Warsaw 2026 · Regulation

The enemy at the gates: how the bans spread, and how to stop them

Kai-Marcus Thäsler on the domino effect, Tamás Bauer on Hungary’s “OOH Armageddon”, and lessons from Poland and Austria

In the regulation session at the WOO Central European Forum in Warsaw, WOO Vice-President Kai-Marcus Thäsler set out how restrictions on Out of Home are spreading from city to city and country to country, why they are rarely about revenue, and what WOO is building to stop them. He was followed by the most sobering case study of the year, and by two market leaders with very different experiences of living with regulation.

Click to watch the full regulation session with sound

Kai-Marcus Thäsler, Tamás Bauer, Paweł Orłowski and Andreas Allerstorfer at the WOO Central European Forum, Warsaw, October 2026. Click the video to play with sound.

Few people in the industry track the subject more closely than Kai-Marcus Thäsler. The Managing Director of Germany’s Bundesverband Aussenmedien (FAW) and WOO Vice-President runs a nightly crawler across the world’s news and legislative feeds. It now delivers around five messages a day about a new ban, restriction or consultation somewhere in the world.

His title, The Enemy at the Gates, was deliberately dramatic; his argument was anything but. Advertising bans, he told the Warsaw audience, follow a pattern, and the pattern is the problem.

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Bans start with a product category that nobody wants to defend. They are adopted at city level without an impact assessment, they survive in court, and then they become a template for the next city. “Banning advertising is symbolism,” he said. The trouble with symbolism is that it compounds.

In this video

00:00Kai-Marcus Thäsler: The domino effect. Amsterdam, six ways to switch off a medium, four trends, and the most radical domino of 2026

07:17Tamás Bauer: The Hungarian OOH Armageddon. How political posters led to a national law, what it bans, and what it costs

18:36Kai-Marcus Thäsler: Stopping the dominoes. WOO’s regulation workstream, the five arguments and the five principles

32:28Expert talk: Poland and Austria. Paweł Orłowski, CEO, Synergic, and Andreas Allerstorfer, CEO, AWS Out of Home Media Group

45:43Questions from the floor. Helping Hungary, audience measurement in Austria and Poland, and the situation in Italy

Click a chapter to open the video at that point, with sound.

The domino effect 00:00

Thäsler opened with Amsterdam, which on 1 May 2026 became the first capital with a legal ban on advertising for meat and fossil fuels, citywide and for every operator. Meat advertising, he pointed out, accounts for 0.1 per cent of Amsterdam’s Out of Home market. Fossil fuels account for 4.3 per cent. On the numbers alone, nobody in the room should care.

“Bans are never about the revenue. They are about the precedent.”Kai-Marcus Thäsler, WOO Vice-President, Warsaw 2026

The precedent matters because there are so many ways to switch off a medium, and because they are available at every level of government. Thäsler’s taxonomy has six entries.

1Ban the product

Tobacco, alcohol, gambling, HFSS food, fossil fuels, meat, and since September, fast fashion.

2Ban the format

Total billboard bans, size caps and removal programmes.

3Ban the pixels

Restrictions on DOOH motion, dwell times, brightness and night switch-off.

4Ban the place

Schools, heritage zones, landscapes and roadsides.

5Ban the data

Camera-based audience measurement and AI rules.

6Tax it

Advertising fees and advertising taxes.

The most dangerous level, he argued, is the city: fast, symbolic, usually without an impact assessment, and instantly copyable. From his own monitoring he picked out four trends.

Category creep

From tobacco in Italy in 1962 to fast fashion in Bristol in September 2026, each new category is smaller in revenue and bigger in symbolism. No ban, once in place, has been lifted. “Nobody bans the last category first.”

Courts back the cities

The Hague, Vernier and Lancy in Switzerland and the Stockholm region have all seen local bans upheld. A local ban that survives in court becomes a template for every other city. The counter-example is Lyon, whose blanket digital ban was struck down because courts demand local justification.

From the message to the medium

Zurich has voted to remove all digital screens, France switches off every illuminated ad between 1am and 6am, and Paris cut advertising surface by 40 per cent. The target is no longer what the industry shows but that it exists, with luminance and light pollution the new line of attack.

The wave goes global

Betting ads have come off public space in Rio and are under vote in São Paulo; Bulgaria has announced a gambling-ad ban; Lithuania banned outdoor gambling ads last year; and on 8 October the Polish Sejm passed a total alcohol advertising ban, including beer, by 400 votes to 33. “It’s happening here, now.”

Slide: six ways to switch off a medium, from banning the product to taxing it, at every level from EU to citizens' initiative

Six ways to switch off a medium, available at every level of government. Slide: Kai-Marcus Thäsler

Slide: timeline of first movers per banned category from tobacco in 1962 to fast fashion in 2026

Category creep: each new ban is smaller in revenue and bigger in symbolism. Slide: Kai-Marcus Thäsler

The most radical domino of 2026, Thäsler told the room, did not fall in Amsterdam or Zurich but less than 600 kilometres from Warsaw. Not a product ban, not a city ban, but a whole national Out of Home market redrawn by law in a single summer. He handed over to the man who has lived through it.

Hungary: “This is not regulation. It’s destruction.” 07:17

Tamás Bauer, owner and Managing Director of IK Outdoor and Chair of the OOH section of the Hungarian Advertising Association, called his presentation the anatomy of an industry’s destruction, and the title was not exaggeration.

The road to Hungary’s new law, he explained, began with the previous government’s own use of the medium. Years of aggressive political campaigns on the streets, first against external enemies and from 2024 against the opposition leader Péter Magyar, fuelled public anger towards “posters” in general. When the new government took office, the same omnibus law that banned hate-fuelled propaganda also restricted the formats of commercial Out of Home nationwide, with no impact assessment, and gave local authorities the power to go further. Budapest, which accounts for around 60 per cent of the Hungarian market, did exactly that.

3 months

from the law taking effect on 1 October to the deadline for removing sites on 31 December 2026

100%

of billboards removed in Budapest, with 90 per cent gone outside the capital; building wraps and freestanding citylights banned nationwide

~300

media owners expected to go out of business, with around 19,000 people losing site rental income

22%

of Hungarians reject commercial posters; 60 per cent reject hate propaganda and 55 per cent reject political campaigns

What survives in Budapest is a narrow list: citylights and digital citylights inside bus shelters, rooftop advertising, around a fifth of the advertising columns and size-limited vehicle advertising. The remaining digital screens must run static content only, with a minimum spot length of 20 seconds and a mandatory shutdown from 10pm to 6am. The vast majority of surviving sites, Bauer noted, are linked to just two media owners. The government’s stated reasons, he argued, do not survive contact with the evidence.

The claim“OOH is visual pollution”

The justification offered for removing billboards, building wraps and freestanding citylights.

The realityThe bans are selective

Billboards and wraps are banned, but bus-shelter citylights can stay. The restrictions do not match the argument.

The claim“Posters distract drivers”

Road safety was cited as a reason for removing roadside formats.

The realityNo accident statistics support it

No data was produced linking Hungarian OOH sites to accidents.

The claim“People hate posters”

Public anger at political propaganda was taken as anger at advertising.

The realityOnly 22 per cent reject commercial ads

An August 2026 survey found 60 per cent reject hate propaganda and 55 per cent political campaigns, but just 22 per cent commercial posters.

The claim“There will be no economic impact”

No impact assessment was prepared before the law was passed.

The realityHundreds of companies, billions of forints

Around 300 companies going bankrupt, some 19,000 people losing income, around 1,200 jobs and roughly HUF 5 billion a year in tax revenue lost.

The money will not stay in the market either. A PanMedia study published on 25 September found that 49 per cent of advertisers plan to cut their Out of Home budgets and 77 per cent will shift spending to social media, which in Hungary is untaxed. Sixty-three per cent say the law makes their business goals harder to achieve.

Bauer was candid about the industry’s own response: silence from other media and from local authorities, and deep-rooted fear among advertisers of challenging politicians’ arguments. His association took the fight to television, radio and the press. And there was, he said, a final irony. The two companies that will survive are Publimont, whose owner has strong ties to the previous government and which displayed 78 per cent of its posters, and JCDecaux.

“If we let toxic politics take over public space, one day there will be nobody left to defend our industry.”

Tamás Bauer, IK Outdoor and Hungarian Advertising Association

Tamás Bauer

Owner and Managing Director / IK Outdoor

An executive with 26 years of experience in out-of-home advertising, Tamás Bauer specializes in the planning, assembly and optimization of OOH campaigns, particularly for major international agencies. His background combines marketing and brand management with long-standing leadership of sales house businesses. Leads a specialist OOH business whose work draws on decades of experience in campaign planning and optimization, supported by a highly skilled, versatile team with extensive market knowledge.

Slide: the legislative OOH Armageddon, with a three-month removal deadline from 1 October to 31 December 2026

A physically impossible removal deadline, and no impact assessment. Slide: Tamás Bauer

Slide: government claims versus reality on visual pollution, driver distraction, public opinion and economic impact

Government claims versus reality. Slide: Tamás Bauer

Stopping the dominoes: what WOO is building 18:36

Thäsler returned to the stage with the second half of his argument: that dominoes can be stopped. Geneva’s voters rejected a “Zéro Pub” initiative; Lyon’s digital ban fell in court; the UK kept Out of Home out of its national HFSS rules; Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled there can be no removal without compensation; and Romania’s gambling-ad ban was watered down in committee. None of that happened by accident.

Regulation is one of WOO’s four workstreams, alongside creativity, sustainability and data, and in twelve months it has gone from a board decision to working infrastructure: a worldwide restrictions database and map, a member survey on product-category restrictions, best-practice documents drawn from Australia, Germany and the UK, an expert pool and a communications toolkit. Next come a Policy Academy and a Global Policy Radar, the early-warning system that scans bills, city resolutions, consultations and court cases in local languages and alerts national associations before a vote rather than after it. “Time is our most valuable resource,” Thäsler said. “Early warning buys us months, not days.”

Five arguments that work

Thäsler also set out the evidence base that national associations can take into any council chamber.

1The least annoying medium

Only 10 per cent of people find Out of Home advertising annoying, against 47 per cent for music streaming and 38 per cent for linear TV (Havas Media Consumer Pulse, 2025).

2The smallest carbon footprint

Five grams of CO₂ per thousand contacts for a small DOOH screen, against 290 for online video, 667 for linear TV and 9,000 for a newspaper.

3Safe, dark-sky friendly, self-regulated

No significant increase in accidents at digital roadside sites; a minor contribution to urban light pollution, with shop windows the biggest source; fewer than 5 per cent of community complaints in Australia concern OOH.

4Out of Home gives more than it takes

Official emergency warnings on street screens, media for good, at least EUR 30 million a year guaranteed to Paris from a single street-furniture contract, and Essays for Peace on 120,000 screens in 250 cities.

5Part of the smart city

Real-time information, connectivity and charging, urban sensing, civic communication and publicly funded infrastructure, all financed by advertising rather than the city budget.

The WOO playbook: five principles

Be early, with a radar rather than a fire brigade. Be evidence-led, because internationally comparable research beats national anecdotes. Build alliances across associations, operators, agencies, advertisers and the people who build and maintain the sites. Offer self-regulation before others regulate for you. And protect the industry’s reputation, because content that triggers bans puts everyone at risk. Hungary, he added, is the proof of that last point.

From members, WOO needs four things: feed the radar with every draft law, city resolution and consultation; answer the survey on product-category restrictions; nominate lawyers, researchers and strategists for the expert pool; and use the toolkit.

Slide: dominoes that have fallen, from Amsterdam to Hungary, beside those stopped or pushed back, from Geneva to Romania

Dominoes can be stopped: Geneva, Lyon, the UK, Poland and Romania. Slide: Kai-Marcus Thäsler

Slide: the WOO playbook of five principles, be early, be evidence-led, build alliances, offer self-regulation, protect our reputation

The WOO playbook: five principles. Slide: Kai-Marcus Thäsler

Expert talk: Poland and Austria 32:28

The session closed with two markets where, in Thäsler’s words, the next domino is wobbling, and two leaders with very different stories to tell.

Paweł Orłowski

CEO, Synergic · Poland

Poland’s problem, Orłowski explained, has been the absence of regulation rather than its excess. Most Polish cities have had no rules at all, and the result is a visibly cluttered streetscape that makes the industry an easy target. The new “landscape resolutions” now being adopted city by city, including the one under consultation in Warsaw, should bring order: fewer sites, better sites, fair competition between operators and an end to building wraps. His verdict was “less, but better advertising”.

Asked about compensation for removed sites, he said he knew of no cases to date, although Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal has ruled that removal without compensation is unconstitutional. On the measurement side, the Polish industry body OOHlife is tendering a new national audience measurement system, which he sees as essential to making the case for the medium with advertisers and regulators alike.

Andreas Allerstorfer

CEO, AWS Out of Home Media Group · Austria

Austria, by contrast, is heavily regulated across road traffic law, building codes, light emissions and nature conservation, and Allerstorfer, who for years was the voice of outdoor advertisers in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, argued that the industry has learned to live well with it. The key is a close and continuous dialogue with the cities, which in Vienna goes back to the founding of Gewista by the city itself in 1921. The company is still a third owned by the city, with JCDecaux holding the rest, and has around 70 per cent of the market; EPAMEDIA has a further 25 per cent.

That dialogue is slow but it works. Getting permission for digital screens took from 2015 to 2020, and the industry won it by demonstrating ambient-light sensors that cap luminance at 4,000 nits by day and 200 to 350 at night. When a council in Amstetten tried to go further, the court ruled for the media industry. His message to the room: “We sit in one boat.” Austria’s Outdoor Server audience measurement system, he added, gives the industry the data it needs to prove its value to both clients and cities.

A question from the floor on Italy brought both strands together. Regulation there is centralised in principle, but the regions have begun to act on their own, with Emilia-Romagna moving against digital screens on grounds of light pollution even as a giant LED wall goes up beside Milan’s Duomo. The domino, as Thäsler had said, does not always fall where you expect it.

“Stay on the right side of legislation so that we grow in an orderly and socially responsible way.”Tom Goddard, WOO President

Kai-Marcus Thäsler

WOO Vice-President · Managing Director, Bundesverband Aussenmedien e.V. (FAW), Germany

Kai-Marcus Thäsler leads WOO’s regulation workstream and runs the German Out of Home association. Introducing the Warsaw session, WOO President Tom Goddard said he could think of no better guide to the regulatory landscape. The restrictions database, map and toolkit described in this session are available to members at worldooh.org/regulation-and-policy.

Watch the session, use the toolkit

The full regulation session, together with every presentation and panel from Warsaw and the speakers’ slides, is available to WOO members through the WOO Database. Members can also feed the Global Policy Radar and answer the product-category survey from the Regulation and Policy section.

Members: videos and slides Regulation and Policy About the Warsaw Forum

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