africa for years, and South Africa is the exception, where other measurement partners have built an audience currency that agencies can plan against. Elsewhere, the same problems come up at every World Out of Home Organization Africa Forum: little or no audience measurement, fragmented ownership, and no standard formats. A brand running across several markets is often dealing with dozens of media owners, each with its own definition of reach, and planning across that takes spreadsheets, phone calls and a lot of trust.

PwC expects digital to take 84% of Nigerian ad spend by 2029, and puts digital's share at 74% in South Africa and 64% in Kenya. Every digital channel arrives with dashboards and attribution, so OOH that can't show its numbers will end up defending budget it used to take for granted.

Lagos takes nearly three-quarters of national OOH spend but returns only about six in ten units of the attention the study measured, and it had the lowest billboard visibility of any city surveyed. The study doesn't spell out why, but anyone who has sat in a Lagos go-slow can guess at part of it: crowded roadsides and blocked sightlines. Meanwhile, Asaba, Enugu and Onitsha had some of the highest-value audiences. And while eight in ten Nigerians visit a market every week, markets get fewer than three in ten of the OOH exposures people reported.

A survey can tell you visibility in Lagos is low. It can't tell you which boards on those roads are worth buying. That takes site-level data from more than one source: telco location data for who is passing, traffic data for how long they're stuck, and the client's own data on who it wants to reach. Moving Walls takes all of it in, including a client's own data, and scores each site on the people really there rather than a raw traffic count.

Across much of Africa, static still carries the load, partly because screens are expensive to run where power is unreliable, and LOMA 4.0 gave it its own award, Excellence in Static OOH Execution. Oiakhina Emperor, Group General Manager of Abiok Publicity, made the point that stuck with us: the board is only the visible end of a long chain, from planning through installation, maintenance and measurement, and a weak link anywhere costs client trust. Most of the real innovation in static is invisible: better site selection, proof of posting and audience data on fixed faces. None of it needs a screen.

Data can't make people care, though. The work that wins a few seconds in Lagos traffic is simple, bold and recognisably local, and it makes the next step obvious for the three in ten who will look you up.

What to do with all this

For brands, ask for audience data on every site you buy, static included, and ask for more than impressions. Test budget outside the biggest city and around markets, and insist on the same metric in every country.

For agencies, plan OOH in the same workflow as the rest of the media plan. When OOH audiences are built on the same data as digital ones, the people a billboard reached can be reached again on mobile through the DSPs you already buy from.

For media owners, operations are the product. Proof of posting, maintenance and reporting keep clients renewing.

Building the layer the market is missing

The problem LOMA kept circling isn't a shortage of boards or screens. It's that OOH across most of Africa is planned in fragments. MW Planner brings audience data into planning across static and digital, so agencies can plan several markets on the same metrics. MW Measure then reports across every layer, from impressions to outcomes, so the conversation moves past whether the board went up to what it actually did.

Last year, Publicis West Africa launched Ghana's first advanced OOH measurement platform with Moving Walls, in a market with no audience currency. Publicis serves clients across 22 countries, the same fragmented picture the rest of the continent faces.

Moving Walls works with whichever media owner a brand buys from and whichever CMS or media player runs a screen. Africa's billboards don't need to go digital to get smarter. They need better data behind them, and Moving Walls lets media owners and agencies layer that data onto the boards already standing.