The 58th FEPE Congress – this is certainly a body with a few miles on the clock – played to a packed Congress hall in windy Stockholm from June 7-9.

Out of Home is an industry with a distinguished past and, so far as one can tell, a rosy future as the only traditional advertising medium to have embraced digital to grow its business.

This was reflected in FEPE’s decision to make two creative awards at Congress for the first time: Classic, which went to Twitter in the US for a striking billboard campaign produced in-house (below) which also won the Outdoor Grand Prix at this month’s Cannes Lions awards and Digital which went to Ocean Outdoor and MediaCom for ‘The Secret Lives of Pets’ from Universal Studios.

This dual nature of the global Out of Home industry also surfaced in a number of presentations. Sky Head of Media Planning Barry Louth (Sky is the UK’s biggest advertiser and leads the Out of Home category too) expressed his concerns that the digitization of UK posters head left his company short of static billboard options.

Adrian Skelton and Nick Mawditt from leading UK outdoor specialist Talon also revealed their own research which suggested strongly that the most effective Out of home solutions came from a balance of digital and classic.

Digital, though, is where much of the action is in Out of Home currently and a number of speakers pointed to the convergence of media, with broadcast and Out of home, for example, coming closer together and competing for each other’s business.

Keynote speaker William Swayne from Carat said, in a rousing address, that Out of Home should lead media as a whole as it alone had the capacity to adapt and benefit from the growing digitization of the world around us; from the “internet of things (IOT)” to smart cities.

Christian Schmalzl described how Stroer in Germany had transformed itself into a digital all-rounder with a substantial web publishing business alongside Out of Home.

Mark Boidman of New York based investment banker Peter J Solomon caused a degree of consternation among some in the hall when he suggested that further consolidation was likely in Out of Home as other media owners eyed its prospects. The good news was that Out of Home was attracting many more investors as the financial community became aware of its potential for growth.

Where there’s media these days there’s also programmatic, the automated trading of digital inventory. It’s a contentious topic, notably on the internet with many advertisers uncertain about exactly what they’re buying and how the price is computed.

In a panel moderated by FEPE’s new Executive Director Bob Wootton, Dallas Wiles from JC Decaux and Stefan Lameire from Clear Channel International stressed their determination to keep programmatic in-house rather than handing it over to third parties which would, Wiles said, mean a “race to the bottom” in terms of price.

Programmatic’s role in Out of Home was described by a number of speakers as being in the “baby step” phase with no industry-wide agreement on trading practice and platforms. Incoming FEPE President Tom Goddard from Ocean Outdoor asked the panel how big programmatic would be in the near future, the $64,000 Question nobody yet seems to have an answer to.

The theme of the Congress was ‘A time of revolution – earning the right to win’ and the balance of classic and digital and the role of programmatic are certain to be on the agenda at next year’s Congress and, probably, in years thereafter.

But the mood of the Congress was determinedly optimistic, welcoming the challenges as well as the opportunities for the industry in the years ahead, encapsulated in outgoing President Matthew Dearden’s “Four pillars of Out of Home’s future success.”

Noteworthy too is FEPE’s now established status as a truly global industry body, which makes it unique in the media landscape. Congress heard from speakers from Africa, India, Russia and the United States as well as Europe, underlining its vital role in bringing together this buoyant worldwide media industry.