The summer shift: how seasonal behaviour is reshaping the media opportunity

By Ben Baker, Managing Director, APAC, Vistar Media

Summer is on its way, bringing a major shift in how Australians travel, socialise and spend their time.

The warmer months reshape our usual routines. Weekends are spent at the beach, road trips become more common, airports get busier, and city centres, shopping precincts, entertainment venues, and regional destinations see new patterns of movement. Add the Christmas and New Year holiday period into the mix, and Australians spend more time away from home and move through a broader range of physical environments.

Last summer offers a useful indication of the scale of this movement. Research from Tourism & Transport Forum (TTF) found 74% of Australians planned to take a holiday during the 2025–26 summer period, with roughly a third (34%) travelling within their own state, 25% to another state and 15% overseas. Travel was also the highest-ranked non-essential spending priority.

For marketers, this creates an immense opportunity to connect with audiences.

When audiences move, media needs to move with them

The summer customer journey is rarely linear.

Someone might leave home, stop for petrol or coffee, travel a major motorway, arrive at an airport or train station and eventually find themselves in an entirely different city or regional destination. Once there, their movements continue across accommodation, retail precincts, beaches, restaurants, entertainment venues and other public spaces.

And their media behaviour shifts with them. While mobile continues to play an important role during downtime and travel, out-of-home (OOH) advertising has an important advantage during these periods: it's embedded within the physical environments consumers are actively experiencing.

OOH and digital out-of-home (DOOH) let marketers reach new and existing audiences at scale while delivering messaging that reflects where those audiences are and, increasingly, what is happening around them.

Whether a brand is launching a summer beverage, promoting a travel destination, highlighting a new retail range or driving visitation to a nearby venue, DOOH can maintain a brand presence throughout the journey – from the road out of town to the destination itself.

This becomes particularly valuable as usual routines change. The media placements that reach someone during their regular commute may not be the ones that reach them on a January road trip. Effective summer planning therefore requires marketers to think beyond a consumer's normal patterns and consider the places they are likely to move through during the season.

Physical presence becomes more valuable when movement increases

As travel ramps up, so does the value of being present in high-traffic physical environments. These moments are particularly valuable because they often coincide with active decision-making – where to eat, what to buy, where to stop, or what to do next.

And those decisions aren't necessarily made weeks in advance.

Tourism & Transport Forum data found that the greatest concentration of summer departures last year was expected during the week before Christmas and in early January, while 54% of holidaymakers planned trips of less than a week.

For brands, that creates a concentrated period in which consumers are moving through new environments, spending, and making choices.

But simply appearing in a busy location isn't enough. The greater opportunity is to use contextual targeting to make that presence relevant to the particular environment, audience, and moment.

Let the conditions determine the message

This is where programmatic DOOH can take summer advertising considerably further.

Programmatic technology lets advertisers introduce signals such as location, time of day, and environmental conditions into their campaign strategy. Instead of treating an outdoor campaign as something that remains static for weeks at a time, brands can use these signals to determine when and where particular creative should appear.

Weather is an obvious example.

A sunscreen brand could increase activity as UV conditions rise. A beverage brand might activate particular creative once temperatures pass a predetermined threshold. A retailer could change its message as the weather shifts from a scorching afternoon to a cooler evening.

It means the weather moves from being something marketers plan around to something they can actively plan with.

We've already seen how powerful this can be in Australia.

Guinness' award-winning Brewery of Meteorology campaign used programmatic DOOH to turn changing weather conditions into a media trigger. The campaign activated relevant creative when temperatures dropped below 7°C, alongside point-of-interest targeting around pubs serving Guinness. It ultimately delivered an 18% year-on-year revenue increase and a 15% uplift in pub foot traffic.

While Guinness was deliberately solving a winter challenge, the principle is just as relevant to summer.

Recognising an environmental condition that changes consumer behaviour and using it to make an ad more relevant, at that precise moment, is the kind of precision that makes programmatic DOOH particularly effective

Plan for the rhythm of summer, not one single moment

However, marketers can't treat the Australian summer as one consistent three-month period.

The lead-up to Christmas has a different mindset from Boxing Day. Early January brings the peak holiday exodus, while late January and February see people gradually returning to work, school and familiar routines.

Programmatic DOOH gives brands the flexibility to respond as those behaviours shift, using context to keep messaging relevant throughout the season.

Rather than asking where an audience usually is, marketers can ask: where are they now, what are they doing, and what message makes sense in that moment?

Follow the audience

Summer has always represented an important commercial period. What's changing is marketers' ability to respond intelligently to the movement and conditions that define it.

As Australians break from their usual routines, brands have an opportunity to do the same. The ones that stand out won't simply increase their summer media presence; they'll use movement, location, context and creativity to make that presence more relevant.

Because when Australians head out this summer, the opportunity isn't just to be seen. It's to be relevant when and where it matters most.