Interview: Why public screens still matter in a private-feed world

From DOOH growth to attention metrics, out-of-home has the numbers. What it lacks is advocacy, coherence, and a shared story — a gap laid bare in my interview with Ocean Outdoor's CEO.

This is a written version of my live interview with Stephen Joseph, CEO of Ocean Outdoor, at The Future of Media last November.

You can watch the interview on YouTube:

Everyone has proof, but few of us have a consistent story.

Welcome to the business of buying and selling media in 2026, as shown by my surprising conversation with Ocean Outdoor CEO Stephen Joseph at The Future of Media last November.

Not surprising because it was candid (if you’ve met or know Joseph well, you’ll know he is confident in his convictions), but because of how disconnected different parts of our media ecosystem seem to each other, despite the conventional wisdom that “everything is digital”.

Out-of-home has had the most rapid of transformations from posters to screens: digital out-of-home (DOOH) now accounts for about two-thirds of total OOH advertising revenue in the UK, despite digital sites representing a significantly smaller percentage of total physical advertising “faces” compared to traditional paper billboards.

Within its own network, Ocean Outdoor has grown from just nine screens in 2009 to just under 5,000 screens today.

But, despite the widespread visibility of digital screens, OOH revenue in the UK currently accounts for only 3% to 5% of total media spend, he says. That’s broadly what it was before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 lockdown times.

Why is that? In a world where every other channel is converging on to internet-connected slabs of glass, out-of-home differentiation as a public, broadcast medium has arguably never been clearer.

Need to get Out-smarter

Joseph implies that OOH’s problem isn’t effectiveness, it’s advocacy.

“We look at it positively because we maintained our 3% to 5% share while everyone else had their spend slashed. People see value in the top end of the funnel for brand building. Recent research from WPP Media says 84% of people still buy brands they have an affinity for, while only 14% of decisions are made at the point of purchase.

“Perhaps as an industry, we need to do more. TV has a brilliant team at Thinkbox for storytelling; in out-of-home, we perhaps lack coherent arguments for the industry as a whole.”

Indeed OOH leaders have privately lamented this for a decade now, having seen Outsmart, the UK sector’s trade group, shrink in scope after the market leader JCDecaux withdrew its membership and funding in 2015.

Joseph explains that Outsmart is more of a regulatory or lobby-type body: “It doesn’t necessarily show the great research we all do individually. Where there is a strong trade body, there is a significant improvement in OOH share. In Australia, for example, the OMA is doing a fantastic job, and Australia is getting around a 12% media share and growing.”

How would a trade body for OOH be different? Joseph would be keen for such a group challenge some of the assumptions in marketing mix modelling tools used by media agencies, where OOH scores are, he admits, “relatively low”.

This jars with Ocean’s own “Attention Dividend” research with attention insights specialists Lumen, he adds. “We’ve proven that large-format, full-motion screens gain five times more attention than social media content and three times more than standard small-format billboards.”

In a flow now, Joseph points to sports clothing rivals Nike and Adidas as a classic recent example of where marketers are led astray by bad models.

“Nike shifted toward DTC and performance marketing, pulled back on brand spend, and eventually, their share price collapsed because they “lost their customers”. Meanwhile, Adidas pushed brand harder and performed strongly. You don’t always need it in the maths; you can see it in the real world.”

It’s an intriguing prospect: despite out-of-home (the world’s oldest and veritably ancient advertising medium) having become more measurable and accountable than ever thanks to its digital transformation, the numbers are not adding up to lived experience.

Clearly something is going wrong: either with the models, the measurement, or the interpretation.

If the models are wrong, who enforces them — and why?

By criticising CPM-led buying, Joseph effectively warns how OOH suffers from “cheap reach” thinking. OOH, alongside radio, has often been treated by mainstream consumer brands as a way an efficient broadcast medium (a politer way of saying ‘cheap reach’).

But the criticism turns more towards agency trading behaviour.

Indeed, when promoting my interview with Joseph on LinkedIn the week before, I casually mentioned we would talk about the “decline of specialist OOH buying agencies” and its impact on how the medium is traded. That led to flurry of public and private messages from said specialists, mostly politely informing me that they were not in the least deceased, expired or past tense in any way.

And yet it remains the case that the large UK media agencies have brought their OOH-buying in-house in recent years, having previously bought through Talon (a private-equity backed indie) and Posterscope (part of Dentsu).

This is another kind of advocacy for the medium that has shrunk in recent years, at least among the big brands with the bigger budgets controlled by network agencies.

Perhaps this is why Joseph looks at creativity, not technology, as the single biggest reason why a brand would invest more in screens and posters in 2026.

“When industry rags talk about great creative, they don’t show a photo of someone holding a phone; they show the billboard. It’s what creatives love and what makes brands famous. Our study shows people are still out, and OOH is unskippable.”

And there’s the challenge for agencies: OOH fails when it’s treated like a commodity, but it succeeds when treated more like a stage, or a public canvas.

Contrast this with the assumptions baked into a cross-media measurement tool, like ISBA’s Origin (see my previous report on the debut unveiling of Origin’s real-world results for a major brand). We are in a world where marketers’ stated objective is to get a “single source of measurement truth” i.e. all the data about how many people saw my ad across all media without duplication.

That sounds noble and rational, until you consider that the way we consume messages is experientially different depending on where we are and whom we’re with.

As an obvious example, the ad that you see on your smartphone screen (let’s say Instagram) may evoke a very different reaction when seen on a huge billboard in a busy train station, even though the picture and copy may be exactly the same. I’m still the same person with the same core tastes and disposable income, but in many other ways I’m in a very different attention state. Getting a single source of truth about me, let alone millions of other punters, seems a tall order.

And yet there should be a premium for channels which carry messages in public, relative to the deep, dark corners of cyberspace where no one except you is being sold to while you’re swiping through the YouTube feed on the Tube.

In other words, OOH is trust infrastructure.

“The underlying point is trust. These screens are in the public domain. There is the “power of the public promise”—like getting married in public rather than behind closed doors. It’s a brand saying, “We are here, we are visible, and we aren’t afraid of showing our product”. Trust in advertising is at a low point, but OOH has no harmful content around it; it’s in environments where people are already primed, like malls.

“Trust and fame are what make OOH different from just scrolling through a phone.”

Euro expansion and tension

The key test will be how much ‘premium’ scales in OOH as the company embarks on an expansion across seven European markets, using the same playbook that worked in the UK.

Ocean is the number-four out-of-home ads business in the UK, behind JCDecaux, Global and Bauer Media Outdoor (previously Clear Channel UK). It may not be the biggest but it claims to be the best; it holds flagship sites like The Piccadilly Lights and the Waterloo IMAX cinema in central London, and positions itself on the “premium” end of the market with sophisticated formats and custom builds, driven by an in-house creative team that will offer brands specialist consultancy.

Joseph is explicit that the logic behind the international push is model replication at scale. The opportunity, as Joseph describes it, wasn’t hidden innovation waiting to be unlocked — it was structural underinvestment waiting to be corrected.

He points back to the origins of Ocean itself: an out-of-home market in 2008–2009 that was “mostly paper sites,” technologically stagnant, and creatively constrained. Ocean’s original intervention was not subtle — big digital screens in city centres and roadside locations, paired with an aggressive push to educate the market on how to use them properly. That education took the form of Ocean’s digital creative competition, which Joseph credits with “supercharging our innovation regarding interactivity, social media links, and quality.”

The European expansion follows the same logic. Joseph says Ocean identified “small startups that had essentially copied the Ocean model” in northern Europe — businesses already proving demand for premium digital OOH, but lacking scale, brand gravity, or technical firepower. Ocean’s role, in his telling, is to standardise excellence: applying its brand, marketing capability, and technology stack to assets that already look structurally familiar.

It’s here where a productive tension becomes clear.

Risk and opportunity

Joseph and Ocean talk a lot about innovation, but its growth strategy seems unapologetically about consolidation plus optimisation. Find fragmented markets; buy or partner with players already pointing in the right direction; apply capital, technology, and creative standards. Repeat.

That’s not a flaw; it’s completely rational strategy. But it raises an uncomfortable question for the wider OOH ecosystem: if owners are focused on scaling and standardising proven formats, where does genuinely new thinking now come from? From media owners refining the machine? From agencies fighting commoditisation in planning and buying? Or from creatives using these increasingly spectacular public canvases in ways the owners themselves didn’t anticipate?

Ocean’s expansion suggests OOH’s next phase may be less about invention and more about discipline. The risk (and the opportunity) is whether that discipline becomes a platform for bolder creativity, or a ceiling that quietly defines its limits.

After all, proof of what works only gets you so far. Having a consistent story requires discipline.

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