Key Takeaways from Last Week’s WOO Conference

Last week, the Out-of-Home industry gathered at the London Hilton on Park Lane for the WOO Global Summit: three days of sessions, debates, and corridor conversations that, taken together, painted a pretty clear picture of where this medium is going.

We came to London as a Platinum Exhibitor, with our team on the ground, two Perion voices on stage, and three new product launches. Here are the themes that kept coming up, both on stage and off it.

The “measurement problem” is no longer a conversation-stopper. It’s an expectation

A few years ago, a buyer asking “how do I prove DOOH worked?” was met with a shrug and a reach rate estimate. At WOO this year, the tone had shifted noticeably. Measurement isn’t a nice-to-have that closes a deal; it’s a baseline requirement for getting on a plan in the first place.

Brand lift and real-world footfall / visitation are increasingly being requested together, not as separate studies, but as part of a single, connected outcomes story. The conversation has moved from “can you measure this?” to “show me what the measurement looks like in practice.”

That’s a healthy shift for the industry. JCDecaux’s keynote made the point directly: the reason OOH has historically underperformed in MMM outputs isn’t that the channel doesn’t work, it’s that the inputs have been wrong. Better audience data in, better results out. Ichiro Jinnai, President of Perion Japan, put it well on stage: “Measurement is an investment, not a cost.”

Audience measurement is getting a global upgrade, and the bar is rising everywhere

One of the more substantive sessions at Congress was the launch of WOO’s Global OOH Audience Measurement Guidelines 2.0, moderated by Gideon Adey and featuring representatives from Route Research, the Outdoor Media Association, OOHMAA New Zealand, and OUTFRONT Media, alongside Ichiro Jinnai, President of Perion Japan.

The panel made clear that audience measurement in OOH is no longer a market-by-market conversation happening in isolation. There is now real momentum behind establishing minimum global standards: a shared framework that allows buyers operating across markets to compare, plan, and report with greater consistency.

What came through strongly is that the ambition has shifted. The Guidelines 2.0 aren’t just about counting audiences more accurately; they’re about establishing the credibility of OOH data in a media landscape where buyers increasingly hold every channel to the same standard of accountability. Markets at different stages of measurement maturity can now reference a common baseline, which matters enormously for the channel’s long-term competitiveness.

For the programmatic side of OOH specifically, better audience measurement feeds directly into better planning, better targeting, and ultimately better proof of outcomes. The two conversations around measurement standards and programmatic buying are more connected than they sometimes appear. We were also proud to see Ichiro receive the WOO President’s Award at the Gala on Thursday, recognition of the leadership he has brought to the industry.

Premium buying is back in focus, and buyers want it programmatically

There was a recurring tension in the room between the premium nature of OOH inventory and the frictionless execution buyers now expect from programmatic channels. Put simply: advertisers want the prestige of premium placements, but they also want guaranteed delivery, predictable pricing, and execution that fits inside their existing workflows.

The open auction dynamic doesn’t always serve that need well. The panel conversation on Friday touched on this directly: incremental growth through ad tech isn’t just about reach, it’s about giving buyers the control and confidence to commit to larger, more strategic buys. It’s why we launched DOOH SOV at WOO: to bring the direct-booked portion of DOOH spend into the same programmatic infrastructure.

AI in planning is moving from buzzword to workflow

The WOO agenda this year gave meaningful time to AI, and the conversations in the exhibition areas were more grounded than they’ve been in previous years. People aren’t asking “will AI change OOH?” anymore. They’re asking “at what point in the planning workflow does it actually help, and what does it hand back to me?”

JCDecaux named the shift from agency to agentic as one of the industry’s defining near-term challenges, forecasting that the majority of media planning and buying will be AI-driven within two years. The practical answer from buyers: the value is in compressing the time from brief to activation-ready recommendation, with transparency into the reasoning and not just the output.

Will Brownsdon put it directly on the panel: “There will be a time when you literally plug in and say ‘I want to reach this profile of customer, find it for me.’ No channel-by-channel optimisation. Just outcome delivery.” That future only works if OOH is fully integrated into the broader ecosystem on a technical and data level. That’s what we built Ask Perion to address.

OOH is a trust channel, and brands are starting to say so out loud

This wasn’t on the formal agenda, but it came through clearly in the brands panel and in corridor conversations: OOH carries a different quality of brand signal than digital formats, and marketers are becoming more articulate about why.

A Lloyds representative made the point that OOH is one of the key drivers of trust in their media mix: appearing in the physical world, at scale, communicates brand legitimacy that digital formats can’t replicate.

JCDecaux made the same argument in the keynote: the presence of OOH already says something about you as a brand. You have the resources. You’re visible. You’re serious. PepsiCo added a different dimension: because OOH is real-world by definition, it’s the easiest channel for brands to connect emotionally with consumers where they actually are. Activating around live moments was cited as a direct extension of that logic.

The industry is consolidating around accountability, and that’s good

Step back from the individual product conversations and a broader theme emerges from WOO 2026: the OOH industry is growing up around accountability. Measurement, automation, data usage, programmatic buying: these were the dominant threads across two days of main stage sessions.

That’s not a threat to what makes OOH special. Premium, high-impact environments; real-world context; formats that can’t be skipped or blocked. What it signals is that the infrastructure around those environments is finally catching up, making the medium easier to buy, easier to justify, and easier to measure.

As our CEO Tal Jacobson argued ahead of the Congress, the infrastructure is already there. The gap isn’t in what the technology can do. It’s in how quickly investment strategies move to take advantage of it. The brands and agencies building programmatic DOOH into their planning logic now, treating it as a live and connected channel rather than a static branding line, are the ones that will have a structural advantage as that gap closes.

Thanks to the WOO team for another well-run Congress. The conversations we had over the three days, at the booth, at the Gala, and on the panel, reflected an industry that’s energised and moving. We’re looking forward to continuing them.

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