New OOH agency aims to expose inflated billboard pricing

An independent out-of-home (OOH) advertising agency has been making waves in the UK industry, with a now viral campaign which aims to promote price transparency.

Launched in 2026, Loud! OOH plans and buys billboards and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising across the UK on a zero markup basis. The company prints all of its own price lists publicly, with the goal of promoting more transparency in the industry.

In early July, Loud! OOH booked two adjacent 48-sheet billboards on York Street in Leeds city centre and printed its own price list on them as part of a disruptive advertising campaign.

The first board read: “I was quoted £650 for this billboard.” An arrow pointed right to a second billboard, which described itself as being half the price through Loud! OOH, despite being the same size and directly adjacent.

The campaign received notable coverage in news outlets, with publications including AP News, Prolific North, and Ads of the World writing up stories and Loud! OOH founder, Jamie Roberts, subsequently publishing an article with The Drum covering pricing secrecy in the industry.

In his Drum article, Roberts said: “I know why the rates stay hidden because I’ve spent the last six years on the inside. Opacity is the margin. I’ve watched the same panel quoted at two different prices, and the only variable was who was asking.

“Internally, it gets called commercial flexibility. What it actually means is that the buyer with an agency and a benchmarking tool pays one price, and the plumber in Leeds pays another – if the plumber even gets as far as asking.”

Roberts argues that a shift towards more transparent OOH pricing with fewer overheads can positively impact the UK signage and wide-format sectors. He comments: “Every billboard campaign is a print job before it is a media booking. If the media cost halves, far more small businesses say yes, and somebody still has to print and post the thing.

“The bottleneck for SMEs was never the print bill. It was the quote they got for the space.”

He also argues that by openly publishing its price list rather than hiding it behind a contact form, companies will be prioritised in AI searches, which are increasingly becoming the main way that potential clients conduct research.

The agency has rebuilt its pricing and insight pages so that AI tools can lift exact figures straight from their webpages. According to the company, this resulted in a 266% rise in enquiries from people who found Loud! OOH through AI tools between May and July.

Roberts says: “If your prices sit behind a contact form, an AI cannot quote you. It will quote whoever published a number instead. Sign companies are competing for exactly the same searches we are. There is no clever technique here: publish the figure, keep it consistent everywhere, and let the machine do the rest.”

Roberts has 20 years of experience in advertising including time working at Google, with the last six having been in the OOH sector. He launched Loud! OOH in 2026 with offices in Leeds and London, after what he describes as “years of watching SMEs priced out of a medium that was never as expensive as they had been told.”

He adds: “I sat in enough meetings where the markup was the business model. The client never saw the real rate card. I got tired of it.”

Loud! OOH plans to release a rebuilt case study section and a new insight series on its website over the coming weeks. The agency has also hinted at a second phase of its billboard campaign being launched later this summer, which will use an empty billboard to comment on “what happens when OOH pricing puts premium real estate out of reach for most businesses.”