DOOH is about to overtake static — WOO 2026 report

The teaser number came at the London Congress in June — ~$54bn, up 15%. On 3 July the World Out of Home Organization published the report behind it: the 2026 Global Out of Home Expenditure Report, and the detail matters more than the headline. Global OOH reached $54.2bn in 2025; the digital half of it hit $25.5bn — 47% of the medium — and WOO forecasts $28bn and 49% in 2026, putting DOOH on course to overtake static OOH for the first time. For anyone building screen inventory, the report’s regional table is the map of how far along that flip is.

What happened

WOO’s expenditure report is the closest thing the channel has to an authoritative global ledger, and this edition documents a medium mid-flip. The growth is real (+15% year on year), but the composition is the story: digital is about to become the majority of out-of-home worldwide, having already crossed that line in APAC (55.7%) — the same dynamic Australia showed in extreme form at 77%. Europe sits at 41.3%, North America at 36.9% — both still climbing.

The programmatic line deserves a careful read. In June, WOO and PwC published a conservative, independently aggregated figure — $1.4bn across 11 SSPs, ~7% of DOOH. The full report now carries $2.1bn / 8.4% on a wider perimeter. Neither is “wrong”: the PwC study counted what 11 platforms transacted; the report estimates the whole. The honest takeaway is a bracket — programmatic DOOH is $1.4–2.1bn globally, a high-single-digit share — which is exactly what our programmatic share tracker treats it as.

What it means for beauty

You’re building into a digital-majority medium. Every macro assumption in a beauty DOOH market-sizing model gets easier when the medium itself is tipping digital: buyers’ plans, agency tooling and creative pipelines follow the majority format. OOH’s share of ad spend is holding while the inside of it digitises — the tailwind is composition, not just growth.
The regional table is a sequencing guide. APAC’s 55.7% digital share versus LATAM’s 27.7% and Africa’s 18% says where screen-first networks meet ready demand and where they’re early. For picking launch geographies, that’s an input alongside venue density — see best markets to start a beauty DOOH network.
Programmatic stays “wire up now, sell direct meanwhile.” At 8.4% even on the generous count, programmatic remains the minority of DOOH — rising along the adoption curve, but not yet the volume. A new network should be plumbed for it (SSP integration) without depending on it for revenue.

The caveat that keeps us honest

These are trade-body aggregations — authoritative for the medium, but nothing here is a beauty-venue number. The $54.2bn is all of OOH; beauty venues are a sliver of the place-based sliver, and the two programmatic figures differ by perimeter, which is why we quote the bracket. No beauty-specific benchmark is asserted; beauty network economics stay modelled bottom-up in the Research.