United States out-of-home advertising revenue rose 10.7% in the second quarter of 2026, reaching $3.16 billion and clearing the $3 billion mark in a single quarter for the first time, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. The trade group published the figures on August 18, 2026, alongside a broader dataset covering advertiser categories, top-spending brands, and format-level performance across the medium.

The quarter extended a run of growth that has now pushed year-to-date revenue up 9.2%, and it arrived on the back of a first quarter that had already set its own high mark. OAAA reported in June that first-quarter 2026 out-of-home revenue reached $2.12 billion, up from the prior year. Second-quarter growth accelerated from there, with digital out-of-home, the segment of the industry built on connected screens rather than static boards, doing much of the work.

Behind the headline number sits a wider structural story: three sectors that rarely dominate outdoor advertising, financial services, technology, and live sports, converged in the same three-month window, while pharmaceutical spending kept building on a foundation the industry has been laying for more than a year.

Digital screens carry the growth

Digital out-of-home revenue rose 18.5% year over year and accounted for 38.4% of all quarterly out-of-home spending, according to OAAA's release. That growth rate outpaced the format's own recent trajectory; OAAA's first-quarter data had shown digital out-of-home up 12.9%, meaning the segment's growth accelerated by roughly six percentage points between the first and second quarters of the year.

The acceleration follows a pattern PPC Land has tracked across the broader outdoor advertising supply chain throughout 2025 and 2026. Supply-side platforms spent the past year building real-time bidding connectivity into physical inventory that previously required direct, manual negotiation. VIOOH added grocery and transit screens through a partnership with Dolphin OOH in January, brought urban panels online through a deal with OBM in March, and most recently connected 38,000 screens generating 7.7 billion monthly US impressions through an agreement with Screenverse. Separately, DeepIntent opened its healthcare demand-side platform to Vistar Media's out-of-home inventory on the same day OAAA published its second-quarter figures, folding billboards, transit screens, and airport panels into a buying workflow pharmaceutical marketers had largely avoided.

None of that infrastructure build-out appears directly in OAAA's release. But it forms the backdrop for the association's digital growth figures: the screens transacting more easily are also the screens generating a rising share of revenue.

Two other formats also outpaced the market average. Transit advertising, the panels and displays inside subway stations, bus shelters, and rail platforms, generated the strongest growth among major formats, increasing 23.9% year over year. Place-based media, the category covering venues such as gyms, bars, and waiting rooms, grew 19.3%, with theaters specifically pacing toward their strongest year since 2019, according to OAAA.

Technology and AI companies reshape the advertiser base

The quarter's most striking shift came from an industry segment that historically has not been a major outdoor advertising buyer. Spending in the Computers, Software & Internet category surged 149.8% year over year, according to OAAA's data, making it the fastest-growing advertiser category the association tracked in the quarter.

Technology and direct-to-consumer companies together represented 30% of the top 100 out-of-home advertisers, OAAA reported. Among the top 25 spenders in that group, the association named Apple, T-Mobile, Verizon, Progressive, Genspark, Uber, OpenAI, Geico, Amazon, DoorDash, and HBO.

The inclusion of OpenAI and Genspark alongside long-established outdoor advertisers reflects a wider pattern PPC Land has documented since OpenAI's advertising business first became visible. The company began testing paid placements inside ChatGPT for US users on February 9, 2026, and opened a self-serve Ads Manager to all US businesses on May 5, 2026, introducing cost-per-click bidding and Conversions API measurement tools. Outdoor advertising spending sits apart from that consumer-facing product, but the presence of an AI company with an actively growing digital advertising business among the OOH industry's top spenders illustrates how quickly artificial intelligence firms have moved into traditional brand-building channels, not just performance media.

OAAA's release listed several brands that more than doubled their out-of-home investment compared with the second quarter of 2025: Genspark, NordVPN, Citi, New Mexico Tourism, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Bank of America, OpenAI, Brex, DraftKings, Odoo, Canva, Nestle, Meta, Coach, Pepsi, Boston Beer, Uber, BetMGM, and Home Depot. The list spans technology, financial services, consumer packaged goods, and hospitality, indicating the doubling pattern was not confined to any single sector.

Nearly three-quarters of the top 100 out-of-home advertisers, 73%, increased their spending compared with the second quarter of 2025, according to OAAA. That breadth is notable: the growth was not concentrated in a small number of outsized campaigns, but distributed across most of the industry's largest buyers.

Financial services and healthcare post double-digit gains

Financial services spending rose 22.7% year over year, the second-fastest growth rate among the categories OAAA tracked with double-digit gains, behind only technology.

Healthcare spending also stood out. Johnson & Johnson ranked as the seventh-largest out-of-home advertiser in the quarter and more than doubled its investment compared with the same period in 2025, according to OAAA. Separately, Hospitals, Clinics & Medical Centers ranked as the second-largest out-of-home product category by spending in the quarter.

The healthcare spending pattern follows a documented shift in pharmaceutical marketing budgets. PPC Land reported in May 2026 that prescription drug brands dramatically increased their multiscreen television advertising following a federal enforcement action against deceptive pharmaceutical advertising in September 2025, according to Video Advertising Bureau analysis of Nielsen Ad Intel data. Outdoor advertising's growth in the same broad healthcare category suggests pharmaceutical marketers may be diversifying budget allocation beyond television as they navigate that regulatory environment, though OAAA's release does not draw that connection directly.

Point-of-care media spending, the category covering advertising placed inside clinical and healthcare settings, has also drawn attention from ad tech buyers this year. DeepIntent's integration with Vistar Media, announced the same day as OAAA's second-quarter figures, specifically targeted what the companies described as pharmaceutical buyers constrained by targeting and measurement gaps in out-of-home advertising.

Live events add a distinct layer of demand

Major live events contributed a separate stream of spending during the quarter, according to OAAA. FIFA invested more than $3 million in out-of-home advertising to promote the men's World Cup, while Live Nation increased its out-of-home investment 10% year over year to more than $2.3 million.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on June 11 and ran through July 19 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, spanning the second quarter covered by OAAA's report. PPC Land has tracked the tournament's broader commercial scale throughout its buildup: sponsorship revenue for the 2026 edition was projected between $2.4 billion and $2.8 billion, roughly double the figure generated during the 2022 Qatar tournament, and FIFA approved commercial advertising during three-minute water breaks across all 104 matches, a decision confirmed in March 2026. OAAA's $3 million figure represents a narrow slice of that spending, specific to outdoor advertising rather than the broadcast and streaming inventory that has drawn most of the World Cup's commercial attention.

The ten largest spenders

Ranked by total out-of-home spending, OAAA listed the following as the top 10 advertisers in the second quarter of 2026: Morgan & Morgan, Coca-Cola, Apple, T-Mobile, McDonald's, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Progressive, Universal Pictures, and Dunkin'.

The presence of Morgan & Morgan at the top of the list continues a pattern the law firm has maintained across recent OAAA reports. OAAA's full-year 2025 data, published in March 2026, had ranked Morgan & Morgan second among annual out-of-home advertisers, behind Apple, with the association noting the firm's spending helped drive legal services to 21% year-over-year growth in that period.

Category-level spending shows broad-based gains

OAAA identified ten out-of-home product categories with the highest spending in the second quarter: Legal Services; Hospitals, Clinics & Medical Centers; Computer Software, excluding games and education; Consumer Banking; Domestic Hotels & Resorts; Colleges & Universities; Quick Serve Restaurants; Local Government; Architects, Contractors & Engineers; and Chain Food Stores & Supermarkets.

Six of those ten categories increased spending year over year. OAAA ranked Computer Software as the fastest-growing, followed in order by Legal Services; Architects, Contractors & Engineers; Colleges & Universities; Chain Food Stores & Supermarkets; and Quick Serve Restaurants.

What the association's leadership said

Anna Bager, President and CEO of OAAA, commented on the quarter's results. "Brands are increasingly recognizing the power of OOH to show up where culture, commerce and real life intersect," Bager said, according to the association's release. She continued: "Whether it's major brands reaching consumers at scale, AI, technology and pharmaceutical companies building awareness, or marketers tapping into the energy surrounding the World Cup and other live experiences, OOH gives advertisers a way to be part of the moments people are actually experiencing. This quarter's growth reflects the confidence advertisers have in the medium to deliver both visibility and impact."

Methodology and reporting limits

OAAA's revenue estimates draw on multiple sources, including data from Miller Kaplan and MediaRadar, along with member company affidavits, and cover digital and static billboards, street furniture, transit, place-based media, and cinema advertising. The association noted one specific gap in the current release: the second-quarter report does not incorporate product category or brand-level cinema data, citing a lack of availability from MediaRadar.

That caveat means the top-10 advertiser and top-10 category rankings in OAAA's release exclude whatever cinema-specific spending occurred during the quarter, even though cinema remains part of the overall revenue total the association reports. The distinction separates the aggregate $3.16 billion figure, which includes cinema, from the category and brand breakdowns, which currently do not.

Reading the numbers against other market trackers

OAAA's figures are not the only dataset describing the US out-of-home market. PPC Land has reported separately on projections from Guideline, a media intelligence platform, which put full-year 2026 US out-of-home spending at $4 billion, growing 4.1% year over year, with digital out-of-home rising 14.5% against 1.5% growth for traditional formats. Guideline's analysis, published in March 2026, also identified a specific constraint on digital growth: only 1% of traditional out-of-home budgets that left the category during 2025 were reinvested into digital out-of-home, meaning the segment's expansion has come almost entirely from new money entering the category rather than migration from static formats.

The two datasets, OAAA's trade-association revenue reporting and Guideline's agency-tracked spend estimates, measure different things and produce different absolute figures; they are not directly comparable or additive. Both, however, point in the same direction: digital screens are growing faster than static formats, and that gap is widening rather than narrowing.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), the trade association representing the US out-of-home advertising industry, led by President and CEO Anna Bager.

What: OAAA published second-quarter 2026 revenue data showing US out-of-home advertising grew 10.7% year over year to $3.16 billion, the first time quarterly revenue exceeded $3 billion. Digital out-of-home grew 18.5% and reached a 38.4% revenue share. Technology and AI advertisers, financial services companies, and major live events all contributed to the quarter's growth, while pharmaceutical spending continued to build.

When: OAAA published the data on August 18, 2026, covering the second quarter of 2026 (April through June).

Where: The United States out-of-home advertising market, based on data OAAA compiles from Miller Kaplan, MediaRadar, and member company affidavits.

Why: The figures document a channel that has now posted double-digit revenue growth in a quarter where digital screens, rather than static formats, accounted for most of the gain. For marketers, the data shows unusual convergence: technology and AI companies without a history of outdoor advertising spending, established financial services and pharmaceutical brands, and live-event marketers tied to the World Cup all increased investment in the same three-month period, while the broader supply-side infrastructure connecting out-of-home inventory to programmatic buying continued to expand in parallel.