17 Jun 25 Outdoor Advertising Solutions: Alliance Media vs Primedia Outdoor
Selecting the right outdoor advertising solution in Africa or the Middle East can be a challenging task. It’s not always clear which company is best suited to your specific audience, geographic targets, and campaign goals. Today, we compare two giants in the out-of-home (OOH) space: Alliance Media and Primedia Outdoors.
Alliance Media provides extensive coverage across 44 countries, including 38 African and 6 Middle Eastern markets, and is trusted by 90% of Africa’s most valued brands.
Primedia Outdoor specialises in more targeted campaigns within Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa’s mid-sized towns and dense commuter hubs.
Understanding the differences in coverage and audience fit, digital capability and measurement, creative support and speed-to-market, available types of outdoor advertising, and overall experience and reputation will help determine your ideal partner.
Coverage & Audience Fit For Outdoor Advertising
Alliance Media’s Coverage & Audience Fit
Alliance Media stands out for its reach across Africa. With over 25,000 billboard sites in 44 countries, 38 in Africa and 6 in the Middle East, they offer one of the largest outdoor advertising footprints.
Outdoor advertising sites are strategically placed along highways, at major intersections, and inside airports, ensuring visibility in high-traffic, high-value locations.
A fairly new ‘fleet’ of OOH structures gives Alliance Media an advantage due to new locations and media types being more relevant and attention creating for brands.
Primedia Outdoor’s Coverage & Audience Fit
Primedia Outdoor, by contrast, has a more focused presence, with approximately 15,000 panels in South Africa and 4,000 across eight African countries.
Their strength lies in more concentrated targeting, particularly within commuter zones, townships, and dense urban areas.
Key takeaway:
Choose Alliance Media if you need broad, multi-country visibility across Africa and the Middle East. Choose Primedia Outdoor if your campaign depends on precise targeting within localised mid-sized Southern African towns.
Outdoor Advertising Digital Capability & Measurement
Alliance Media’s Digital Capability & Measurement
Alliance Media offers a broad Digital Out of Home (DOOH) network across premium locations, including highways, malls, and airports.
Formats include standard flat-screen LED billboards, as well as 3D digital displays designed to boost engagement through visual depth and motion.
Programmatic buying is supported, enabling cross-market campaigns with unified messaging.
When it comes to measurement, Alliance Media relies primarily on traffic data, often sourced from national databases. While not real-time, this method avoids the inconsistencies that can arise from vendor-supplied tracking platforms.
Vendor-supplied tracking platforms often provide conflicting estimates, raising questions about their accuracy. Real-time eyeball tracking at scale remains an industry-wide challenge, and many systems overpromise on accuracy.
Primedia Outdoor’s Digital Capability & Measurement
Primedia Outdoor has invested heavily in digital infrastructure, particularly in South Africa.
Their digital sites include HD LED billboards positioned along major roads and transit hubs, including taxi ranks.
They offer programmatic buying, allowing advertisers to target impressions rather than locations, adding agility to campaign execution.
In 2021, Primedia introduced audience measurement tools via LMX, enabling the tracking of reach, frequency, and impressions using a multi-signal, near-real-time platform.
Key takeaway:
Alliance Media leads on premium site quality and pan-regional programmatic reach.
Primedia Outdoor offers data sophistication, offering more real-time audience insights; however, consistency across tracking remains a challenge for the entire industry.
Outdoor Advertising Creative Support & Speed-to-Market
Alliance Media’s Creative Support & Speed-to-Market
Alliance Media partners with brands that already have strong in-house studios. Artwork is finished. However, they offer a concise OOH Ad design playbook for those seeking further input.
Outdoor advertising, such as billboards, typically takes between three and five days to go live, depending on the country, location, and date of commencement. Their digital billboards are quicker, with same-day delivery in many markets.
Advertisers can also select location-specific timeslots, so that a breakfast deal, for example, could be visible only in the morning. The process is quick, predictable, and built for campaigns that need speed across 44 markets.
Primedia Outdoor’s Creative Support & Speed-to-Market
Primedia Outdoor also offer its own design guide and excels with South African dynamic ads. Dynamic ads provide instant updates based on events such as weather and time triggers, as well as live social feeds. It is generally slightly quicker than Alliance Media’s offering, although smaller in total reach.
However, as with all creative work, it needs sign-off, that can stretch timelines and require instant updates. The flexibility is functional, but only if the extra moving parts don’t stall the launch.
Key takeaway:
Alliance Media delivers fast, disciplined roll-outs for brands with ready-made creatives, whereas Primedia Outdoor’s reactive add-ons bring flexibility but can slow execution.
Types Of Outdoor Advertising
Alliance Media’s Outdoor Advertising Solutions
Alliance covers every major out-of-home format on the continent. High-reach billboards are strategically positioned at highway merges, busy intersections, and transit chokepoints, making them ideal for launches and long-term brand building.
Airport inventory spans more than fifty terminals, ranging from O.R. Tambo and Cape Town to Jomo Kenyatta, Addis Ababa, Lagos, and Dubai, placing messages in front of business and leisure travellers with minimal media waste.
Inside malls, digital displays, escalators, and passage signage, as well as car parks, carry mall media that nudges shoppers at the moment of purchase.
Alliance Media’s digital network is one of Africa and the Middle East’s largest DOOH footprints, with the ability to synchronise targeting across many markets.
Street-furniture ads, such as bus shelters, suburban signs, street finders, and pole ads, extend coverage into suburbs and rural towns, doubling as directional markers while building mass-market familiarity.
One supplier, one contract, every major touch-point from runway to road.
Primedia Outdoor’s Outdoor Advertising Types
Primedia’s strength lies in its depth within South Africa. Classic large-format billboards on highways and main arterials, while HD digital screens bring motion to the country’s busiest roads and taxi ranks.
Rank Branding grants exclusive naming rights inside major commuter hubs, keeping brands in front of millions of daily taxi passengers.
Programmatic buying is now live on the domestic digital network, allowing marketers to pay per impression rather than per site.
Street furniture “Adlite” panels serve as directional signage in most towns, providing brands with a presence on local streets and in malls. Escalator wraps catch shoppers as they move between floors, adding a final retail touchpoint before they make a purchase.
Key takeaway
Alliance Media offers the broadest mix of formats across Africa and the Middle East, suitable for campaigns that need seamless reach from highways to airports and malls. Primedia Outdoor focuses more on South Africa’s commuter and retail environments, giving brands saturation inside the country’s urban movement corridors.
Outdoor Advertising Experience & Reputation
Alliance Media’s Experience & Reputation
Founded in 1997, Alliance Media has spent 28 years mapping and mastering Africa’s out-of-home landscape. Today, its network is trusted by 90% of Africa’s most valued brands.
Alliance Media’s financial investment into media structures and billboards has been greater than any other company in Africa. The current fast pace of this investment means that Alliance Media has the most relevant and updated media holding over its peer group. As brands are looking for new and innovative ways to engage with audiences, the fast deployment of new media structures in new areas by Alliance Media ensures that they have the most relevant options for their clients.
Industry accolades are numerous, including the European Union Medal for Premium Innovative Media, as well as a decade-long streak of PMR Diamond, Gold, and Silver Arrow awards across Africa. Alliance Media was also awarded best overall Media Owner in Africa by the South African media industry recognised “Most Awards”.
The achievements signal more than awards; they prove consistent delivery at scale, deep local insight and the capacity to guide new entrants through complex markets.
For Multinational advertisers and brands, that combination of continental reach and proven execution removes the guesswork from advertising in Africa and the Middle East.
Primedia Outdoor’s Experience & Reputation
Primedia Outdoor began in 1994 and has 31 years of experience, primarily concentrated in South Africa and close neighbouring territories, making it slightly older than Alliance Media.
Primedia’s strength is their ownership of older billboard structures installed across small and medium cities of South Africa.
Primedia’s roll out outside of South Africa has been limited which reduces the amount of options they have outside of South Africa.
Recent recognitions include a Top-Three nomination for Technology and Innovation at FEPE International’s 60th anniversary congress and a PMR Diamond Arrow award in Namibia.
The plaudits reinforce a reputation for tech-forward thinking inside Southern Africa’s commuter corridors and retail clusters.
Key takeaway
Alliance Media combines the continent’s most extensive African footprint through recent OOH media placement with a client list that includes some of its biggest brands. Making it the natural partner for brands looking to scale across Africa and the Middle East. Whereas Primedia Outdoor’s strength lies in three decades of innovative work focused on mid-sized towns in South Africa, with a particular emphasis on smaller media formats.
Conclusion
Selecting between Alliance Media and Primedia Outdoor depends heavily on your campaign’s geographic and strategic requirements. Alliance Media is an ideal outdoor advertising solution for brands seeking wide, coordinated visibility across multiple countries, from highways to airports and malls, particularly companies wanting to use innovation and newly installed locations to promote their brand in Africa and the Middle East.
Primedia Outdoor offers detailed targeting and dynamic digital capabilities, tailored to campaigns with a deep focus on Southern Africa’s mid-sized towns, commuter zones and retail environments.
Each offers something different, and the choice will ultimately depend on your brand’s strategic needs and target audience.
Contact Alliance Media today, to discuss your next outdoor advertising campaign.