Digital Now Accounts For 39% Of JC Decaux Revenue, Up 5 Points In One Year

March 10, 2025 by Dave Haynes

JC Decaux, the biggest largest outdoor ad company on the planet, saw the digital side of its business grow by 21.9% last year, with digital out-of-home advertising now making up 39% of the company’s total revenue – up nearly 5 percentage points year to year.

Digital’s growth was even more pronounced in the fourth quarter, generating 42.9% of all revenue.

Revenue in the French media company’s supply-side programmatic platform Viooh increased by 45.6%, to €145.9 million ($158M US).

Programmatic was just 9.5% of digital revenue last year, but it’s growing at twice the rate of the overall digital business.

By countries and regions, the UK led with double-digit growth, while France, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and other regions achieved high single-digit increases. Only China, which is about 10% of sales, showed more modest mid-single-digit growth and remains below pre-pandemic levels.

JC Decaux expects 5% organic growth in Q1 2025.

More data from the earnings call, from Jean Charles Decaux, Chairman of the Executive Board and Co-CEO:

The share of digital revenue grew in our three segments. In street furniture, digital revenue grew to reach 36.9% with the highest digital CAGR over the long period at 24.2%. In transport, our most digitalized segment, digital revenue grew to reach 44.1%. In billboard, digital revenue grew to reach 33.8%. Moving now to the next slide, You will see that our digital revenue contribution remains unequal as five countries, namely The UK, The U.

S, Australia, but also Germany and China, account for 60% of our total group digital revenue. We still have a lot of room for growth. As you can see, some countries are quickly catching up, such as Germany, where the digital revenue share increased from 38% to 45% and China from 21% to 30%. We still have a lot of room for growth. Let’s move to a fast growing part of our digital revenue, programmatic advertising.

Programmatic revenue continued to grow strongly at 45.6% in 2024 to reach 145,900,000 or 9.5% of our digital revenue versus 8% last year. Programmatic revenues remain so far mainly incremental and new money coming from targeted campaigns and from the long tail of advertisers, which enables us to generate higher yields for our digital inventory. They also include new types of campaigns from major brands such as the one on the right, which was linked to flight data and targeting specific groups of travelers at Paris airports.

We expect the strong growth of our programmatic revenue to continue as some important countries such as Germany and The Netherlands are already at 30% in terms of share of digital revenue coming from programmatic.

 We think that the penetration of Programmatic will continue to increase and should double to reach around 20% in the near future.