Heinz W. Ströer was born in 1938 in Nordhorn. Between 1955 and '57 he trained as a publishing specialist at Verlagshaus Altenberg in Düsseldorf. In 1957 he started working for Gramm advertising agency, where he was promoted in 1962 to manager of the poster department. In 1963 Heiner Ströer took on the management of the outdoor advertising company Joerger in Düren, went out on his own only a year later with Heinz W. Ströer GmbH & Co. KG outdoor advertising (renamed Ströer Aussenwerbung GmbH & Co. KG in 2000) and, with a mere 200 advertising spaces, began the success story that is the Ströer Group. In 1990, Heiner Ströer and Udo Müller founded Ströer City Marketing GmbH, thereby laying the cornerstone for today’s Ströer Group. Heiner Ströer passed away on 6 March 2004 at the age of 65. “Without him our company would not be what it is today,” said Udo Müller, Chairman of the Board of Ströer Out-of-Home Media AG. “With his energy, ethics and personal integrity Heiner Ströer defined the German out-of-home media industry like no other businessman before him.”