👋 Hello billboard believers and banner sceptics!

While your digital budgets were busy chasing third-party cookies down the drain and your CTV ads were buffering on someone’s shared Netflix password, out-of-home quietly swaggered back into the media spotlight—like an ex who got hot over lockdown.

And now, thanks to a new five-year Kantar study, it’s not just back. It’s outperforming.

Billboards are back, baby. And this time, they brought data.

Forget QR codes on bus shelters and cringe AR gimmicks—turns out those towering displays you used to ignore are now outperforming the digital darlings of the last decade. The study, done with Clear Channel Outdoor, looked at thousands of campaigns and found something shocking to absolutely no one who’s been paying attention: Out Of Home drives a 13.3-percent higher increase in ad awareness than digital, TV, and even CTV.

Yes, that includes all those six-second skippable pre-rolls your intern insisted were “so Gen Z.”

It gets better. Out Of Home now matches linear TV for driving brand favourability and purchase intent—but costs a hell of a lot less. In other words, it’s the media equivalent of discovering you can buy Waitrose meal deals on Too Good To Go.

Short answer: screens got crowded, streets didn’t.

As digital saturation reaches peak doomscroll and ad-free streaming turns every living room into a brand-free zone, marketers are rediscovering something magical—people still go outside. And when they do, they see your ad. All of it. Unskippable. Unmuted. Undeniably there.

Out Of Home fills the awkward silences that digital can’t. It complements TV without needing a remote. It’s the wingman your media plan didn’t know it needed.

Oh, and now it’s got programmatic pipes and pixel-perfect measurement, too.

Digital Out Of Home grew a spine. And an API.

Remember when Out Of Home was just “poster sites and praying for footfall”? Those days are gone.

Thanks to programmatic buying and smart measurement tools, you can now target audiences by postcode, weather, mood (yes, really), and probably their last Deliveroo order. UK programmatic Out Of Home spend is set to hit one-hundred-and-five-million-pounds this year—because buying billboards like banners suddenly makes terrifying sense.

Dynamic creative? Check. AR interactivity? Check. Real-time optimisation? Also check. Basically, Out Of Home is now playing in the same sandbox as digital, but with actual attention.

And 76-percent of consumers report taking real-world action after seeing a DOut Of Home ad. That’s not engagement. That’s results.

Time to wake up and smell the outdoor inventory.

This isn’t a cute media trend. This is a strategy shift. If your omnichannel plan still treats Out Of Home like an optional extra between paid social and overpriced CTV—good luck with that.

Even better, Out Of Home is the antidote to ad fatigue. People don’t scroll past it. They walk right into it.

It’s a media maturity glow-up.

Out Of Home isn’t back. It’s evolved. It’s measurable. It’s programmatic. And it might just be the last truly public ad format left that still commands genuine attention.

So while the rest of your media plan is quietly weeping into another attribution model, Out Of Home is standing ten-feet tall in a premium postcode, reminding consumers exactly who you are.

Your move TikTok…

Out Of Home really is the only place left where size still matters. Well maybe not in every situation but that’ll get HR’s attention!

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Until next time you massively undervalued media genius!