Why We Still Love Static Out-of-Home

In a world chasing clicks, static out-of-home (OOH) stands its ground.

No rotations.

No shared space.

Just 100% share of voice, front and center, delivering a level of frequency that’s increasingly rare in advertising today.

While digital OOH has its advantages, static brings something different to the table: permanence, creative freedom, and sheer visibility. It’s one of the last true high-reach channels left.

Static Brings Big Creative Energy

Some of the most talked-about OOH executions — the ones that show up in award decks and get shared online — aren’t digital. They’re static.

Image Credit: https://www.isco.net/

Think:

• A series of sequential billboards telling a story across a highway

• Boards with physical extensions breaking the frame—like cheese on pizza stretching across multiple boards

• A Corona ad that used the sun’s shadow to reveal a bottle silhouette at a precise time of day

You don’t get that kind of magic with a screen rotation. Static gives brands a canvas to think bigger.

It Works Because It’s Always There

Unlike digital boards that share space with 8–10 other advertisers, static boards deliver constant presence. That matters. Especially on commuter routes or near points of purchase.

When we run static campaigns in cities with strong OOH inventory, we consistently see a lift in sales, even when category performance is flat or declining.

We’ve tested this. Markets with static OOH consistently outperform digital-only regions. It's not always the only piece of the media plan, but when it plays a major role, it delivers.

Buying Static Out-of-Home: What We Look For

We don’t take shortcuts when we buy OOH. Our process is intentionally labor-intensive because board selection can make or break a campaign.

Here’s how we approach it:

1. Full Market Availability Review We start by requesting avails from nearly every vendor in-market. Our internal form standardizes how we review inventory, making it easier to compare across providers.

2. Inventory Elimination We immediately remove boards that are low-value for the client—poor traffic visibility, left-hand reads across high-speed roads, known construction blockages, or awkward access points. We also eliminate boards with poor lead times or questionable CPMs.

3. Visibility Check (Not Just the Glamour Shot) We look beyond vendor-provided photos. We’ll inspect boards using Google Street View to assess what a driver actually sees. We look at how long the board is visible, if it’s partially blocked, or how it reads in motion. Many boards look great on paper and fail in practice.

4. Creative Fit & Environmental Context We think about the creative canvas. Can the board accommodate an extension? Is it lost in a sea of cluttered placements? Does it sit near a retailer or make sense in its environment?

5. Vendor Strategy Whenever possible, we’ll cluster a buy with a single vendor to negotiate bonus weeks, overrides, or production benefits. That might mean standardizing sizes or formats to reduce friction for the client’s creative team. We never come back with 40 different specs unless it’s necessary.

6. Mapping & Distribution We physically map the boards to ensure either strategic reach or strong hyper-local coverage. This is especially critical when the goal is frequency in specific zip codes or proximity to retail locations.

Our approach is both surgical and strategic. And it pays off, not just in campaign performance, but in how cleanly a brand shows up in the real world.

For the Awareness-Averse: Here's the Reality

If you’ve ever studied brand strategy, you know this: awareness supports performance.

And yet, in the chase for closed-loop attribution, some marketers have skipped OOH entirely.

Why?

Because it’s harder to measure and harder to explain to a CFO who only wants to see ROAS on a dashboard.

But here’s the truth: awareness lowers customer acquisition costs. It drives efficiency across digital channels. There’s plenty of evidence, it's just not always the kind that fits neatly in a spreadsheet.

While your competitors zig toward digital-only playbooks, static OOH gives you the chance to zag—show up where they’re not, and be seen in ways they can’t match.

Want to build real-world impact into your plan?

Start with strategy. Start with us.