Media Forum: Is outdoor a closed shop?

Are there too few buying points in out-of-home, Alasdair Reid asks.

The demise of Gen Outdoor Media Intelligence is hardly a surprise - there's been speculation for many months that it has been struggling, having lost its grip on important clients such as Twentieth Century Fox and Volkswagen. At a more philosophical level, its failure was perhaps predictable too, given the almost Herculean task it had set itself - to prise apart the established closed-shop structure of the outdoor buying business.

This is a sector dominated by the Aegis-owned Posterscope and the WPP-owned Kinetic, which between them control more than 80 per cent of UK out-of-home media spend. The only other significant player, taking around 10 per cent, is Interpublic's IPM.

For historical reasons, outdoor is treated as a separate part of the media marketplace, with unique levels of commission and systems …