Stephen Dolan, COO, StreetIQ
For years, the conversation around digital out-of-home (DOOH) has centred on scale. Bigger networks, more screens, broader coverage and increasingly sophisticated measurement.
While all of those things have absolutely helped mature the channel, one thing that hasn’t evolved is the way brands approach their creative. Put simply, most digital campaigns still behave as though they are mass-market poster buys from 15 years ago.
The screens are now dynamic, but the messaging is too often not.
This is increasingly out of step with where marketing is heading. Across almost every other channel, brands are investing heavily in first-party data, customer intelligence and personalisation strategies designed to make communication feel more relevant, contextual and connected to specific audiences and scenarios.
Yet when many of those same brands move into out-of-home (OOH), the creative frequently becomes generic again. The irony is that DOOH is now far more capable of delivering relevance than many other channels – especially around things like location and weather.
One of the biggest misconceptions still lingering around Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) is that it is difficult to deploy, operationally painful or only viable for large innovation budgets. Historically, there was some truth to that.
In the past, it’s true that running dynamic campaigns across multiple media platforms would have required rebuilding creative assets several times, managing fragmented workflows, and investing significant time in deployment.
But it’s 2026 – the technology has matured enormously over the past few years. Campaigns can now be built once, centrally managed and deployed seamlessly across networks, whether bought directly or programmatically. What used to feel highly bespoke has become far more standardised and scalable.
It means the barrier holding DCO back today is not infrastructure, it’s imagination.
What is particularly interesting is that many marketers still assume dynamic creative needs to be highly complex to be effective. Often, the opposite is true.
Some of the most powerful uses of DCO I’ve seen are actually the simplest because they create something many brands are desperately trying to achieve right now – genuine relevance.
Take a franchise business, such as Baker’s Delight. Traditionally, an OOH campaign might have promoted hot cross buns nationally with the same creative running everywhere. But with DCO, creative is used to reflect the name of the nearest local store, effectively turning what would have been a generic brand ad into something that feels connected to the store’s immediate community.
That may sound like a small adjustment, but it can completely transform the way the campaign is experienced.
A change like this means, for consumers, the message suddenly becomes more local and relevant to them. Franchise owners, who may feel disconnected from national brand advertising, can gain an immediate sense of ownership and visibility into their store and its impact. Some Bakers Delight store owners have even said, “For the first time, my store name is in the ad!”
That is a powerful shift driven by something that is now operationally very simple, and many marketers may be underestimating the opportunity sitting in front of them.
Brands already possess extraordinary amounts of customer and location intelligence through loyalty programs, CRM systems, app behaviour and first-party data environments. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to activate that intelligence across digital channels, but OOH is often left out of the equation despite being one of the most visible and contextually rich environments available.
DCO is a way to bridge that gap.
Think of the possibilities. A retailer can dynamically show the distance to the nearest store, a real estate platform can display how many inspections are happening within a specific postcode that weekend, or a health service can surface live appointment availability or wait times.
None of these executions requires wildly futuristic technology. What they require is a shift in thinking away from using DOOH purely as a broadcast medium and towards using it as a contextual communication platform.
One of the more interesting conversations happening in the market right now is around entertainment and live events. There is often a temptation to jump straight to the most technically ambitious execution possible, like streaming live concert content directly into outdoor placements.
While those ideas can absolutely have an impact, sometimes the most commercially effective executions are far simpler.
Even something like a countdown for a concert can be compelling. These introduce a different paradigm of time that the consumer recognises instantly and can generate urgency and action. Think about the impact of saying something like “10 days to go!” versus a simple date.
These are relatively simple dynamic layers, but they fundamentally change how the campaign behaves. Instead of functioning as static awareness advertising, the creative becomes timely, adaptive and connected to audience behaviour in real time.
That distinction matters because relevance is increasingly what drives effectiveness.
Consumers are surrounded by advertising everywhere, and attention has become extraordinarily difficult to earn. The campaigns that cut through are rarely the ones shouting the loudest; they are the ones that feel useful, contextual or connected to the environment people are already in.
This is ultimately why DCO matters far beyond creative experimentation or technical innovation. It gives brands a way to make OOH campaigns work significantly harder without necessarily making them significantly more complicated.
The industry has spent years proving that DOOH can scale. What comes next is proving how intelligently that scale can be used.