Ben Gibb. Credit: QMS
For years, New Zealand's out-of-home market has been defined by its formats.
Operators have responded to briefs based on what they own rather than what a client needs. Billboard companies pitch billboards, street furniture operators push street furniture.
Ben Gibb, national sales director at QMS New Zealand, and a veteran of both oOh!media and Sky, told AdNews the industry has been selling itself wrong.
"Until now New Zealand’s out-of-home market has been fragmented by format," he said.
"Naturally if you brief a billboard business the answer will always be billboards. But that's not necessarily the best solution to a client's specific challenge."
The MediaWorks out-of-home division's transition to QMS, combined with the operator's Auckland Transport concessions win spanning street furniture, large format, bus, rail and ferry, has given QMS a scale that makes a different kind of offer possible, a total audience solution rather than a format-led one.
Whether the market is ready to buy it that way is a separate question.
Out-of-home has been the standout performer in New Zealand media through several difficult years.
Broadcast television, print and radio have lost audiences while out-of-home has grown, its potential audience expanding alongside population.
According to the Out of Home Media Association Aotearoa (OOHMAA), total industry revenue grew 10% year-on-year to $204 million in 2024, one of its strongest results on record, achieved against one of the most difficult market environments since the 2008 financial crisis.
Gibb calls it the last true broadcast channel, and he says the numbers support that framing.
The channel's growth has come from agency-represented clients switching spend from traditional media.
Direct advertisers, businesses buying media without an agency intermediary, remain an untapped category. So too are digitally-native brands.
The buyers who pride themselves on following audiences wherever they go, optimising every dollar and staying channel-agnostic are, Gibb said, sitting out one of the most addressable digital formats available.
"There are a number of digital advertisers that are yet to understand or recognise programmatic digital out-of-home as a viable and easy-to-include option," Gibb said.
Programmatic digital out-of-home is where Gibb sees the greatest opportunity, the next growth surge and the most significant education challenge.
“Whilst it’s growing rapidly, I still see so much potential for PrDOOH due the flexibility it gives an advertiser to use OOH in ways it never traditionally could be used,” he said.
"Programmatic in the out-of-home world often carries connotations of cheap, remnant or second-class inventory. But for us, programmatic digital out-of-home is where innovation lies.”
This means running a campaign across all digital sites in a city at rush hour. Or serving different creative to hundreds of screens at once based on context, weather, time of day, location.
Adapting messaging as a client's business needs shift. These are use cases belonging to television or digital display, and out-of-home is able to compete for them.
The OOHMAA figures bear out the opportunity, programmatic digital out-of-home grew 23% year-on-year in 2024 to $15.7 million, yet still accounts for just 11% of total digital out-of-home revenue. The ceiling is high.
"We need clients to think of digital out-of-home as another digital screen that they can access to reach whatever audience they require, it just happens to be outside and at a scale never seen before in the world of digital," Gibb said.
The reframing changes who the channel competes against for budget.
Programmatic digital out-of-home, understood as a digital screen, addressable, flexible, contextually dynamic, becomes relevant to media planners who have never considered outdoor.
That is a larger addressable market than converting existing out-of-home spenders to a new buying method.
The Auckland Transport concessions illustrate the scale argument.
Spanning street furniture, large format, bus, rail and ferry and sitting alongside QMS's existing network of more than 190 billboards, nearly 2,000 street furniture posters and more than 4,000 bus panels, the portfolio follows a person's commute.
"The Auckland Transport concessions give us the ability to own Aucklanders' commute end-to-end across the entire greater Auckland region," Gibb said.
Auckland is New Zealand's largest market, and for many advertisers winning there is a prerequisite to winning nationally.
The City Rail Link, which will extend the network further, adds to the opportunity.
QMS is betting that format consolidation changes what out-of-home can claim to do for clients, not just bigger reach, but a different kind of answer to a brief.
The channel's growth story has been about taking share from traditional media and the next chapter is about earning budget from categories that have never seriously considered outdoor at all.
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