POV: Why your brand should get a billboard

It’s hard not to notice a visible shift in out of home advertising at the moment: brands are embracing simplicity with bold visuals, leaning into extreme zooms or tight product crops, and letting clever, concise copy take centre stage. So-called “old media” is making a comeback, and there seems to be more to gawk at on the streets than there has been for years. As Matt Curtis, design director of Uncommon, puts it: “Now we spend our lives looking down at our phones, scrolling through rectangles, I think we’ve rediscovered the joy of looking up.”

Design teams, it seems, have taken note, with billboards being used with greater frequency and newfound confidence. One clear trend is the tendency to say less in OOH communications. Wieden+Kennedy, for example, was confident enough to drop the logo placement in a recent minimal Heinz campaign, highlighting the brand’s slogan – “It Has to Be” – instead. Adam&EveDDB cleverly struck out copy altogether in its campaign for Dreamies Cats Will Do Anything,
pushing the billboard format beyond the frame with 3D printed, life-sized cats climbing over a simple studio shot of Dreamies packaging. Just when we thought it couldn’t get more pared back, Amsterdam-based agency TBWA\\Neboko took it a step further by using nothing but a block of colour on billboards for McDonald’s. Simple red and yellow rectangles were fitted with an internal ventilation system that released the subtle scent of the fast food chain’s fries.

Although these streetside spectacles are making an impression, the minimalist poster designs driving this OOH resurgence “aren’t anything new”, says Mark Shanley, executive creative director at London ad agency Adam&EveDDB. “They’re actually a return to what posters should be. One simple thought, clearly articulated by great art direction.” Posters of the 60s and 80s marked the creative surge for minimal copy and imagery, an era that’s now widely considered as “the golden age of advertising”, (think Volkswagen’s Think Small campaign). Now, a revival of that spirit is drawing industry attention once again, and it caused quite the stir at Cannes this year.

According to Anna Bager, president of the Out of Home Advertising Association: “This year at Cannes, out of home was undeniably front and centre,” and its strong showing wasn’t just down to luck; the format was bolstered by incredibly creative storytelling decisions. One of the prize winners for 2025’s Outdoor Lions category was Prague-based agency VML, with a pared-back campaign for KitKat, Phone Break: a billboard series that communicated its message with a beautifully crafted image alone. No words, no logos.

When something starts winning creative awards, “clients and agencies alike all want a piece of the action”, Mark says. This is something that creative agency Uncommon – experts in the OOH game – have experienced first-hand. It’s also a big reason why Matt Curtis, the studio’s design director, joined Uncommon two and a half years ago. With a host of incredible projects in this area, Matt was drawn in straight away: “I was working for The New York Times Magazine, and I felt [Uncommon] was the only studio doing it this way. At Uncommon we aim to make magazine covers and book covers, but they don’t live on shelves, they live on walls.”

A case in point of this editorial approach is Uncommon’s British Airways billboards, which shows just a slice of logo, as if viewed from the airplane window. Or, more recently, a Depop campaign which features a sole, searching eye, representing the hunt for pre-loved finds.

For Mark at Adam&EveDBB, the rise of this editorial style might be creating the misleading idea that old formats have returned. “Is there really a rise in OOH or are we just noticing posters again because there’s a trend in poster design that has made us notice them again?” Either way, the creative director is pretty certain we’re seeing higher quality poster design in advertising than we have seen for a long time (his opinion carries weight, as a “firm believer that nobody wants to see your ad, so it better be good”). Mark is happy about this renaissance: “I had started to think great OOH was a lost art. As a medium it feels like it is most definitely back.”

From his perspective, this resurgence is actually a return to “timeless media”. A return to great OOH feels like “a return to form”, he says. After all, for Mark, a poster is “the purist distillation” of an advertising idea: “I always feel like if we can’t get the campaign idea onto a great (simple) poster then we don’t have an idea.”

Despite Mark’s healthy skepticism about a rise in OOH at large, there are some reasons brands should be paying attention to billboards right now. One might be caught thinking that outdoor tricks are a lost cause in a landscape of highly targeted digital ads and influencers, but the research suggests otherwise.

Real-world ads actually make brands feel much more “credible”, especially for millennials and Gen Z. In a quantitative study conducted by BBDO in August 2025, cited in this article by Omnicom’s Nicole Granese and WEST BBDO’s Matt Miller, trust in OOH and cinema/film ads stood at 49 per cent and 54 per cent for this demographic, while only 19 per cent of young adults say they can trust social media ads.

OOH was also seen as the least annoying ad format, with only two per cent of people expressing frustration, whilst frustration over social media sat at 30 per cent. “The thing about OOH is that it isn’t targeted at you,” says Matt from Uncommon, “it is observed at your discretion and I feel like this is really refreshing.” Billboards or posters can feel like something exciting we’ve found for ourselves, as opposed to everything else our algorithm has been force feeding us.

Part of the value of billboards also lies in the psychology of trust in advertising. “When we see a message in multiple formats, in different contexts, we’re more likely to remember it,” says Emily Alcorn, chief effectiveness officer at global OOH agency Talon. “OOH is out there in the real world, building trust and recognition, making campaigns feel bigger, broader, more connected.”

Outside of screen fatigue, there is another shift on the horizon that could lead to even more ads in print, at least in the UK. With new legislation around food and drink proposed in advertising – specifically a 9pm watershed on TV adverts and a total ban on online advertising for anything “unhealthy” – the landscape could be shaken significantly for a lot of brands. These new regulations, however, won’t apply in print, leaving a window for the surge in clever OOH to continue.

The growing wave of creative attention towards OOH print proves real-world surfaces are still cut out for the some of the best brand storytelling. As Mark says, there’s still “a quiet confidence in a great poster”. “It’s signalling that you have distinctive brand assets that are recognised by someone on the street in an instant. If you can do posters that say just one thing and get noticed, it remains a high impact medium.”