When everyone is slashing prices, attention becomes the real currency

By Josh Gurgiel, head of creative, oOh!media

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Here's an equally confounding question: if everyone is screaming at once, can you hear anything?

Every year, around Black Friday, brands turn up the volume. They flood inboxes with offers, bombard social feeds and compete aggressively on price, and for good reason. In 2025, Australians spent $9.6 billion between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or $1.6 million every minute in 2026, according to Westpac DataX. This long weekend has become the unofficial start of summer and the year's unequivocal peak retail period.

But with advertising investment and consumer activity surging, how can brands be heard among all the shouting? Even in Out of Home, a more organically integrated and passively consumed media channel, brands default to the same conventions: bigger discounts, red sale stickers, giant percentages and crowded layouts. The result is a sea of sameness.

This peak retail period is no longer a competition for share of market; it's a competition for share of mind.

Here are five ways to make your brand's OOH work harder this summer season:

The not-so-dirty "F" word
Mental availability does not begin on Black Friday. Successful retailers are often those that built memory structures well before purchase season.

As Professor Byron Sharp explains, the more extensive and fresh a brand's network of memory associations, the greater its chance of being noticed in buying situations. Essentially, he is talking about my favourite marketing "F" word - frequency.

This is where OOH excels. It seeds and reinforces brand associations across people's daily movements over time. Analytic Partners' research found brands maintaining a long-term presence in market, over eight weeks, saw up to a 79% increase in ROI.

People rarely buy from brands they are seeing for the first time. Winning the weekend starts with priming audiences months earlier.

Be relentlessly distinctive
'Brand versus performance' is an argument as old as Blur versus Oasis or Vegemite versus Marmite. In OOH, there is no useful delineation.

Talon Benchmark research found OOH containing monetary incentives drove up to 28% higher purchase intent. OOH can build brands and accelerate performance, but only when the brand is unmistakable.

Distinctiveness is not decoration; it is a memory device. Colours, characters, codes, packaging, talent and typeface must shortcut memory associations. Amazon understands this exceptionally well, using everything from its shade of blue to the shape of its boxes to promote recall and drive activation.

In peak retail, it is not about brand versus performance; it's about your brand's performance.

Don't be afraid to get a little 'emo'
The strongest brands do not simply shout "20% OFF". They focus on what the moment means to customers.

Between Black Friday and Christmas, people are planning holidays, buying gifts, rewarding themselves and preparing for summer. Brands that tap into the emotion of the moment give people a deeper reason to pay attention.

IKEA masters this mechanic, creating deeply human campaigns that still feature products and prices. Telstra's 2023 Hello Christmas campaign paired the nostalgia of old phone boxes with the magic of Christmas to create emotive, visually striking OOH.

If brands want eyeballs when competition is at its highest, they must offer genuine value in return for attention.

Zig where others zag
When everyone speaks the same language of price and value, convention becomes an opportunity. Brands that can challenge the category and/or offer genuine utility can truly rise above the noise.

In 2015, US outdoor retailer REI launched #OptOutside, announcing via OOH that it would close on Black Friday and encouraging people to spend the day outdoors. The campaign generated 2.7 billion media impressions in its first 24 hours and secured something more valuable than another discount message: brand affinity.

Public space media should offer a creative respite from the chaos. I'm not saying brands need to cancel their Black Friday sales to stand out, but I'm also not not saying that.

When all else fails, keep it brutally simple
So, you're going with "20% off". Fine. I get it.

But for heaven's sake, keep the creative simple and uncluttered. Seven words or fewer, strong colour contrast and a clear visual hierarchy.

Here's a cheeky simplification hack. Use the product as the logo. Beverage brands do this brilliantly, from Asahi Hard Rated to Kirin Hyoketsu, allowing the product itself to do the priming.

OOH works best when it gives the brand room to shine. Strip back the headings, subheadings, CTAs, websites and search bars. Hero the core value and trust people to search for the rest.

As media fragments further, peak retail will only become more cluttered. Yet the brands that stand out are not always the loudest. They are the easiest to notice, understand, and remember. When every brand is on sale, the ability to capture and activate attention becomes the ultimate competitive advantage.