Independent out-of-home advertising agency Loud! OOH has launched with a campaign that does something the industry rarely does: tells small businesses exactly what a billboard actually costs.
Two 48-sheet hoardings on York Street in Leeds city centre are running side by side, one carrying a £650 customer quote, the other answering back with the Loud! OOH price for the same site – £325. Half as much, with no catch.
The two 48-sheet billboards are up side by side. The first one reads: “I was quoted £650 for this billboard.” An arrow points right. The second board answers back: Same billboard. Half the price.
READ MORE: Global NFL tie-in for Dentsu Creative UK
“Small businesses keep telling us they love the idea of billboards but assume they’re out of reach,” said Jamie Roberts, founder of Loud! OOH. “We got tired of explaining the pricing, so we decided to show it instead.”
Roberts has worked in the advertising industry for two decades, and says he knows exactly where the process breaks down: A business owner decides they want to explore billboard advertising or London Underground advertising. They start researching. They find agencies. They fill in a contact form. They wait. Then comes the call, the brief, the back and forth – and eventually, days or weeks later, a quote lands in their inbox, then nothing.
“It happens constantly,” said Roberts. “You build the rapport, you do the research, you go back with your recommendation and the client just disappears. Not because the price was wrong. Because by the time they got a number, they’d already lost momentum. The process killed it.”
The issue isn’t that billboard advertising is expensive. Most businesses are surprised by how affordable it actually is. The issue is that finding out what it costs requires running a gauntlet of contact forms, discovery calls and proposals that most SME owners simply don’t have time for.
Loud! OOH was built to remove that, with prices for billboards, digital out-of-home screens, bus advertising, London Underground and transport advertising all published openly at loudooh.co.uk/pricing/. A business owner can research, compare and make a decision without speaking to anyone.
“We want SMEs to find this information useful from the very first search,” he went on. “If someone is looking for billboard costs or London Underground advertising rates, they should be able to find a real number immediately and make up their own mind. That’s what we’ve built.”
“£325 for a proper 48-sheet in Leeds city centre isn’t a promo rate.. It’s what the media actually costs when you remove the layers of markup. Northern businesses deserve to know that.”
The York Street location for the new campaign was chosen as it has a bus stop right in front of the site, which means real dwell time – commuters, workers and shoppers who aren’t driving past at 40mph and have time to read both boards and look at both prices.
“I wanted the campaign to do what good OOH always does,” said Roberts. “Make the point before someone has time to think about it. You look left, you look right, you get it. That’s the job.”
UK OOH advertising revenue hit £1.44 billion in 2025 and is forecast to keep growing. Outsmart, the trade association for the Out of Home (OOH) advertising industry in the UK – puts average return on OOH investment at £1.80 for every pound spent, with ad recall at 79% within a month. The medium works, but Roberts says that the issue has been that smaller businesses were never given a clear picture of what it costs to access it, which Loud! OOH says it hopes to change.
Loud! OOH is an independent out-of-home advertising agency that plans and buys billboard, digital out-of-home, bus, London Underground and airport advertising across the UK.
