By Mohammed Farooq, founder, Monster Outdoor
Every agency in out-of-home knows the question. It arrives by phone, by email, by LinkedIn message, at the end of every event panel and in the first thirty seconds of most first calls. What does it cost?
And the industry’s traditional answer, “it depends”, is true, and it is also useless. It depends on format, location, duration, production, availability, time of year. All real. But “it depends” has become a way of saying: tell me your budget first, and I’ll tell you what things cost afterwards. If you’re new to out-of-home, that’s intimidating. If you’re busy, it’s friction. Either way, you leave the conversation knowing no more than when you started.
We were answering the same cost questions so often, nearly word for word, that we eventually did the obvious thing: we put the answers on the website and let people help themselves.
There are now three calculators on our site, covering billboards, London Underground, and bus advertising. Each one works in both directions. If you know what format you’re after, pick it, set your locations and dates, and you get a realistic price range in seconds. If all you know is your budget, it works the other way round: tell it what you’ve got to spend and it shows you what that actually buys. Formats, number of sites, campaign length, the lot. No meeting required.
BILLBOARD COST CALCULATOR: https://www.monsteroutdoor.co/billboard-cost-calculator
TUBE ADVERTISING COST CALCULATOR: https://www.monsteroutdoor.co/tube-cost-calculator
BUS ADVERTISING COST CALCULATOR: https://www.monsteroutdoor.co/bus-advertising#bus-estimate
Some people arrive knowing the format and needing the number. They’ve never bought a tube panel or a bus superside and just want a sense of scale before going further. Others arrive holding a budget, maybe £5,000, maybe £20,000, and needing to know what it gets them. They’re the same person, really: someone trying to plan honestly without having to pretend, on a call, that they know more than they do.
That’s the part I think our industry underestimates. A lot of people are still unfamiliar with outdoor formats. Not because they’re lazy, but because we’ve historically made the basics harder to find than they need to be. Nobody should need a briefing document to find out roughly what a fortnight on a billboard costs.
Here’s what we didn’t expect.
Once the calculators were live, we started noticing who was using them, and a good chunk of them are not buyers at all. Students. Graduates. People a few weeks into their first marketing job, trying to build a media plan for the first time and quietly googling what everything costs. The feedback we get from them is some of the warmest we receive. They’re not booking anything. They just appreciate that somebody finally showed them the numbers.
I’m completely fine with that. Better than fine. Some of them will be planning real budgets in two years. Most of them won’t ever spend a pound with us, and the tools are still doing their job, because the job is to make this corner of the industry less opaque. If a graduate in Leeds uses our tube calculator to sense-check a university project, the industry got slightly easier to understand today. That costs us nothing.
There’s a commercial logic here too, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The conversations we have now start in a better place. People arrive already knowing the ballpark, so we talk about the campaign instead of dancing around the number. The people who were never going to book don’t have to sit through a sales call to learn what a poster costs. Everyone’s time gets treated with more respect, ours included.
But the honest origin is simpler than strategy: we got asked the same question enough times that hiding the answer started to feel silly. Being open about it wasn’t a positioning exercise. It was the path of least resistance for a small team that would rather build something once than repeat itself forever.I
f you’re holding a budget and wondering what it gets you, or you just want to know what these things cost before you talk to anyone, us included, the calculators are linked above. Use them, share them with the newest person on your team, and if the number surprises you in either direction, I’d genuinely like to hear
