Unleashing the Superpower of OOH with Nick Brien | 2025 OOH Media Conference

Thank you. Thank you for that nice welcome, Anna. And it's nice to be here. As Anna said, last time I stood here was in 2019. A lot has happened in seven years. And probably one of the most significant is I've now moved from the buy side after 35 years of my life running agencies. I'm now here on the sell side, on the brand building side. So I'm excited to give you my perspectives, not just what's happened over the last seven years—I think we all know that—but what are some of the unique opportunities that I believe our growth as a medium and the contribution we make to building brands is really significant. So the title, as you can see here, 'New World, New Rules for New World.' And I want to just give you a quick riff through where we were at last time I was on stage. Before I do that, I want to thank Liz Raven and her team who work for me at Outfront, and Chad and his creative team for a lot of the work that they put into helping me shape this presentation—all human, no AI. And we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail. Your theme of your conference, our conference, is 'The Power of Presence.' I think a theme that I'm going to talk about throughout my speech is the importance of trust. And I'm going to give that context for where that is. So the first thing is the context. Obviously, last time I was here, since then, e-commerce exploded, climate has continued to be such a challenge, and yes, the thing we're never all going to talk about is tariffs. And I know in your mind you're imagining, 'What can AI do? Will AI save the day?' Because we're all talking about it. Everyone, even my mother, has just launched a new AI service. Every headline is just full of it. And we obviously see why it is so significant. It is more significant because I went through the dot-com revolution and the arrival of internet transforming everything. We are in for something so much more significant. Good or bad will decide based on our behaviors. But the one thing that AI is doing is eroding trust. Some recent survey data you can see it. We scoured a lot of the different trusted surveys—Harris, Kantar, Edelman—we went around to really understand what was going on. And I think a lot of you have done your own AI searches and whether you work with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, whoever it is, you know the kind of challenges you have when using the system. Ultimately, AI erodes trust, which is building on the fact that we had a Gen Z who have been increasingly wanting to spend less time with their devices, actually more time away from the platforms, because we're seeing—and we'll talk about that in a bit more detail—what that means in terms of the toxic echo chambers that we see online and why that is such a significant opportunity for us in real-life marketing. So I want to talk about the challenge as I see it today. This is really significant for the marketers, and many of you in this room are marketers, agencies, obviously we've got the full gamut. When I think about the marketers, we know that the pendulum has swung so far to the right. We know that the power of performance marketing, the accuracy of those metrics—to what degree they're there depends on what kind of marketer you are—but without doubt, the pressure is there against brands. And what does that mean? I actually went back and I looked at Interbrand. There are two of the best brand surveys in the world: one is Kantar, one is Interbrand. Interbrand has been doing this for 25 years. And actually, it made me very proud when I see that Apple is the number one most valued brand. It's at 3.2 trillion. It'll get back up before you know it to $4 trillion. It's actually our biggest advertiser. But here, this was an interesting commentary from the survey that just came out: 'Utilizing our best global brands data, we see that an increased focus on operational efficiency and short-term performance tactics over mid- to long-term potential has cost the world's most valuable brands three and a half trillion USD in cumulative brand value, equating to $200 million of lost revenue.' So the significance—because I was raised when I started working at the great Leo Burnett company, and Leo Burnett himself talked about building a brand over time and driving sales overnight—we're in a situation where the marketing industry, and this has been reaffirmed to me, the sheer pressure, and a lot of that has to do with a conversation I had with Bob Liodice. Bob Liodice, as many of you know, is the CEO of the ANA. I'll give you his perspective in a minute. But it's really exciting for us to see that the world's most valuable brand is identified again for the first time in 15 years as 'Marketer of the Year,' not 'Advertiser of the Year.' And as I said, it makes me especially proud. They're our biggest advertiser. And they love the medium. They don't just love it in the US, they love it in Paris, and they love it in Tokyo, and they love it in Shanghai, and they love it in Dubai. They use this medium and have done so diligently, so professionally, so expertly. Why? To create their brands within culture, to shape culture, to truly influence what's going on. They care about the brands. They're brand marketers who care about brand. They're not alone. This is Fernando Fernandez. He started on the 1st of March as the new CEO of Unilever. He was a global CFO before that, he ran Latin America. He's Argentinian. He's very, very bright and very tough. He wants to get back to brand. But isn't it interesting when he talks about brand, he said, 'Modern consumers are suspicious of traditional corporate messaging. So Unilever will switch to a social-first advertising model. That move will see media spend on social channels rise from about 30 to 50% of our budget, and we're going to work with 20 times more influencers.' Where does he mention out-of-home? But he wants to get back to brand. And why does he say that? It's because we live and work within a creator economy. Goldman Sachs just did a recent survey and they talked about the fact that the global creator economy was going to be worth $380 billion by 2027, and the creators—60% of TikTok users are more likely to trust the brand after hearing about it directly from the creator via a standard post. Right? This is significant. We had a campaign recently. It just ran with Bad Bunny. He looks like me. He had 22 million organic reach. The campaign started on the 1st of March. Within six days, the level of organic support, enthusiasm. So this is going to start a trend. I personally believe that all the significant brand marketers that care about brand will be seeking to increase their level of investment. So the model that we've all used—paid, earned, owned—watch it start to flip to earned and owned, and then maybe many of the brands will think about paid media later. It's significant. It's a significant challenge we're facing with all of it, and no more so than for Bob Liodice, because Bob has been with the ANA for 31 years. He's been the CEO for 22. And when I sat—I really admire Bob—if anyone's not an active member and participant of the ANA, whether you're on the sell side, buy side, strategy side, supplier side, you're missing a trick. It is such a well-run, formidable organization because he has a very clear focus on what it's about: driving business and fueling brand growth. Building brands and fueling growth. And he's very clear on all the particular activities that the ANA will focus on to ensure that the focus is just not on short-term pendulum metrics for performance media, but that has a consideration to the importance of the brand. And I believe that's a business we are in, and we should be focusing that we are helping our clients win, keep, and grow their best customers—how to acquire them at the lowest rates, how to maintain and keep them and their loyalty, and use their advocacy to grow. Win, keep, and grow. It's not just about making a sale. So when I think about that, I think about how much opportunity we have with our medium's creative impact, the impact of our creativity. We just had a panel where we're talking about it. Whether you're selling Western clothes or we're selling HubSpot on a B2B to B2C, the impact creatively. Now we have increasingly the opportunity to truly integrate the digital outcome. So we're talking about this notion that we are a seriously competitive player. And yet when I talked to Bob and I had an hour and a half with him, and I asked him, 'Look, just sum it up. What are your frustrations on behalf of your 1,265 members?' Lack of scale, complexity in all aspects, and poor measurement. And by the way, he said, 'These have been our ongoing frustrations with this medium, and you are suffering as a consequence.' And I identified that because I had a separate team who I've been working with pull for me the biggest brand marketers and look at how much they're spending in legacy media, right? Traditional media, and how much they're spending with us. These are the top brand advertisers spending in excess of $100 million. Look at that. Why? They're spending $67 billion this year on paid linear TV and cable. We have only got to increase a small amount to shift the needle so significantly. Look across those industry categories. What does it mean? I stood on this stage seven years ago. Our share was 4%. Our share of media spending now has come down so significantly. And yet the power and the validity of our medium only gets stronger. I come on to talk about why also not just our share. What about our yield? I asked Solomon Brothers to look at all the media and look where we are. Makes me nuts when I think that broadcast is getting an average CPM of that. So for those of you in the room who think, 'Okay, that's Outfront's problem, they got a lot of logo, they got a lot of national, and that's really a lot of the focus of their book,' I tell you what, AI is coming. A lot of you in the room would have read all the LinkedIn posts that have blown up since Mark gave his interview on the 1st of May. This is going to go for the local clients, of which by the way Facebook has over 10 million advertisers, and he's never declared the numbers, but I would say between 70 to 80% of their total revenue comes from local advertisers. And what's he saying? 'We're going to get to the point where you're a business. You come to us, you tell us what your objective is. You connect to your bank account. You don't need any creative. You don't need any targeting demographic. You don't need any measurement. Expect to be able to read the results we spit out of our walled garden that you can never dig into and quantify.' I think that's going to be huge. I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising. So Mark has decided—how many creative agencies are in the room with us here? You're not necessary anymore. Strategists, forget about it, right? It's just tell us what you want. We'll do it. We'll serve it up. Now, how many of your local advertisers will buy this snake oil? It's going to happen. So we are facing some existential challenges whether at the national, regional, or local level, and the opportunities ahead of us remain huge. But we have to recognize we're up against serious competition. This isn't just Meta. This is Google. This is TikTok. This is Amazon. This is the AI enablement. Mark had a meeting with the CEOs of all the major tech companies, and he told me that they were spending—he calculated after his various meetings—that they are deciding to spend between three and $400 billion on AI development over the next five years. So the level of scale towards the platform, the AI decision-making on who to target, how to plan, how to activate, how to create, how to measure, how to optimize all the way through to how you get your bills paid. It's moving so fast. I see significant opportunity if we do what Mark—what I think Mark Pritchard, who works very closely with Bob Liodice, as you know he's the chief brand marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, and Mark told me, he's told us a number of times, 'You got to become more digital, you got to become more programmatic, you got to become more connected, more measurable, and then most importantly, you got to maintain how you're more impactful.' And I would argue that when I think about all these trends and I think about what we're saying here as a conference, that this is 'The Power of Presence,' I think this is also about the importance of trust. So I think that as an organization, and I've talked to Anna about it, and I'm going to start having more conversations with some of my senior colleagues now on the OAAA board. I believe this is a marketing challenge. I believe that we need to recognize—I thought of this great quote from Steve Jobs: 'You can't look at the competition and say we're going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say we're going to do it differently.' And we can, because we are in the business of reach and influence. I'm going crazy if I keep hearing people talk about reach and frequency—that belonged in the 1960s. Influence is what it's all about. The global head of media at LVMH has now cancelled media planning. It is influence planning. Not influencer, influence. The importance of influence. What is influence? Influence is the ability to command attention. Our great sites, our great experience, our great transit, the buses or everything that is moving that is outside has the opportunity to create the attention, the relevance, the messaging, the content, the immediacy. Last but not least, the trust. What is the trustworthiness of the platform of the medium? This is—and by the way, very interesting study I'll share with you. I wish we had done it. I wish one of my agencies had done it. This had come from BCG. It's a great study. The power of trust and the power of influence. We are in the influence business. Reach and influence, because as far as I'm concerned, trust is built in the real world. Trust is built in the real world. And real-world branding fuels digital growth. And I thought if we think about pivots, this is one of the most amazing pivots ever. There was Netflix, there was Blockbuster. Netflix was pushing DVDs through the mail. And then they were so in tune with their consumer and what was going on with technology, they recognized that streaming was really going to be significant. And now Netflix is where Netflix is, and Blockbuster is a distant memory. So I stood here. I actually went back and I looked at the deck that I shared when I came here when I was running—it was IPG at the time, I can't remember—and it was 'Winning Through Transformation' was my theme. And I said the most important things that I imagined as an outsider looking in was that this industry, as an association representing everyone, focuses on a bigger ambition, that it raises its altitude in the industry—not in the media industry, in the marketing industry. Because we've also suffered from the media industry the last 15 years of adtech mining data and media and data and media with absent consideration for creativity or content excellence. And then the alignment—how do we align together? And it isn't about small billboard owners and the transit players and the specialist management partners and the expert creative. How do we all align together to really say what it is we can do? And so as far as I'm concerned, as I stand here today, seven years on, and I look at the world, and I look at our share of media spending, and yet I imagine the great ways we're seeing ourselves being able to tap into the creative community, our ability to connect with mobility in every aspect. I think our challenge now is about innovating the way out-of-home is marketed. I'm really serious—this is a marketing challenge. This is not a trading challenge or a negotiation challenge. We will not significantly and collectively shift the needle. We've only got to take one percentage point extra share to take it off linear TV or audio or print, for God's sake. The opportunities for us to demonstrate our power and validity if we market it—and I believe we've got to start talking much more significantly about 'in real life,' where culture is shaped, where events are specific, where the opportunity for brands to really engage human emotion, where we are trusted. Our media are trusted media. It's not down to what the algorithms are serving. It's not hyper-personalized. It's not so chopped up. It's not fragmented. My view is, let Mark Zuckerberg own the metaverse. We're going to own the universe. The real universe, where 80% of businesses are in real life, 90% of consumer shopping is in real stores. So I believe that we own collectively the last water coolers on earth. These are the water coolers that everyone wants to be involved in. Everyone wants to talk about. It's where culture is shaped. It's where connections are formed. It's where emotions are deepened. And this is where trust and loyalty to brands is born. And I don't care whether you're a local brand, a hyper-local brand, a regional brand, or a national brand, or a global brand. We have that opportunity, and we have to do it with impact. We have to do it with impact. We have to create a very clear narrative, and we need to know who we're going to share it with, and we need to dial up the volume. Thank you for your time. I have a short—before you run out and get coffee. Chad, Eddie, Chad and his team, a lot of them all worked to put together a film to sum up the essence of what I talked about. So I'd like to share that film with you.