OOH, experiential: The skip button doesn’t work out here

I spent a few days last week in Nashville at the MediaPost OOH and Experiential Summit, and I came back with something I didn’t entirely expect.  I uncovered a media format that may not be completely paved over by the integration of AI, but may instead expand and grow as a result of the ongoing experiences of real people.

I’ve spent most of my career in digital. I understand impressions, click-through rates, viewability scores, and all the other metrics we’ve built our industry around. OOH and experiential have always lived on the periphery of that world, more of a nice-to-have, a brand awareness play you do when you have budget left over and need to fill in some reach gaps (not my words — this was said at the conference).

The industry has treated it that way for years, and that treatment hasn’t matched the reality of what the channel delivers. The conversations I had last week made that clearer than ever.

Can’t fast-forward a billboard

The fact is, the skip button doesn’t work for OOH and experiential media. You can’t fast-forward a billboard, or swipe over a moment that actually stops you in your tracks. In a world where every digital format has trained audiences to tune out or skip, OOH and experiential are earning attention by being genuinely impossible to ignore. That’s not a small thing.

What I heard repeatedly is that this medium is maturing in ways that should make every media planner sit up and pay attention. The measurement story has genuinely improved. Location data, proximity targeting, foot-traffic attribution, and real-time DOOH integration with mobile identity are the foundation of the format. Channels are becoming attributable in ways that survive scrutiny, and numbers are starting to reflect that.

Not to be overlooked, but the best work in this space isn’t winning because it’s measurable. It’s winning because it’s creative and drives measurable results.

Bold piece of creative

There are many opportunities in OOH to build a genuinely bold piece of creative that makes someone stop walking, turn around, and pull out their phone — not because a call-to-action told them to, but because they couldn’t help it. That’s an entirely different conversation from most standard digital formats.

That content doesn’t just stay on the street. It travels. It shows up in social feeds, in group chats, in earned media coverage. Nobody snaps a picture of a banner ad.

OOH and experiential media get amplified, and that amplification is effectively a real-time measurement of whether your creative was good enough to matter.  Social engagement is the truest signal the industry has for whether an activation resonated.

As for AI, it is being used to massively improve the back-end work required to identify locations and meet the needs of the strategy, but AI can never replace the eye of an expert who knows which board or digital screen in the right location will pop. 

Wildly complex

This is a category of media that is wildly complex when you dive in to realise how many different types of media fall under the category bucket of OOH. No AI can keep up with that, and no AI will ever ‘see’ the placement at dusk and dawn and know what will work to capture attention. Context matters, and AI doesn’t have it.

What all of this adds up to is a channel that is no longer asking to be a supporting player. OOH and experiential are earning a seat at the primary table, and the brands that are treating them that way, building campaigns around the real-world moment first and extending outward from there, are getting results that the impression-chasers aren’t.

Nashville was a good reminder of that. The city itself is proof that a song, a stage, can make a stranger feel something they didn’t expect to feel. That’s not a bad brief for what the practitioners in OOH and experiential can do.