I’ve been off for a little while… Taking some time out, enjoying the garden, working on my golf handicap and keeping up to date with the industry and peers with my BEHIND THE BILLBOARD podcast. I was chatting to my pod partner Hugh Todd last summer, coffee in hand, when he turned to me after we’d finished reviewing the Outdoor Lions shortlists and winners and said something that stuck with me: “Half of these aren’t ads. They’re moments.” 

He was right. And honestly? That’s the point. I think the purest in him was a little disgusted… but the realist in him was impressed. 

In the run up to Cannes 2026 and having had the year of having some headspace to reflect on our industry, I did what I always did… started to write down some thoughts… And without a marketing department to send it to, I thought you lovely followers might be keen to hear my thoughts. 

What’s changed?

It’s clear that out-of-home remains a crucial medium in an era dominated by digital content because it occupies the only space audiences cannot avoid: the physical world. In a fragmented attention landscape, OOH offers scale, tangible presence, and cultural resonance, while increasingly adopting the agility of digital through data, interactivity, dynamic creative and of course Artificial Intelligence.

As we’ve seen together on the podcast, and as you’ll have heard in our recent 100th episode featuring Sir John Hegarty and an all-time top 100, truly great OOH work transcends the traditional poster space to become cultural phenomena — installations, projections, and digital hybrids that are contextually rich, executed boldly, and impossible to overlook.

Why?

Because when it’s OOH, it’s suddenly real. It’s trusted. Brand activations embed themselves in culture, environments, locations and audiences… They are not just campaigns any more… They are multitouch experiences with tentacles stretching across format, media and border. And I think that shift — from campaign to experience — is the single most important thing happening in our industry right now.

The feeling is the thing…

A distinct trend in OOH is the shift towards immersive experiences that hit you emotionally before they hit you rationally. On billboards, posters, in event spaces or locations — the medium is being used not merely to display information but to make people *feel* something. Awarded work last summer increasingly leaned into experience-driven creative that transforms public spaces into moments of cultural and emotional impact. The Outdoor Cannes Lions Grand Prix winners — KitKat and the Paris Olympics — lay testament to that. One was “just” a poster. The other was a huge international event. But both worked because they made you feel something real, captured in a real space, at a real moment. It suggests the future of OOH lies not only in technical innovation but in the ability to create an emotional response that lingers. And I’m also sure you’ll see more of the same this coming summer in the South of France. 

3D and anamorphic: turning billboards into cultural events

Don’t fear — tech-driven immersive executions like anamorphic illusions and 3D billboards are still flourishing in OOH. They just have their place as part of the overall campaign experience.

So called, “three-dimensional” billboards generate an immediate, captivating impact, transforming screens into cultural talking points. Brands are elevating visual storytelling with attention-grabbing 3D (or faux 3D) effects and projection mapping that overlays static visuals or buildings, making them come alive at night or targeting them around locations and relevant societal moments. And crucially, they offer brands a narrative for other channels beyond the OOH media itself — the social amplification of a great anamorphic execution can dwarf the media spend behind it.

Think about the Balenciaga 3D billboard takeover in Times Square, or the now-iconic wave on the Coex screen in Seoul that kicked the whole anamorphic trend into the mainstream. More recently, we covered Coca-Cola’s anamorphic work across multiple global markets on Behind the Billboard, and what struck me was how the 3D creative wasn’t a gimmick — it was the campaign’s engine for earned media and social sharing. The billboard *was* the content. It reminded me of when I worked with Duncan Wardle and Jay Hatcher on Disney Parks innovative projects to create social content from OOH stunts and experiences… Turning a stunt for thousands to see or do into a spectacle for hundreds of millions to feel. 

Dynamic creative and programmatic: real-time relevance

Hold the front page, stating the obvious, preaching to the choir, and still banging the 20-year-old drum, digital out-of-home is sophisticated and responsive. Shock horror. 

Ads that adapt in real time to weather, traffic, time of day, or live data — thanks to dynamic creative engines, programmatic buying platforms, and the synchronicity between them — allow brands to deliver highly contextual messaging with precision and flexibility. This isn’t theoretical any more; it’s finally happening at scale.

I know this space intimately. Back in the Grand Visual days, we had a process known internally as building a “Creative Matrix” — that was matching data, location and message, painstakingly by hand. Take the Google Maps Explore campaign: each location, condition and hand-crafted copy line was smashed together based on every data point and potential condition we had available. Thousands of data points, hundreds of people hours. The ambition was always to make the creative feel like it was speaking directly to you, right here, right now. That’s the promise of dynamic creative — and the tools have caught up with the ambition. 

The Cannes Lions judging frameworks across Creative Data, Direct, Media, and Digital Craft categories increasingly reward this kind of data-driven, experiential innovation… the best work doesn’t feel “programmatic” at all — it feels personal. And of course AI is now streamlining production processes into minutes or hours from days or weeks, while maintaining that personal feel to the output. 

AI: making the creative, ideas and media smarter

AI and analytics are helping to facilitate hyper-personalisation and provide more precise performance insights, resulting in campaigns that are both creative and accountable. From AI-driven media planning and hyper-local content adjustments to analytics-rich campaign optimisation, AI is boosting efficiency and impact across the board.

The Grand Prix Winner in B2B Lions — “Act Like You Know” for GoDaddy Airo — is a perfect example of how this plays out in a campaign. An AI-powered, human-centred narrative that turned data into a believable eyewear business experience to illustrate how small businesses can grow online. It translated complex tech into experiential engagement… and multi-format campaign including traditional OOH… blurring the lines between the real and digital/virtual worlds. Nils Leonard said to Hugh and me on Behind the Billboard EP 58, “We’re in the remit of new, challenging, original and creativity and this is something AI can never be.” The GoDaddy work got that balance right — AI as enabler, not author.

As I wrote recently in my piece on Creativity and AI, the true power of AI lies in augmenting human creativity, not replacing it. My old stablemate Neil Morris is doing brilliant work on this front with his Super Optimal offering — Design Intelligence for OOH — using AI to analyse and test creative concepts before they go live, based on previous successes, established rules, and good old-fashioned industry expertise. It’s the kind of application that makes creative people better, not redundant.

On this point, I read with great interest that US-based OOH creative agency Empirical announced EMPIQ, an AI system to supercharge their ideation and validation process for experiential and creative OOH campaigns. The explosion of AI as an aid to the creative process is creating seismic shifts in the early/planning stages of the creative process as creative agencies look to harness humanity’s last great invention. Especially powerful when coming from those with large data lakes to fish their proprietary knowledge from, while augmenting it with real time information. 

AR, VR and interactive: from passive viewing to active participation

Augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality and interactive engagement encourage audiences to immerse themselves in the work, fostering emotional connections through participation. AR and interactive displays are transforming out-of-home from something you look at to something you’re part of. Whether through smartphone-enabled overlays, touchscreens, motion sensors, or QR codes, these experiences foster deeper engagement — often resulting in significantly longer dwell times and higher conversion potential.

I keep coming back to the Pepsi Max Unbelievable bus shelter as a cornerstone project here — it’s practically OOH folklore at this point, but it proved something important: when you bring the audience into the work, they don’t just engage, they *evangelise*. The social reach of that activation dwarfed the media buy. Similarly, the EE hologram projection of Fatboy Slim DJing over the London skyline — delivered by the team at Really Creative — showed just how far creative tech has come. That wasn’t an ad. It was a spectacle. And people couldn’t stop sharing it. 

When we started our creative shop back in 2005, Neil and I launched with the mantra “Attention is Important, but Involvement is Critical.” That phrase is over twenty years old now, and never has it been more relevant than now, in this space. These technologies are finally helping deliver on the “involvement” promise at scale.

Sustainability: creativity and conscience, together

Lastly, and by no means least — brands are investing in energy-efficient displays like LED and solar-powered screens, recyclable materials, and eco-sensitive installations. These sustainable practices don’t just reduce environmental impact; they resonate with audiences who are more tuned into these issues than ever before. Brands are more committed than ever to breathing life into ideas that don’t just sell products but actively reshape cultural values, challenge stereotypes and drive more inclusive narratives in media and advertising.

You’ve only got to point at media owners Bauer Media Outdoor UK and their work in the community, or JCDecaux’s solar-powered street furniture programme, or even Ocean Outdoor’s carbon measurement work, to see how the big OOH media owners are taking their role in the creation of sustainable campaigns more seriously. 

Back to the beginning

So here’s the thing. Hugh wasn’t making a casual observation when we looked through the Cannes Lions work up in the Palais — he was describing a fundamental shift. The best OOH work isn’t something you glance at any more. It’s something you stand inside, interact with, feel, photograph, share, remember. It’s not a campaign. It’s an experience.

And for those of us who’ve spent our careers trying to make the physical world a canvas for ideas that move people… honestly, it’s never been a more exciting time to be in this space. The tools are better, the ambition is bigger, and the audience is hungry for it. 

Goodbye campaigns. Hello experiences.