Originally published in Mumbrella.
Yesterday, oOh!media announced its win of Transurban’s Melbourne and Brisbane motorway contracts following a competitive tender. It described the tender as the “most significant” of the past 25 years. Robbie Dery, Chief Commercial Operating Officer, tells Mumbrella why.
Described as a “landmark” win, Ooh Media secured 42 premium motorway sites, 22 of those from the incumbent JCDecaux, across the two cities.
In Melbourne, oOh!media will represent Transurban’s City Link, Southern Link, and Western Link. At 22km, this roadway connects the Monash, West Gate, and Tullamarine freeways, as well as Melbourne’s CBD, airport and Port Melbourne and includes the Bolte Bridge, Burnley and Domain tunnels. These follow last year’s win of the East Link.
And in Brisbane, it has added new locations across the Inner City Bypass (M3), as well as the Clem 7 Motorway, which connects the inner suburbs, Airportlink (M7) and Legacy Way, to Brisbane’s southern and eastern suburbs.
oOh!media described the tender as “the most significant multi-market competitive large format out of home tender of the past 25 years”.
Transurban is one of the world’s largest toll-road developers and operators. It manages all but two toll roads in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Locally, it owns the Linkt brand, while it owns Express Lanes in the US, and A25 in Canada. It is an ASX-listed company, and in FY24, reported a toll revenue of AU$3.54 billion .
“It wasn’t just about the number [of billboards], it was also about the quality of the motorways that were available for the first time altogether,” Derry told Mumbrella.
“Having all of that wrapped up together, really, is the first time of a tender that size.”
He said the 42 sites were high quality.
“These are seen as absolute premium large format inventory,” Dery said. “There’s not a lot of it on those [toll roads], unlike Parramatta Road where there is a lot of large format inventory … So to be able to have that and provide holistic solutions, we see that are highly valuable, and so does the market.
“One of the areas that we were very focused on for our network strategy was targeting very high-volume, high-quality, large format inventory. Particularly in Melbourne.”
oOh!media now claims to have the most comprehensive portfolio of premium sites in capital city roads, as well as in 30 of the largest regional markets.
“Our very simple goal is we will be the number one out-of-home network. That is both in size, in scale, and in quality,” Dery said.
oOh! made $636m in total revenue last year, which at around 49% of the total OOH industry revenue, already clearly makes it the biggest OOH player.
After “building” at the end of last year, and dealing with a number of high-profile departures this year — including Chris Freel, Neil Ackland, and soon-to-leave Cathy O’Connor — Dery said the company is in a good position.
“We’ve hit this year running very hard. We’re got some strong performance from a revenue perspective, and we’re gaining market share, we’re getting some of these enormous contract wins.”
