What Does the Future of Media Investment Look Like? Expert Insights from the OOH Media Conference

June 3, 2025

The OAAA’s annual OOH Media Conference always serves as a pulse check for out of home advertising – a chance for us to look at where we are, how we got here, and perhaps most importantly, where to next.

It was in that spirit that the conference hosted a CIO panel entitled “The Future of Media Investment,” moderated by OUTFRONT SVP of National Sales Marc Miller. Marc was joined by agency holding company executives Carrie Drinkwater of Carat, Katerina Sudit of MRM Media, and Pat LaCroix of MissionOne Media. With such a high-powered panel, this discussion was sure to yield some gems of knowledge – and it did not disappoint. Here are a few of the highlights from the conversation.

On why OOH is undervalued as a channel

Carrie: Things are getting bucketed incorrectly…I think there's a lot of misattribution in our industry in general…like how podcasts’ number one platform is YouTube, but it's audio – yet it's really on video and it's getting millions of views. I think out of home suffers the same misattribution…being able to demonstrate the business results, we have to be able to demonstrate how – good out of home really is so impactful. The technology, the data, the creativity that it offers across all platforms… being able to tie those to business results or awareness, word of mouth, other cultural impacts. Really demonstrating the benefit and the impact on business is needed to help move the needle.

Katerina: Out of home is a hugely strategic area. It can amplify other channels. It can deliver a real-world experience. It provides incredible contextual relevance opportunities…it has all of these incredible strategic applications that are not just – what is the scale of a national campaign or what are you doing on a local market – so if we start thinking about it as strategic applications of growth rather than just scaled growth…the biggest challenge that we have as agencies is that we are dying for new ways to use the things that are already out there but we just don’t have time to solve for that…allow us to understand how to strategically use the medium based on what we’re trying to do.

 
Pat: The incentives aren't there. I think they want to see immediate ROAS. They want to make sure it's going to work in their marketing mix models, and not to say that it doesn't drive immediate ROI but in the current kind of systems the metrics, the knobs that people are used to looking at and turning…frankly a lot of people are just…kind of incentivized to not get fired versus get promoted, and that doesn't work in out of home's favor…the industry needs to both speak the common language and showcase how it's going to drive real business results, speak more to some of the metrics that people are used to um working against and buying against, but then also showcase that yes, you can buy this and use these platforms at scale.

On OOH as brand experience

Katerina: The big opportunity is to not even to think about OOH as a channel. We aren't living in a channel world. It's not about programmatic, out of home. or TV channels – channels don't exist anymore. Think about it - TikTok is stealing share from every video platform, from search – search isn't Google and Bing anymore it's Perplexity, it's ChatGPT, it's TikTok…so even considering out of home as a channel I think is deeply limiting. We need to think about how we're building experiences for the brands and for our clients and therefore the opportunity for out of home to completely go through a reimagination and become endless opportunities… it is really a part of a brand experience and we just need to think of, what is the strategic role that it's playing in that moment, and how can it become something that really just transcends real worlds and digital worlds.


Pat: It's not a channel. It's so much bigger than that. It's the opportunity to reach somebody at the right time, right place, right message. It’s a canvas that can be highly creative…Nine times out of ten outdoor is where we went to be like "Okay, what can we put in the pitch to get the award for?"…outdoor was the place where you could do the most creative stuff, the most breakthrough stuff. You can do real breakthrough work that ultimately is going to drive not just a ton of attention but stuff that's going to be seen and remembered and then ultimately drive action.

On shifting emphasis from performance to brand

Katerina: The industry for the last ten years, writ large, has had a short-termism mentality. It's been, what is attributable, what is the last click, what can I prove to Wall Street, to the board, to my stakeholders, and a lot of the opportunities have basically fallen by the wayside…what's fascinating is that Forrester and Analytic Partners released a study that basically said that upwards of 60 to 90% of sales is being directly attributed to brand efforts – not how brand is helping, but performance directly attributing to those brand efforts. And it makes sense. When you think about how the influx of DTC brands have been operating, they've essentially flattened the funnel. In social today, a DTC brand can go from first awareness to consideration to purchase in under a minute and a half! So the funnel doesn't really exist in that way anymore. We can't think about brand and demand and silos. You have to think about them collectively.

Carrie: If you don't have enough brand, it's not a funnel – it becomes a cylinder. I don't think that works. You will start to see all clients will start to see their funnel turn into cylinders; long term I do there will be consequence when you see some of these DTC companies that were just digital starting to appear [in channels] where they have to grow their brand because they're beyond the point of return when they're just speaking one-to-one.

Pat: I used to lead media and advertising at Bose. We might have done experiential OOH activations but no traditional outdoor, which in hindsight - you think about headphones and being on the go and traveling – so endemic to the space, but we didn't do it because the metrics weren't there and we were very much a performance media-driven company…Being someone more positioned in the upper funnel on the brand side, I never was walking around saying "These millions of dollars I'm spending, it doesn't have to perform, it's just there to get awareness." It's not like that, and that the flip side's not like that. All these things need to perform and just putting things in what are traditionally known as performance media channels like pay-per-click or even paid social, it doesn't do enough. Someone has to do the job of creating attention and awareness and familiarity amongst an audience in order…to ultimately make people aware, make people consider, ultimately convert, and stay loyal…No channel only does one and not the other; you can use search platforms in a way to help build proper awareness and you can certainly use television and outdoor and radio to drive sales.

On the power of social out of home (#sOOH)

Katerina: When you think about the old ways of engaging with out of home, technology has taken us to such infinite places right now… it really is a bridge between the real world, the physical world and the digital world – and it was all it was all catalyzed by COVID. All of a sudden in the span of two weeks we needed to figure out what our own brands were in digital environments. So we're kind of a few years past that and what we've seen is that there have been excellent campaigns… when we look at Charli XCX’s brat wall, that was phenomenal and the foundation of it was out of home. But what that did is it caused this incredible echo effect across the digital universe into social spaces, into all sorts of other environments that drove the success of that campaign.

 
Carrie: The growth of social media has heightened the connection…people just want to share and show…I’ve seen so many amazing out of home campaigns on my feed… social has amplified the power and beauty of out of home.

Pat: I think there's opportunity because it is truly both digital and physical. It can bridge both worlds and be very precise in terms of understanding where someone is and what's going on in the culture, then layering in things like proximity and place-based information, all driving to some certain type of action. It's social, but also, it's inviting participation. I think the convergence of what's going on in OOH with retail media and then the phone being the connection between the two - the opportunity is vast. The potential is huge.

On the rise of automated buying for out of home

Pat: Everything has to drive towards measurable outcomes, and I think it can be done on a small scale to kind of prove its worth but if the data is there and you can show a throughline that these placements and these places are driving some form of desired action and behavior… out of home is really a barometer for where culture is at…driving down the Mass Pike where you see gambling and cannabis billboards all over the place it's like, well that's where the culture is at. And then the fact that it is such a canvas to do such a higher bar of creative than other channels…it still comes down to CPMs and CPAs and CPCs and maybe even CTRs still, but the ultimate idea that you can really see when you have a higher level of creative, how that drives a much greater level of attention and then hopefully action.

 

On touching culture via out of home advertising

Carrie: I love what Kraft Heinz has been doing…DJ Mustard performs with Kendrick Lamar and by fate in Kendrick Lamar's GRAMMY Award-winning song he says “mustard!” So he was nominated for a GRAMMY and he was performing at the Super Bowl - all Kismet - and so we bought a spot in the GRAMMYs last-minute. We tried to position it around when we thought he would win…Thankfully he won. Right when he won, we launched a big out of home campaign that said “Mustaaaard!” on the creative. We did a whole social thing around it…it was so powerful…it was amazing. It was just one of those moments that you just love in our business where you could take advantage of a moment in culture and make a mustard brand part of culture! I love when a CPG can make some magic happen.


Katerina: We had a campaign for Sparkling Ice...we actually briefed for that campaign around not awareness or funnel metrics or any of those things but we were like what type of a world would a brand like this create and be able to connect in culture with Gen Z. It was all about an egalitarian world, one that is not weighed down by a lot of the things that are unfair in this world. And that's what the brand needs to stand for. So we had a campaign during Barbie - do you guys remember Barbiegate? Biggest feminine power movie of the year and the two main females, the director [Greta Gerwig] and Margot Robbie, the lead actress, get overlooked for an Oscar. And [Ryan Gosling], who was fine as Ken, he was not bad but he was fine - he gets the Oscar nod. So Barbiegate ensues.

Five days before the Oscars, we called the network and we said “listen, we need the spot right after best director,” where Greta Gerwig was going to be notably absent from…we ran a 15-second – I don't want to call it a spot because it had nothing to do with the brand – all it said was…"Congratulations to all the Greta directors” – then a beat – then cross out “Greta” and put “great” directors, wink. And that was it! We ran it at the same time in Times Square because it was an incredible amplification moment of something that was happening… there were more people probably in Times Square taking pictures and sharing on social than were actually watching the Oscars… we really were able to not just be really creative, but we were written up in Vanity Fair…it was a huge win for the brand and we couldn't have done it without Times Square.


Pat: The creativity of outdoor, broadly speaking, is what makes it unique and different, in addition to the proximity. When you can map that scale with soul together, that's kind of where the magic happens, and unlike what's happened in traditional, digital channels, programmatic and data and ad tech, it can somewhat be a race to the bottom and lead people to oblivion…I don't think that will ever happen to outdoor.

Are you trying to touch the culture? We can help. Contact OUTFRONT today.

Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Manager @ OUTFRONT

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