If AI Became the World’s Smartest CMO …
Would It Recommend OOH?
WORD ON THE STREET:
By Brent Baer, Publisher, OOH Today and OOH Owner, baerboards
Artificial intelligence has quickly moved beyond writing clever headlines and generating pretty pictures. Today it’s helping brands develop strategy, sharpen positioning, identify audiences, allocate budgets, recommend media mixes, build creative campaigns and even predict marketing outcomes. AI is rapidly becoming the CMO’s newest strategic advisor—and, in some organizations, its most influential one.
That raises an important question for those of us in Out of Home.
If tomorrow’s Chief Marketing Officer increasingly relies on AI to help shape media strategy,
will AI recommend Out of Home?
Or, perhaps more importantly… Will it know enough to?
As an industry, we spend a great deal of time talking about inventory, impressions and availability. Marketers, however, are focused on building brands, growing market share and delivering measurable business outcomes.
AI will learn from whatever evidence marketers feed it.
If that evidence overlooks the power of Out of Home, we shouldn’t be surprised if AI does too.
So let’s imagine we’re sitting across the table from the world’s smartest Chief Marketing Officer—an AI CMO with instant access to virtually every marketing study, attribution model, consumer trend and media performance metric ever published.
Here’s the conversation I’d like to have.
Q: AI, you’re now the world’s smartest Chief Marketing Officer. What’s your first responsibility?
Artificial Intelligence Answer (AIA): My first responsibility is simple: build the brand. Not produce more advertising or buy more impressions, but build a brand people recognize, trust, and remember. Every media decision should support that objective because strong brands consistently outperform stronger campaigns.
Q: How will you decide where to invest the next marketing dollar?
AIA: I’ll follow the evidence. I’ll look for the channels that consistently improve awareness, consideration, customer acquisition and long-term business performance—not simply those that produce the easiest dashboards. The best marketing investments aren’t always the easiest to measure, but they consistently move the business forward.
Q: Where does Out of Home fit into that strategy?
AIA: Out of Home fits wherever consumers live their lives. They still drive to work, shop, travel, ride buses and trains, fly, attend concerts and sporting events, dine in restaurants, and walk city streets. Brands are not built exclusively on screens; they’re built where people experience the real world. Out of Home remains one of the few media capable of creating that kind of daily, unavoidable presence.
Q: If that’s true, why wouldn’t every AI-powered media plan recommend more OOH?
AIA: Because AI only knows what marketers teach it. If the data emphasizes clicks but ignores credibility, if attribution measures online activity but overlooks brand influence, or if media models fail to capture the lift OOH creates across search, retail visits, digital engagement and long-term brand growth, then AI isn’t overlooking Out of Home. We’re failing to teach it.
Q: What’s the biggest mistake the OOH industry could make?
AIA: Continuing to sell locations when marketers are buying outcomes. Brands don’t wake up hoping to purchase a billboard, a transit shelter, an airport display or a wrapped bus. They wake up wanting more customers, greater awareness, stronger brands and measurable business growth. Out of Home wins when it positions itself as a business solution—not simply another line on a media schedule.
Q: Then what should every OOH company do tomorrow morning?
AIA: Start educating tomorrow’s marketing advisor. Demonstrate how Out of Home builds brands, amplifies digital campaigns and influences search activity, store traffic, consumer confidence and sales. Most importantly, stop assuming your value is self-evident. Teach it. Because if AI becomes the trusted advisor sitting beside tomorrow’s CMO, the media that presents the clearest evidence won’t simply earn a place on the media plan—it will earn a larger share of the marketing budget.
Word on the Street
Before we complain that artificial intelligence doesn’t recommend Out of Home, perhaps we should ask ourselves a tougher question.
Have we given it enough evidence to do so?
The future won’t be won by the medium with the loudest sales pitch.
It will be won by the medium with the strongest evidence.
AI isn’t coming to replace marketers. It’s coming to challenge every marketing discipline to prove its value. Frankly, that’s a challenge the Out of Home industry should welcome.
If we truly believe OOH builds brands, drives business outcomes, and amplifies every other medium around it, then we shouldn’t fear the world’s smartest marketing advisor.
We should make sure it has every reason to recommend us.
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