Billboards Are Just the Beginning – IRL Advertising Is All About the Experience

November 11, 2025

If you’ve ever gone to a sporting event on the scale of the Super Bowl or the FIFA World Cup, you know that it’s bigger than just what happens on the field. The excitement generated by cultural touchstones like these cannot be contained even by the largest stadium – but rather they engage entire cities!

Shared enthusiasm on such a massive scale across a single geographic area creates a prime opportunity for advertisers to join the fun with IRL advertising. And billboards are just the beginning. OUTFRONT can now help brands create connection and cultural relevance in more ways than ever.


If you were in the Big Easy for the last Big Game, our work was impossible to ignore. We transformed some of New Orleans’ largest structures into unmissable showcases for brands like Verizon, Bud Light, and FanDuel.

And this season, we’re raring up to run it back. That’s why we’ve partnered with the Bay Area Host Committee, to facilitate brand experiences across the region during the 2026 FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl LX. The BAHC is a non-profit entity that partners with local teams, civic leaders, and businesses to maximize the economic, cultural, and social impact of sporting events and major cultural tentpoles, anything from Coachella to Comic-Con.

In recent weeks we’ve signed additional partnerships with the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission (LASEC), the Atlanta Sports Council, and the Dallas Sports Commission. That’s four FIFA host cities and each of the next three Super Bowls if you’re keeping score at home.

Why are our partnerships with these official host committees so important? It’s because there’s a big difference between being an integrated part of the experience and doing guerrilla marketing stunts. These committees juggle the interests of numerous stakeholders, including the municipality, official sponsors, the league, local businesses, property owners, and the fans themselves. Through our partnerships, we can keep you on everyone’s good side and help brands break through – for the right reasons.


As for what kind of brand experiences we can create to surprise and delight your audience, building-sized super graphics are just the beginning.

Looking to make jaws drop? How about projection mapping or a drone show? Trying to create closer connections with your customers? Let’s brainstorm an interactive brand activation.

We’ve assembled a stable of experiential experts who specialize in making you unmissable and unforgettable. Each of our partners is best-in-breed, fully vetted, and ready to go. One of them is Wasserman Live, whose work builds brand excitement in Super Bowl host cities year after year.

Of course, brands looking to make a big impact at these big events can also tap into the full suite of high-tech capabilities from the OUTFRONT XLabs team, including 3D creative, augmented reality, dynamic digital, interactive QR codes that control the ad’s content, generative AI, live streaming, and much more. Digital out of home makes the perfect complement to brand activations, driving awareness, attendance, and engagement – especially for people as passionate as sports fans.

And since measurement is everything to marketers, we also offer enhanced measurement and attribution capabilities so you can quantify your brand event’s success.

Brands are already connecting by creating IRL experiences, supported with OOH media. At the U.S. Open, brands like Dove and JPMorgan Chase fueled their on-site activations with digital out of home campaigns across New York City’s subways and commuter rail systems – a perfect illustration of the synergy that only happens in real life. In-person events are one of the best ways for brands to increase trust, doing so for more than nine in ten attendees (SOURCE: Freeman). For consumers, trust truly matters, whether you’re choosing a financial advisor or a deodorant. And this combination ensures that the brand is present not only during the big moments but the quiet ones as well.


By forging these partnerships, OUTFRONT has established a turnkey way for municipalities, leagues, host committees, and brands to join forces and spread big-game excitement beyond the stadium’s walls, across the entire region.

And by delegating all things branded to us, municipal leaders can focus on the not-insignificant day-to-day task of keeping their cities running smoothly. The operational burden of hosting a Super Bowl, after all, is not small.


“We create temporary platforms that allow brands to show up in real life — in ways that are culturally relevant to each city and event,” said Patrick Cresson, Vice President, Asset Development and Events at OUTFRONT. “These partnerships elevate the city’s look, feel, and energy, creating experiences that make both brands and visitors eager to come back.”

We can also help municipalities monetize their real estate, including through temporary event-based digital networks as well as placements on existing infrastructure on city property. OUTFRONT is committed to the communities we serve – not just philosophically but in the most material sense.


After all, we love a good win-win at OUTFRONT, and there are plenty of other winners when cities call us in on the play.

For the leagues, it’s a critical means to protect the value of sponsorships and media by heading off guerilla marketing stunts or ambushes.

For property owners, it’s an opportunity to be part of the big event and tap into an additional source of revenue while getting your share of attention during your city’s moment in the sun.


For brands, what the partnership means is this: if you’re looking to make a larger-than-life impact at IRL’s biggest events or maximize the return on your sponsorship dollars, OUTFRONT is your one-stop shop. And we’re the real deal.

Our lawyers won’t let us say “the only limit is your imagination” so instead we’ll just close with this:


When it’s time for your brand’s dream to come true in real life, we can make it happen. Contact OUTFRONT now.

Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Manager @ OUTFRONT

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