OOH is often talked about as if it belongs to a different era, a legacy branding channel in a world obsessed with clicks, conversions and short term metrics. Yet for a growing number of agency leaders, OOH is not just compatible with performance marketing, it is uniquely equipped to thrive in it.
That argument was put under the microscope at “The Future of OOH in the Performance Age”, a panel held at an exclusive industry event hosted by top independent OOH agency, billups, at Outernet in London. Moderated by Nick Bell, Managing Director of billups UK, the discussion brought together leaders from across the independent and network landscape, Hannah Saunders, Business Director, Bicycle London; Jack Chape, EMEA Head of Integrated Media, PMG; Matt Semple, Client Managing Director, Medialab; and Lee Baring, Managing Director, The Specialist Works (TSW).
As Bell noted when introducing the panel, the conversation is long overdue. “You have heard a lot from billups today about what we are doing in the industry,” he said, “but it is just as important to hear from the people who plan and buy across every channel, not only OOH.” He positioned the session as a chance to challenge assumptions rather than reinforce them, reminding the room that “OOH should be part of the performance conversation every day.”
Performance is more than last click
The panel started with the deceptively simple question of what performance actually means in OOH.
For Jack Chape, it starts with the fundamentals of the medium. “OOH has a fairly defensible moat around it from a performance point of view,” he argued. “It is the highest reaching medium in the UK, it drives incredibly high attention, and it ranks very high for trust and credibility. All of those things combined drive performance.”
Chape pointed out that OOH reaches around 95% of UK adults every day, building exposure over commutes, lunch breaks and weekend trips. “Those aggregate exposures are far more impactful than a single impression,” he said, adding that the channel consistently lifts the performance of others.
“Introducing OOH to TV can increase sales potential by around 17 to 20 percent, and we know it drives mobile search too, which is strongly linked to market share.”
Matt Semple warned that the word performance itself often leads marketers in the wrong direction. “Everybody thinks performance means digital, and last click,” he said. “But unlocking performance for a lot of our scaling clients has meant investing in channels like OOH, when the returns from TV or social have plateaued. OOH has always been a strong performance channel, it just does that work further up the funnel.”
From Lee Baring’s perspective, the clients TSW works with bring a very clear lens. “We work with entrepreneurial brands who are ultra focused on business impact,” he said. “For them, the question is what does it drive to the bottom line, and how can you feed that through. It is really difficult if you only lean on short term signals. You have to see OOH as a broad, mass reach medium that will drive outcomes, then design tests and experiments that prove it.”
Measurement, the missing pieces
If the medium’s fundamentals are strong, measurement is where the cracks appear.
Saunders noted that many of Bicycle’s clients use Marketing Mix Modelling as their gold standard, but that it rarely gives OOH a fair reading.
“MMM often under attributes OOH,” she said. “Audience data can be patchy, methodologies differ between suppliers, and we are often running regional OOH while sales are reported at a national level. It means the channel looks like it is underperforming, even when we know it is doing the heavy lifting.”
Where clients are prepared to test, though, the picture looks very different.
“With Mojo we were lucky enough to start when they had almost zero awareness in the UK,” Saunders explained. “We ran isolated regional tests with OOH as the lead channel and were able to show, with a high degree of confidence, that the campaigns drove household penetration, sales and brand uplift. That gave the client the confidence to scale into national activity.”
For Semple, in flight confidence is as important as econometric read outs. “Clients need to talk to their CMOs and CFOs about what is happening now,” he said. “We can do all the work at the start on objectives and role of channel, but if we cannot show that the ads are live, are being seen and are doing what we expect, confidence drops, especially compared with TV, which has BARB, or digital platforms with their immediate dashboards.”
Chape pointed to fragmentation as a practical barrier.
“We are dealing with disconnected measurement stories,” he said. “One media owner gives us impressions, another gives us play outs, and we are trying to stitch that together into models and cross channel analysis. There is clearly more that can be done collectively.”
Baring contrasted OOH with the way other channels have organised themselves.
“TV has Thinkbox, news brands have Newsworks,” he said. “They have invested heavily in studies and tools that prove their strengths. OOH has bodies like Outsmart, and there is a lot of work going on, but from the outside looking in I do not see the same visible, joined up push that could really put the case in front of planners, strategists and clients.”
Learning from digital without copying it
When the conversation turned to what OOH should learn from other channels, the panel saw opportunity, but were wary of copying digital too literally.
Semple believes the audience planning discipline of digital could be usefully adapted.
“Industry planning tools often do not favour precision in OOH, because it is so geo based,” he said. “If we can align with those tools or build better ones, so we understand who is actually seeing those ads, we can make client budgets go further and push OOH into more plans.”
He also called for more experimentation. “We often treat OOH as a single block in the plan, but a roadside might perform very differently to a Tube environment for a specific advertiser. Being able to test and optimise at that level would be powerful.”
Baring drew a line under one lesson from performance TV. “Do not measure the short term just because you can,” he warned. “If you only follow short term attribution models, you end up with every DR TV campaign bought in exactly the same way, and a downward spiral. OOH should not go down that route. It should be proud of its reach and its brand building power.”
He also flagged AI as a structural shift that could benefit the medium.
“AI is changing how people search for and discover brands,” he said. “When you ask a model to recommend a product, it is not just about who bids the most, it is about which brands are famous and salient in the real world. OOH makes brands famous, and that will matter even more.”
Asked to imagine the future of OOH in the performance age, the panel kept coming back to the same conclusion, the fundamentals are already right, the job now is to prove them better.
“The channel does not need radical change,” said Saunders. “Better cross channel reach and more sophisticated audience and outcome data will move it on, but the core strengths are already there.”
Chape is excited, but cautious. “Programmatic OOH and AI driven creative are full of potential,” he said. “The key is to balance that with reach and scale, because that is what lifts everything else.”
Semple described OOH as “the indestructible channel” in a world where many digital environments are becoming less appealing to consumers.
Baring summed up the challenge with a simple wish. “If I had a magic wand, I would create a measurement system that proves the effect of every campaign,” he said. “People notice it even when they think they do not. Capturing that impact is how the medium will claim the place in the performance age it deserves.”
Bringing the session to a close, Bell reminded the audience what unites both specialists and generalists. “Most people in this room love OOH,” he said. “The task now is proving its value in the language that performance marketers understand.” It was a fitting end to a panel that made one thing very clear, OOH is ready for the performance age, but the industry must now step up and show it.
