GenAI creative is just about to change the face of out-of-ho...
May 2025
Andrew Newman
Imagine if brands could use genAI to create out-of-home ads in almost real time. Andrew Newman, CEO at DOOH.com, believes we are on the cusp of big change in the sector.
Hollywood has often provided us with glimpses of the future of technology, from Lawnmower Man envisioning the early days of VR, to the Terminator and Skynet warning us of the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence. And, of course, Minority Report introduced a version of hyper-personalized advertising, where Tom Cruise’s eyes triggered tailored content. While this scenario seemed like pure science fiction 22 years ago, we are closer than ever to seeing this level of personalization in the out-of-home (OOH) industry today.
The question isn’t just who’s going to win the race towards hyper-targeted ad content but also who has the capabilities to deliver it at scale.
Could generative AI be the step-change technology that takes this from concept to reality?
Out-of-home advertising, since its inception, has fundamentally been a broadcast medium, with a design for one piece of creative distributed to thousands of billboards and screens. A one-to-many medium. The industry has evolved enormously over the past five to ten years. The advent of digital screens and connected digital inventory with real-time content updates is now a standard that we’ve helped to usher in, and we are at the cusp of delivering that at an unimaginable scale.
I believe that hyper-contextualization in the industry is the next inevitable step. AI is pushing us closer to that future by making real-time creative optimization and targeted messaging possible at scale.
Thanks to the potential of generative AI, we can actually imagine a standardized out-of-home campaign that could have thousands of creatives contextual to time, third-party data, and location and even optimized in real-time by impact across the live duration. This hasn’t been possible until now, based on the complexity of screen aspect ratios and the product cost with creative agencies on generating personalized files. At DOOH we have mapped all of the UK’s digital inventory and with the help of JCDecaux, demonstrated how dynamic, two-way communication can occur at scale as shown by our award-winning ‘Virtual Vending Machine’ campaign with Coca-Cola.
WPP and Nvidia are working on a game-changing automated-genAI content production system. It is only a matter of time before the first genAI-powered digital out-of-home campaign goes live, with creative tweaked, customized, and optimized by AI in real time. At that point, you have a level of hyper-contextualization our industry has never been able to achieve and a tool that solves the huge problem of creative production cost, and we’re poised to publish it.
