Michelle Capasso, Partner & Chief Media Officer
I recently moderated a roundtable titled “The Role of OOH in Budget-Conscious Media Strategies” at the MediaPost OOH Insider Summit in Nashville. The premise was practical: how do you justify and maximize out-of-home when budgets are tight and every channel is fighting for the same budget?
While the large group started with that thought, where we ended up became something more interesting.
Within the first few minutes, the conversation moved past tactics. Formats, geography, dayparting. We landed pretty quickly on something nobody had explicitly come to discuss – are we at risk of optimizing OOH into irrelevance?
The pressure is understandable. When budgets compress, every channel gets scrutinized. And OOH has always had a measurement problem relative to digital. No click, no cookie, no clean attribution path. So the natural response is to reach for programmatic buying, efficiency metrics, and CPM comparisons that make OOH look defensible in a media plan. My colleague, Abby Sullivan, called it the digital media security blanket in her presentation, and it’s a real thing. As an industry, it can be too easy to default to what is readily measurable, even when that measurement isn’t the whole story.
And that’s when the roundtable got really interesting. The same moves that make OOH easier to defend on paper also strip out the context, physical presence, and creative intentionality that make it work. You can buy OOH like a digital impression. The question the room kept circling was whether you should.
You could see this identity shift playing out in the summit itself. The partners in attendance looked noticeably different from even a few years ago. Programmatic partners, custom digital display vendors, audience buying platforms, and measurement companies sitting alongside the traditional OOH operators. That diversity is a good thing. It signals a category opening up to more advertisers, more budgets, and more use cases than the traditional billboard buy ever could. But it also accelerates the tension. The more OOH looks and trades like digital, the harder it becomes to preserve what makes it distinct: the physical scale, the environmental context, the presence that no algorithm can fully replicate.
OOH earns its impact by showing up in the real world in a way digital can’t. A bus wrap on a commuter route isn’t competing with a display ad for attention. It’s doing something different entirely. When you reduce it to a CPM and optimize accordingly, you’re not really buying OOH anymore. You’re buying a version of it that will underperform and confirm every skeptic’s priors.
The accountability conversation that came up in the roundtable wasn’t really about measurement tools. It was about making the case for what OOH actually does, and what role it plays in your media plan.
The tension in that room isn’t going away. Budget pressure is real and the demand for accountability is fair. But the answer isn’t to make OOH behave like digital. It’s to measure what OOH actually moves: awareness, recall, physical confidence, bottom-funnel lift. And build the case from there.
The channel doesn’t need to justify itself by becoming something it isn’t. It needs better advocates for what it already is.
