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MAGNA and Rapport’s global survey on Out of Home trends revealed that the market weathered the COVID storm successfully. Despite an unprecedented decline in revenue in 2020, all major OOH companies, and most of the smaller companies, survived the severe revenue losses of 2020 (-25%) and grew again in 2021. Inventory and capacity did not shrink overall. Global OOH revenue grew by +12% in 2021 to $28 billion. The 2021 rebound has not offset the losses of 2020 yet, as the global market remained 15% smaller than its pre-COVID peak ($33.3 billion) but it was a robust performance in line with MAGNA’s expectations that advertisers big and small would return to OOH as soon as business and audiences would stabilize.
In fact, OOH did better than survive. Instead of just downsizing during the storm, the industry continued to invest in digital conversion and innovation (programmatic, experiential, place-based, data) and pursued its efforts to future-proof its business model, anticipating correctly that several market features brought to the fore by COVID (campaign flexibility and data usage) would become permanent expectations from advertisers.