What you need to know:

• QMS chief John O’Neill thinks Australia’s out of home publishers can take a 20 per cent share of the ad market within five years after OOH players took 17 per cent in a bumper Q1.
• Per O'Neill, Quadrant-owned QMS held 14.5 per cent of the total outdoor market and 18 per cent of digital OOH sales in the first quarter, with a "north of 40 per cent" YoY surge in April potentially putting the vendor ahead of the market. He's aiming for further gains via incoming "strategic initiatives".
• With 95 per cent of its inventory now digital, QMS is touting high-impact creative like 3D digital OOH (3DOOH), with agency briefs increasingly seeking full-motion, standout formats. Which QMS and the broader sector are backing to take cross-screen budgets as well as add an attention premium.
• The company has also stepping up the pace in programmatic. All digital formats are now open for programmatic trading, including 3DOOH and City of Sydney assets. The firm is backing sharper targeting, frequency control and ROI measurement to bring more brands and budgets into play – and eyeing "over-invested" performance channels, i.e. Meta and Google.
• Meanwhile, Four'N Twenty's 2024 Olympic campaign is a standout case study – both in terms of client sales growth and ROI and in terms of where QMS sees the best bet for the OOH industry to take a 20 per cent share.
• The brand dropped 85 per cent of its annual budget with QMS for the campaign – and saw pie sales climb 30 per cent.
• “To get a brand like that to trust all of their spend – rather than buying TV networks – in a campaign in out of home, was unbelievable,” per O’Neill.

Envy of the world?

Six years after Quadrant bought QMS only to watch Covid crash the market, Australia's out-of-home sector has bounced back harder than even the most optimistic investors could have anticipated.

Speaking at a media event last week in Sydney, QMS boss John O'Neill reckons the local trajectory is "the envy of the world", and forecast the sector will take a 20 per cent share of local ad spend by 2030. At the start of O'Neill's career, which he acknowledged carried some vintage, the OOH sector was taking 3 per cent of the total ad market.  

The sector's momentum has QMS plucky enough to move beyond targeting brand budgets and more TV dollars to "over-invested" channels like Meta and Google via a programmatic expansion that brings in smaller advertisers. It's also wooing big brands – and their creative agencies – by underlining the creative canvas and engagement that new tech is bringing to digital billboards while packaging up oven-ready templates to take cost out of dynamic content and 3D campaigns. 

Share gains

O’Neill said out-of-home overall notched a 17 per cent ad share in the first quarter of the year: "It's a really big milestone for us that, from an industry perspective, it sets out-of-home above so many other markets around the world ... and out-of-home is expected to grow another 10 per cent this year."

Of that overall Q1 share, QMS took 14.5 per cent, per OMA data and O'Neill thinks it has laid the groundwork for a further gains through incoming "strategic announcements". Meanwhile, it's powering into the June quarter with a tailwind from the federal election. O'Neill said government spending in April helped drive a "north of 40 per cent" monthly sales surge year-on-year for QMS.

The firm has also been adding assets in key markets and expanding and "balancing" its footprint – notably in Adelaide – which helped increase revenue, per O'Neill, who hinted at further pipeline deals.

"There's other great things in the in the works at the moment, so there will be a lot of change moving forward." 

Retail extension

O'Neill outlined how he sees programmatic advertising starting to add incremental revenues for QMS and value for customers rather than cannibalise. He cited a retail example, adding targeted performance offers to a traditional brand campaign.

"The way that we generally play in overall campaigns is we would be selling lengthy campaigns for a period of time, [for example] if it was a David Jones or Myer branding position. Then programmatically, there may be a sale on this afternoon for shoes at 25 per cent off. So we clearly understand where all of those connection points are, and we can upweight and make sure that we can maximise that," said O'Neill. 

"Over and above that, the big and the exciting opportunity is the whole data information that we have – and the digital network and the revenue that's been spent in environments that we currently don't deal with."

"So I think that there's obviously a significant growth profile [there]. We need to be mindful of how many assets we've got to make sure that we can get the right cut through – so that's why we continue to look at expansion and make sure that we can provide the best return we can."

Programmatic performance

Michael Whiteside, who last year joined the firm from IPG Mediabrands performance unit Kinesso, underlined the push for incremental budget pots, with the firm hoping to take a slice of broader performance marketing budgets – especially amid sustained price inflation within those channels. 

"It doesn't benefit [the business] if we're simply migrating traditional spend into programmatic – because they're the same assets, it's the same inventory. Which is why we're developing capability to try and bring incremental clients on board that might have been priced out of out-of-home previously, or who have got immediacy of results – on paper – from likes of Google and Meta, for example, which are great channels, but they might be over-invested," said Whiteside.

"So can that over-investment shift into programmatic out of home, now that we've got lower minimum spend or lower barriers to entry and reporting granularity that actually gives them proof of efficacy? The short answer is, yes, we're bullish – but it's not going to get to where programmatic is in display, where it's got 80 per cent of the category," he added.

"So as rapid as the growth in programmatic is, there will be a natural ceiling to that – eventually it will cap out. But the platform innovation that programmatic allows is something that we're heavily investing in more broadly," per Whiteside.

"As an example, at the moment, panel-based availability is based on a loop-based structure – that is [now] moving towards more dynamic availability ... we are adding that programmatic versatility into digital out-of-home more broadly. So there's definitely a distinction to be made between programmatic and automation, because automation is something that we're definitely incorporating into everything that we do from a digital out-of-home perspective."

Opening up inventory

Whiteside said while QMS is keen to provide a "human layer of intervention" to help brands new to out-of-home, the company is comfortable opening up its programmatic inventory to demand-side platforms and exchanges.

"The benefit of those DSPs is they've got networks, or they've got self-serve capabilities within the agencies and the brands direct. So that opens the demand for us significantly, which is a positive. The other positive is those DSPs have 'universal path to purchase' reporting capabilities that we haven't had access to before from an out-of-home point of view. So the ability for those brands to identify how out-of-home impacts other channels or amplifies, or has halo effects across the board, is a lot more ubiquitous than they've had access to previously. So I think it's a positive."

Whiteside's appointment was part of a broader sales overhaul intended to streamline trading, with Tim Murphy brought across from Ooh! in 2023 as chief sales officer, Sean Rigby following in 2024, and hiring Amelia Allan from Wavemaker to run the Adelaide office.

Six months into the new role, Whiteside says the company has “all formats” enabled programmatically “including digital large format and The City of Sydney” while the company last month pulled off its first programmatic 3D digital out of home (3DOOH) campaign for Garnier.

Creative (digital) canvas

QMS likewise sees major growth coming from brands seeking deeper impact and engagement via new creative formats – with high-impact canvases like 3D out-of-home, or 3DOOH.

O’Neill claimed inquiries are running hot for the new formats, thanks in part to the massive attention being generated globally by the likes of Ocean Outdoor's Piccadilly Lights executions.

"It's a natural progression for clients to want to at least have discussions around it – and we're running these creative workshops now with clients. We ran one with L'Oreal yesterday, sitting in with not only agencies', but clients' creative directors, and really having a discussion around the assets, the availability," per O'Neill. "I think the work that we're doing will enable those creative executions to be used across all portfolios, not only ours." Either way, he said, "We're getting briefed a lot."

Those briefs are dealt with by QMS’ in-house creative team, QUBE, which works with clients and agency partners to consult on the development of full-motion creative for assets like the 3DOOH billboard at Emporium Melbourne, as well as shopping centre and convenience assets.

Eyes, pies

That capability was tested out fully last year as part of the Olympic and Paralympic partner campaign run by Patties Food for its Four’N Twenty brand. Four'N Twenty handed QMS 85 per cent of its annual budget to deliver a national, integrated OOH campaign over the Olympic period, resulting in a 30 per cent sales uplift over the campaign period, according to Patties marketing chief, Anand Surujpal. 

O’Neill suggested a brand like Four’N Twenty – which “were big users of out of home 30 years ago” but had fallen off since – coming back to the medium underlines its momentum.

“To actually sit with the agency group and our people and get a brand like that to trust all of their spend – rather than buying TV networks – in a campaign in out of home, was unbelievable.”

The firm's Olympics messaging “reached 11.5 million Australians” and “set a new global benchmark for real time audience-driven engagement with our custom, dynamic content platform”, per QMS chief marketing officer Tennille Burt. The firm claimed turnaround from live action in Paris to bespoke content on QMS screens in Australia was whittled down to an average of 15 minutes.

QMS is also now in-market with a suite of creative implementation templates to reduce the cost and complexity that can stop bigger creative ideas getting off the drawing board and onto the billboard.

"We know that the biggest barrier to big ideas is around cost and implementation, so we are encouraging more adventurous creative campaigns with products and services that are pre-prepared," said Burt, while touting "creative consultancy through workshops, best practice presentations, AI testing, pre and post-campaign". 

O'Neill said across the piste, the aim is to reduce friction in the buy, take more of the pie, and make the pie bigger – which in turn should bring more people into out-of-home and keep the momentum.

"This [industry] is the place you want to work, if you working selling advertising, and I've been doing it for a long time. If you had ever said that I would be standing here saying we're at 17 per cent [share], we're going to push to 20 per cent, when I was whacking around trying to sell tin signs and put some posters up [I wouldn't have believed you]. 

"We couldn't even get people to put them up in time ... By the time we got to the end of the second week and the campaign was over, they were just putting up the posters," said O'Neill. "It's a very, very different world than what it was – and a really exciting one for people to to be involved in."