2024 was another strong year for Out of Home (OOH), and 2025 is poised for even greater growth and innovation. The sector continues to evolve, consistently delivering exceptional creativity, data-driven strategies and technology-powered results for advertisers.
With global OOH revenue projected to reach US$41.82bn in 2025 – and digital OOH (DOOH) growing 8.44% to reach US$22bn – further expansion is on the horizon, largely driven by increased investment and rising programmatic OOH (prOOH) adoption.
As OOH evolves, several priorities will continue to shape its direction in 2025. These include leveraging econometrics to maximise ROI, supporting brands navigating new HFSS regulations to maintain reach, aligning DOOH with retail media networks to enhance the path to purchase, and harnessing AI to drive efficiency and creativity. Together, these focus areas will ensure OOH remains innovative, adaptable, and a key player in the advertising ecosystem.
Beyond these priorities, we believe 2025 will be defined by seven key trends shaping the future of OOH:
- The fabric of real-world connections creating micro-moments
- Continued growth of prOOH
- Data-driven OOH anchors omnichannel campaigns
- Supporting sustainable marketing strategies with OOH
- OOH’s credibility building consumer confidence
- The convergence of experiential and OOH
1. The Fabric of Real-World Connections
In a world saturated with digital interactions, consumers are craving authentic, real-world connections; and spending even more time Out of Home. People are seeking depth, authenticity and sensory richness in their experiences.
They want to engage with the world in meaningful ways, finding textural experiences that connect them with their environment and each other. Accenture has termed this “social rewilding” – a quest to reconnect socially in the real world, often but not always around nature, and to balance technology’s role in the moments that bring people joy and well-being.
In 2024, people did more physical and ‘real-world’ activities with a recent Kantar survey finding that 48% spent time outside, 47% hung out with friends in real life and 46.9% shopped in physical grocery stores. Advertising on OOH puts brands at the centre of this, woven well within the fabric of people’s everyday lives.
2. Creating Micro-Moments: OOH Delivers Broad Reach and Personal Resonance
Leveraging audience-first planning and real-time data in OOH to deliver highly contextual and targeted messaging will become mainstream in 2025. This approach will enable brands to create campaigns that feel like personalised one-to-one connections, even when reaching a wide audience across a one-to-many platform.
Personalisation in OOH is transforming how brands engage audiences – audience-first planning through Ada; and Atlas for real-time triggers such as location, weather and time of day to dynamically adapt OOH campaigns to their environment.
This enables highly relevant and impactful messaging that bridges the gap between broad reach and personal resonance. For example, kids’ sunscreen ads appear on digital OOH locations during sunny weather, placed where parents of school-aged children are more likely to see them. Similarly, protein coffee promotions day-parted in the morning on commuter routes and delivered programmatically to those more likely to go to the gym.
3. Continued Growth of Programmatic OOH
PrOOH will continue its rapid growth, as more brands embrace its precision, flexibility, and real-time capabilities at scale.
By combining the flexibility of digital platforms with the unparalleled reach of OOH, programmatic allows advertisers to enhance their media plans, buy, and optimise ad placements in real-time and aligned to audiences. This precision enables brands to deliver highly relevant messages to targeted audiences at the right moment and place.
In the UK, PrOOH spend will continue to grow, rising from an estimated £86.8 million in 2024 to £105m in 2025. We’ll see more advertisers using prOOH, with an estimated 36% of media plans set to include prOOH and a +29% average increase in prOOH campaign spend over the next 18 months.
4. Data-Driven OOH Anchors Omnichannel Campaigns in the Real World
The linchpin between physical and digital touchpoints, data-driven OOH will play a pivotal role in omnichannel marketing strategies in 2025.
OOH works as the link between consumers’ digital footprints and experiences, delivering holistic campaigns. Creating connections across screens, OOH cements brands in consumers’ day-to-day lives, seamlessly, linking campaigns across mobile, social, and in-store. Connection between screens increases engagement and enhances brand recall.
Marketers can achieve cohesive messaging that resonates across touchpoints by syncing OOH with digital channels like social media and mobile ads.
5. Supporting Sustainable Marketing Strategies with OOH
As sustainability becomes a core priority for consumers and businesses, OOH advertising continues taking significant strides to reduce its environmental impact. OOH has a unified carbon methodology to provide transparency and plan sustainability-focused campaigns. Industry initiatives like unified carbon methodology offers brands access to increased transparency as industry data aligns, providing the ability to plan campaigns with lower carbon footprints.
Sustainable practices, such as green-energy powered DOOH and recycled classic poster materials, are now commonplace. Industry initiatives like unified carbon calculators offer brands transparency and the ability to plan campaigns with lower carbon footprints. When compared with all other media measured, OOH accounts for 3.3% of all UK ad power consumption and <3.5% total UK ad carbon footprint.
Consumers increasingly value brands prioritising sustainability, and OOH can deliver on this expectation while maintaining the scale and impact needed to influence public perception.
6. Credibility of OOH will Help Build Consumer Confidence
OOH is proven to build trust in an era of digital misinformation, offering a credible and tangible medium for brands to utilise. Consumers are struggling to discern genuine content online, underscoring the importance of trusted offline media.
OOH has remained a stable, trusted medium for authentic brand communication. Unlike digital platforms where content credibility is often questioned, OOH offers a physical presence that reinforces trust in the real world. OOH’s tangible nature positions it as a reliable foundation for cross-channel campaigns, amplifying trust in both physical and digital spheres.
7. Experiential and OOH Will Converge
In 2025, OOH and experiential channels will become increasingly converged, blurring the lines between static media and live brand experiences. As consumers crave immersive, memorable interactions with brands, OOH will evolve to incorporate more experiential elements, turning physical spaces into interactive stages where audiences can actively engage with content.
2025 will see us reimagining physical spaces as experiential stages, blending OOH creativity with interactivity. From gamified billboards to immersive art installations, experiential OOH campaigns invite audiences to engage directly with the brand. At the end of 2024, Campaign listed its Top 10 Experiences, signifying that brand experiences have a firm place on the agenda.
These tactile, sensory-driven experiences not only enhance brand recall but also foster emotional connections, making the consumer feel part of the story and positioning OOH as a leader in creating meaningful interactions.
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