Key Takeaways from WOO Congress 2026: Measurement, Automation, and the Next Phase of Growth for Out of Home

The World Out of Home (WOO) Congress 2026 brought together more than 800 delegates in London, marking the industry's first global gathering in the city since 1989. A full fledged team from Moving Walls joined media owners, technology providers, measurement experts, and advertising leaders from across the world.

The old industry silos are dead. The message from the Congress was clear: Out of Home is shifting away from fragmented legacy operations and entering a new phase driven by automated infrastructure, verifiable measurement, and open collaboration.

A Growing Industry with Bigger Ambitions

According to WOO President Tom Goddard, global OOH revenues reached US$54 billion, representing 15% growth over 2024. APAC emerged as a strong growth engine with almost 30% growth, while digital formats now account for 47% of total OOH revenues—on the verge of overtaking static formats for the first time in history.

This rapid digital expansion exposes the core industry villain: physical media is scaling faster than the manual workflows supporting it. To capture expanding budgets, the global market identified four operational priorities:

• Proving incremental effectiveness and clear return on investment.
• Strengthening audience measurement through multi-source data standards.
• Accelerating independent adtech connectivity to bypass walled gardens.
• Promoting OOH’s real-world competitive advantages directly to omnichannel marketers.

These themes align with the Moving Walls philosophy of modular architecture, independent audience intelligence, and non-disruptive programmatic enablement.

Collaboration Driving Better Measurement

One of the major announcements at WOO Congress 2026 was the launch of Version 2.0 of the Global OOH Audience Measurement Guidelines. The updated framework, spanning more than 160 pages, brings together contributions from 20 measurement bodies across 28 markets.

True transparency requires moving past proprietary metrics. The new guidelines showcase advances in synthetic population modelling, passive mobility data, and impression multipliers. This standardizes the industry around verified audience movement rather than soft estimates. For Moving Walls, this collaboration reinforces the principle of Data Democracy: technology must ingest multi-source data and adapt to the language of the land, rather than forcing a single closed currency on fragmented markets.

A Landmark Moment for Programmatic DOOH

Another major milestone announced during the Congress was the launch of the world's first independently aggregated global study of programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) advertising expenditure. The study, conducted by WOO in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), revealed that global pDOOH revenue reached approximately US$1.4 billion in 2025, representing 7% of total DOOH spending.

Moving Walls participated in the study alongside Broadsign, Hivestack, Place Exchange, Vistar Media, VIOOH, and others. While legacy platforms treat programmatic trading as a closed marketplace, the baseline data underscores a broader macroeconomic shift:

• The Americas lead pDOOH adoption with 14.2% penetration and US$670 million in spending.
• EMEA recorded 9.4% penetration with US$521 million.
• APAC, despite being the largest DOOH market by spend, recorded just 1.7% penetration with US$149 million, highlighting significant room for infrastructure modernization.
• OOH-specific DSPs accounted for 65.5% of pDOOH spend, while omni-channel DSPs represented 34.5%, demonstrating growing mainstream adoption.

The findings establish a global operational baseline as programmatic trading matures into a core digital layer.

Perspectives from Moving Walls

Reflecting on the discussions and developments at WOO Congress, Mauricio Sabogal highlighted the increasingly global nature of the industry.

"OOH is truly becoming global as industry leaders from the Americas to APAC and everywhere in between were present at the conference. Continuing on the above, we could immediately recognise greater collaboration across markets to enable global advertiser campaigns."

"The networking value of the Congress was exceptional. The event brought together, in one place, both the leading Out of Home media owners and the key technology providers from around the world. This created a unique opportunity to strengthen existing relationships, establish new partnerships, and accelerate conversations that would otherwise require months of international travel and coordination."

Mehul Mandalia observed the accelerating shift toward digital and automated media.

"Digital formats are about to overtake static billboards - now at 47% of global spends. This provides a greater canvas for automation, dynamic creative executions, and increased demand for measurement as campaign execution becomes even more fragmented."

He also pointed to the broader technological transformation taking place across the industry.

"Out of Home is experiencing the same technological evolution that transformed digital advertising. The industry is rapidly embracing advanced technology, data, automation, and AI-driven capabilities. This reinforces my belief that Digital Out of Home is the next major wave of advertising, following a similar path to digital media. The integration of AI will make campaigns significantly more efficient, measurable, and effective while unlocking new opportunities for personalization and optimization."

On the future of programmatic, he added:

"Programmatic buying remains one of the industry's biggest growth opportunities. Despite the progress being made, many regions particularly across Asia are still far from fully adopting programmatic trading. At the same time, many media owners continue to underestimate its potential. As education, technology, and market maturity improve, programmatic DOOH is expected to become a major driver of industry growth worldwide."

Looking Ahead

WOO Congress 2026 proved that the future of Out of Home cannot be built on isolated tech stacks or proprietary silos. As digital supply scales, survival depends on interoperability, open data ingestion, and frictionless workflow automation.

For Moving Walls, the mandate coming out of London is clear. We will continue deployment of the Agnostic OS layering infrastructure over existing media stacks without demanding a disruptive rip-and-replace. Out of Home is no longer an alternative budget line; it is an intelligent, automated, and boundaryless real-world medium.