Global, the London media and entertainment group that runs radio stations, the DAX advertising exchange and the rail advertising contract for Transport for London, today said it has agreed to acquire Alight Media, a UK out-of-home company launched in 2019 by Matthew Dearden, a former president of Clear Channel Europe, and Dave Huckerby. Alight operates more than 1,500 digital 48-sheets and digital and classic 6-sheet posters, plus over 4,000 digital screens in leisure and hospitality venues, according to Global. No price was disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals, and the two companies will operate separately until then.

In Short

Global, a large UK radio and outdoor advertising company, has agreed to buy Alight Media, which runs more than 1,500 billboards and posters and over 4,000 screens in leisure and hospitality venues. One of the UK's younger independent sellers of outdoor space would pass to a much larger rival, which plans to sell Alight's sites through its automated buying tools and through AdPower, its self-service platform for small businesses. Nothing changes for buyers until the deal closes, which Global expects in the first quarter of 2027 once regulators approve it, and no price has been made public.

What Global is buying

Global's announcement describes Alight as "one of the UK's leading digital media owners" and gives two figures for its estate. The first covers roadside and street-level advertising: "over 1500 digital 48-sheets, digital and classic 6-sheet posters." The second covers indoor venues: "more than 4000 digital screens in leisure and hospitality environments." The release does not split the 1,500 figure between the three formats. Nor does it name the venues where the indoor screens sit, or give any revenue, profit, audience or headcount figure for Alight.

The formats are standard UK sizes. A 48-sheet is the large landscape billboard that lines main roads; a 6-sheet is the portrait poster found at pavement level, on bus shelters and in town centres. Alight's own locations page sorts its inventory into three products. Digital 48s are sold on visibility, flexibility and audience size. Digital 6s are pitched on "High dwell-time" and "Proximity to POS", the shorthand for point of sale. Classic 6 - printed paper posters - is listed against "High traffic areas", "Long-term holdings" and "24 hour visibility".

Taken together, Global's two figures mean more than 5,500 advertising sites would change hands. That is a PPC Land sum; Global published no single total. Set against the "more than 235,000 sites" Global's outdoor division held when PPC Land covered its move into direct YouTube ad sales in June, the deal adds roughly 2.3% to Global's site count, by PPC Land's calculation. Site counts say little about value in this business, however. A digital out-of-home screen can rotate several advertisers through the same frame, while a paper poster carries one campaign at a time, and most of Alight's estate is digital.

How Alight built its estate

Alight's locations page, which carries no date, opens with a short history: "In just under four years our network has grown from 12 digital screens in Bournemouth to an advertising portfolio that spans every region in the UK." Dearden's statement in Global's release dates the launch to 2019, so the page's "just under four years" suggests text written around 2023.

The same page lists three principles the company says it applies to every site. On audience: "Our sites deliver high quality audiences as verified by our industry trading currency, Route." Route is the body that produces the UK's outdoor audience figures, the trading currency on which buyers and sellers settle deals. On scarcity: "We select our sites in locations with few or no existing OOH opportunities in proximity." On visibility: "Our sites are highly visible to traffic and free from obstruction."

That scarcity principle helps explain the geographic argument Global makes for the deal. Global describes its own network as spanning "roadside, transport and city centres." Alight's estate, by its own account, was assembled in places where other outdoor owners had little or no presence. Global says Alight's estate "is a perfect fit" with that network, "offering advertisers a broader geographic reach across the UK, and a diverse range of high-quality Outdoor formats and environments."

The locations page also carries an interactive map with filters for Digital 6, Digital 48 and Classic 6 frames. As displayed when PPC Land viewed it, the numbered clusters on the map add up to roughly 320 frames. The densest group, 139 frames, sits around Leeds. Further clusters run across the north of England, the Midlands, East Anglia, Wales, the south-west and central Scotland; no frames appear in Northern Ireland. That total is far below the 1,500-plus roadside and street frames in Global's announcement, and the page does not say whether the map covers the whole estate or when it was last updated.

Global's route into outdoor

Global entered outdoor advertising in 2018, according to the release. When PPC Land reported in January 2020 that DAX would add digital out-of-home inventory, it noted that Global had arrived in the sector in late 2018. DAX, originally the Digital Audio Exchange, was renamed the Digital Ad Exchange at that point, and its outdoor screens became available from February 2020 through demand-side platforms including The Trade Desk, Vistar Media, MediaMath and Hivestack.

The release lists what Global has added to outdoor since: DAX itself, "insights, planning and outcomes tools", a product called Global IQ, and AdPower, which Global describes as "the first self-serve advertising platform for smaller, fast-growing brands who have not used outdoor advertising before." Global offers no evidence for the "first" claim and gives no figure for the number of advertisers that have used AdPower. The release also says Global "holds some of the most significant advertising contracts in the world, including the rail contract for Transport for London (TfL)", without stating that contract's term or value.

Outdoor is one part of a wider sales push. In May, Global said it would sell spot ads directly across its YouTube network and hired Fatima Dowlet from Channel 4 as Director of Video Sales; PPC Land reported at the time that Global reaches 51 million people in the UK each week and DAX 130 million worldwide. In October, Global-owned DAX US became TWiT's exclusive partner for dynamic audio ads across 13 technology podcasts. The pattern is a company assembling audio, video and outdoor inventory behind shared buying tools. Alight's screens would become the latest addition.

What the executives said

Simon Pitts, Group CEO of Global, framed the purchase around reach and technology. "Alight has an impressive digital Outdoor estate with excellent customer relationships and a geographical reach that complements Global's existing Outdoor business," he said. "Combining Alight Media with Global will enhance the whole Outdoor sector by offering advertisers even greater reach across the UK, as well as improved access to our best-in-class technology, self-service and programmatic solutions. This is brilliant news for advertisers of all sizes."

Dearden, CEO and co-founder of Alight, said: "Since launching in 2019 we've built a successful business and established an outstanding estate that engages valuable and unique audiences." He added that "Global's expertise, innovative technology, and unique planning and booking tools, will supercharge what we can offer customers so we can build on delivering outstanding digital Outdoor solutions for advertisers."

Neither statement says what happens to Alight's brand, its management team or its sales staff once the deal closes. Huckerby is named in the release only as a co-founder.

The Google and Meta argument

Outdoor deals tend to be pitched as contests between outdoor companies. Global's announcement names rivals from outside the sector. The combination, the release says, "will boost investment in UK Outdoor and strengthen its ability to compete for overall advertising spend." Its closing paragraph says that bringing the two businesses together will make outdoor "more attractive to advertisers as they choose where to spend across multiple channels, including digital platforms like Google and Meta."

The scale of that contest is visible in the most recent full-year data. The AA/WARC Expenditure Report put the UK advertising market at £46.7bn in 2025, up 6.4%, with analysis showing two of every three pounds going to Google, Meta and Amazon. How much of the remaining third can everyone else hold?

Global's answer runs through three levers named in the release: technology to "plan, buy, and measure campaigns", programmatic access, and self-service buying for small businesses. The release's third headline point reads: "Making Outdoor advertising more accessible to smaller businesses through Global's self-service platform, AdPower."

That last point targets the part of the market where Google and Meta are strongest. Analyst Ian Whittaker has argued that the advertising market is really two markets: a visible layer led by agencies, and a self-serve layer of small advertisers that most forecasts miss. His earlier estimate put small and medium-sized business spend at roughly half of global advertising, and Meta has discussed ten million advertisers on its platforms. Self-serve buying, in which the advertiser runs the platform without a sales rep placing the order, is how most of that money moves. Other media sellers are chasing the same customers: in June, Walmart agreed to buy Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV platform with more than 10,000 advertisers, to bring TV advertising to small businesses through Walmart Connect.

Programmatic is still a small share of outdoor

Automated buying is the other lever, and the data shows how much room remains. World Out of Home Organization figures, aggregated by PwC from supply-side platform data, put programmatic digital out-of-home spend at $1.339bn in 2025, just 7.0% of all digital out-of-home spend. The UK ranked third by programmatic outdoor spend at $90.4m, a 7.1% share of the country's digital out-of-home spend, and 94.6% of that UK programmatic money moved through a private marketplace rather than the open auction.

More than 90% of UK digital outdoor spend, in other words, still changes hands outside automated systems, and the automated portion runs mostly through negotiated, invitation-only deals. Global's pitch to put Alight's screens on DAX and its self-service tools is a bet that the share will grow.

A consolidating UK market

The deal arrives after two years in which ownership of outdoor inventory has shifted repeatedly - including at Dearden's former employer. In January 2025, Bauer Media Group agreed to acquire Clear Channel Europe-North, adding about 110,000 sites in 12 markets including the UK. The $625 million deal completed on March 31, 2025, with Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden alongside the UK. In February 2026, Mubadala Capital and TWG Global agreed a $6.2bn take-private of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, a company that by then had divested its international operations.

JCDecaux, another major seller of UK outdoor, reported on November 4 that its transport revenue was lifted by double-digit increases in the United Kingdom and North America in the third quarter, with programmatic revenue up 37.5% on an organic basis. Smaller UK networks have meanwhile been plugging into automated sales routes. In June, i-media, which holds advertising rights at motorway service areas run by Moto, Welcome Break, Roadchef and Extra, connected 1,200 screens at 132 locations to VIOOH.

Global's release does not name the regulators whose approval it needs. It does not say whether the transaction has been notified to the Competition and Markets Authority, the UK's merger authority. UK media deals of scale draw that scrutiny: PPC Land reported in June that Sky's reported £1.6bn agreement for ITV's broadcast arm would have to be examined by the CMA. Whether the loss of an independent outdoor seller with a deliberately "scarce" estate raises questions for regulators is not something either company addressed today.

What the announcement does not say

Several facts that matter to buyers are absent from both documents:

  • Price and financing. Global gave no purchase price and no detail on how the deal is funded.
  • Alight's ownership. The release does not say who owns Alight today beyond naming its two co-founders, or whether outside investors are selling.
  • Financials. No revenue, profit or growth figures for Alight appear.
  • Venues. The 4,000-plus leisure and hospitality screens are not broken down by venue type, operator or location.
  • Integration timing. Global says Alight's network will be combined with its "technology, insights and programmatic capabilities", but gives no date for Alight inventory to appear on DAX or AdPower.
  • People and brand. Nothing is said about whether the Alight name continues, or about roles for Dearden, Huckerby or Alight's staff. The release does cite Alight's place among Campaign's top 100 Best Places to Work.

Why this matters for marketers

For brands and agencies that buy UK outdoor, the deal reduces the number of independent sellers. Alight's inventory, until now sold by a separate team, would come under Global's sales operation, which the release says will bring "extensive sales and creative capabilities, as well as wider agency relationships" to Alight's existing customers. The release addresses its pitch to "advertisers, agencies and specialists", the last a reference to specialist outdoor planning agencies.

For smaller advertisers, the material change would be access. If Alight's roadside screens become available through AdPower, frames chosen for locations with "few or no existing OOH opportunities" would be bookable without a sales negotiation. That would put more regional outdoor inventory in front of the same small businesses that currently spend through Google and Meta's self-serve tools, which is the competition Global names.

For programmatic buyers, Alight's screens would add to the inventory reachable through DAX, which already connects Global's outdoor estate to demand-side platforms. The WOO data suggests programmatic outdoor in the UK remains a small and mostly private-deal market; a larger Global estate on the same exchange changes the supply, not necessarily the trading habits.

None of this happens before the first quarter of 2027. Until completion, Global said, "Global and Alight Media will remain independent businesses and continue to operate separately."

Timeline

Summary

Who: Global, the London-based media and entertainment group led by Group CEO Simon Pitts, and Alight Media, the UK outdoor company co-founded by Matthew Dearden and Dave Huckerby.

What: Global has agreed to acquire Alight Media, which operates more than 1,500 digital 48-sheets and digital and classic 6-sheet posters plus over 4,000 digital screens in leisure and hospitality venues. No price was disclosed. Global plans to bring its DAX programmatic exchange, planning tools and AdPower self-service platform to Alight's estate.

When: The agreement was announced today. Completion is expected in the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals; until then the two companies operate separately.

Where: The United Kingdom. Alight's estate grew from 12 digital screens in Bournemouth to a network its own map shows across England, Scotland and Wales, with the densest cluster around Leeds.

Why: Global says the combination will give advertisers broader UK reach, simplify outdoor buying and open outdoor to smaller businesses, strengthening outdoor's ability to compete for budgets with digital platforms such as Google and Meta, which together with Amazon took two of every three UK advertising pounds in 2025.