The CEO of oOh!media says the company is not worried at all about the challenge JCDecaux will present if its proposed acquisition of rival APN Outdoor is approved.
Speaking to B&T, Brendon Cook said oOh!media is “very happy” to compete against a much bigger JCDecaux.
“We’ve done it for years, and we’re very happy to compete against the merged entity, and so we don’t see anything changing from our point of view,” he said.
“We’re not intimidated by anybody. We know what we’ve got to do, we’re good at what we do, and we’ll do it.”
Of course, if JCDecaux’s deal with APN Outdoor gets the green light by the ACCC on 30 August, it will only become the second-largest outdoor media company, given oOh!media is set to take over Adshel.
Cook wouldn’t buy in to talking about a plan B if the Adshel acquisition didn’t eventuate.
He said the ACCC has done a lot to understand the industry since casting doubt over the planned oOh!media and APN Outdoor merger, which went cold last year.
“With Adshel, we’re not diminishing competition. We’re talking about products we don’t operate in being street furniture and rail. The products behave differently in the way they work at the property end and at the advertiser end,” Cook explained.
Despite oOh!’s recent M&A appetite, Cook said it hadn’t considered partnering up with other media companies beyond the out-of-home patch.
“We haven’t thought about other media. We believe out of home’s got a tremendous future and we’re expecting to grow as an industry, and that’s our focus,” he said.
“We’ve only got six per cent of the media pie, but we believe we should be at 10 per cent as an industry.”
And you can’t blame oOh! for not looking at opportunities outside the OOH industry, with the company announcing earlier this week some solid revenue and profit growth for the first half of 2018.
