OOH is overtaking print — the 2026 ad-spend reports

Step back from the global forecasts and read the national advertising-investment reports — the ones each country’s own ad-spend authority publishes — and a single pattern repeats across continents: out-of-home is taking share of the ad pie, and in market after market it has now passed print. It’s the clearest evidence yet that OOH is the resilient traditional medium — and that’s the macro foundation the beauty-DOOH case rests on.

One pattern, six markets

These are not forecasts or single-vendor estimates — they’re the consensus national ad-spend studies, each from the body that measures its own market: MRSZ (Hungary), Megatime (Chile), CAAM (Argentina), Initiative’s Media Fact Book (Romania), Pitch Madison (India), and Mexico’s Estudio Valor Total Media (OOH ~31% of the offline mix in 2025). Across very different economies, the read is identical: OOH is gaining share of total advertising, and it is overtaking print. The engine is digital — DOOH is the fastest-growing part of OOH in every one of these reports.

That’s a more robust signal than any one global number, because it’s the same finding measured independently in six markets by six different methodologies. When print keeps shrinking and OOH keeps climbing past it, “OOH is a growth channel” stops being a vendor claim and becomes an accounting fact.

What it means for beauty

This is the structural layer beneath everything on this site — and it’s worth stating plainly:

The traditional budget is consolidating into OOH. As advertisers retreat from print and lean into screens-in-the-world, OOH is where resilient traditional spend is going. A beauty network is building inventory in the one classic medium that’s taking share of the ad market, not losing it.
Digital is doing the lifting — which is exactly the beauty slice. OOH’s share gains are driven by DOOH, and the fastest-growing DOOH segment is place-based, captive venues — the family beauty belongs to. The macro tailwind and the beauty thesis point the same way.
It’s the floor under the bottom-up model. None of these national figures is a beauty number, and we don’t treat them as one. But a channel gaining share market-by-market is the demand-side backdrop that makes a bottom-up beauty sizing worth building against.

The honest caveat is the usual one: these are total-OOH national figures, not beauty-venue figures — there’s no beauty-specific share or CPM here, and we assert none. But the direction is unusually well-evidenced: across six independent national ad-spend reports, OOH is the traditional medium that grows, and it’s passing print to do it. (For the programmatic-by-region complement, see the regional roundup.)