The Future of OOH Innovation Is Holographic

Traditional printed out-of-home billboard advertising being installed — Traditional printed out-of-home advertising being installed.

The world's biggest out-of-home companies have the locations, audiences and advertising relationships. Hologram companies have something different: specialist technology, speed and the freedom to innovate. The biggest opportunity may come from bringing the two together.

Out-of-home advertising is having a remarkable moment. Global OOH advertising expenditure reached $54.2 billion in 2025, up 15% from the previous year. Digital out-of-home accounted for $25.5 billion of that total, representing 47% of global OOH revenue, and the World Out of Home Organization expects digital's share to increase to 49% in 2026. The numbers show an industry that is growing, digitising and becoming increasingly sophisticated, but they also reveal how slowly enormous physical media estates naturally evolve. World Out of Home Organization

Despite decades of digital transformation, more than half of global OOH revenue in 2025 still came from non-digital formats. Much of the physical advertising estate around the world therefore remains based around traditional static media, including print. There is nothing wrong with that. Print remains commercially effective, relatively inexpensive and entirely appropriate for thousands of locations. The important point is that when an industry is built around enormous networks of physical infrastructure, change takes time. That is exactly why the next generation of OOH innovation may depend increasingly on partnerships between the world's largest media owners and smaller specialist technology companies.

Scale is the OOH industry's greatest strength

The biggest out-of-home advertising companies have spent decades building something extraordinarily difficult to replicate. They have premium locations in airports, shopping centres, railway stations, city centres, roadside networks and transport systems. They have long-standing relationships with landlords, municipalities, transport operators and property owners, as well as relationships with virtually every major media agency and many of the world's biggest advertisers.

They also have sales teams, measurement systems, content management infrastructure, maintenance networks, programmatic connections and years of operational experience. Consider the scale of JCDecaux alone. At the end of 2025, the company operated more than 1.1 million advertising panels across 79 countries, reaching an estimated daily audience of 850 million people. That scale is an enormous competitive advantage, but it also creates a practical constraint: rapid experimentation is harder when every hardware or software change has to work across a huge international estate. JCDecaux 2025 results

Big companies cannot innovate like small companies

When a technology company has ten, twenty or fifty people, it can make decisions remarkably quickly. A prototype can be built, tested and changed without requiring a multinational procurement process. A new camera can be installed, a different processor trialled, a new AI model integrated or a content format redesigned. An idea that appeared promising one week can be abandoned the next if the evidence says it does not work. That ability to experiment rapidly is one of the most valuable characteristics of a small technology company.

Now imagine making the same changes inside a multinational OOH organisation operating hundreds of thousands of advertising locations. A hardware change can affect procurement, servicing, safety certification, content systems, landlord agreements, warranties, insurance, capital expenditure and long-term contracts. This should not be interpreted as an inability to innovate. Some of the world's largest OOH companies have made enormous investments in digital transformation, programmatic advertising, measurement and data. The issue is structural. When you operate at enormous scale, innovation naturally becomes more deliberate. When you are small, specialist and focused on one emerging technology, innovation can happen considerably faster.

That difference creates a powerful partnership opportunity. Instead of large OOH companies attempting to develop every emerging technology internally, specialist businesses can become an external innovation engine, testing new ideas quickly and helping established media owners identify which technologies are genuinely ready to scale.

The transition from static to digital shows how slowly physical infrastructure changes

The development of digital OOH provides a useful illustration. Globally, digital represented 47% of OOH revenue in 2025, meaning 53% was still generated by non-digital OOH. In the United States, digital represented 38.4% of total OOH revenue in the second quarter of 2026, even though DOOH revenue was growing rapidly at 18.5% year on year. These figures do not suggest that traditional media has failed. They demonstrate that the transition of a physical advertising estate is fundamentally different from updating software. OAAA Q2 2026 revenue report

JCDecaux provides perhaps the clearest example of both the scale of digital transformation and the amount of traditional infrastructure that remains. Digital represented 41.7% of its total revenue in 2025 and grew organically by 10%, while programmatic digital revenue increased 19.2%. Digital is clearly an important growth engine, yet even one of the world's most technologically advanced OOH groups still generates the majority of its overall revenue outside digital. Again, that is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of how long physical infrastructure takes to transform.

A website can change overnight and a software platform can push an update to millions of users in hours. A physical advertising network covering thousands of cities cannot. That distinction matters when thinking about what comes next.

Hologram companies are specialists, not generalists

Holographic advertising is not simply another version of a television screen. The technology behaves differently, the content behaves differently and the audience experiences it differently. Creating a convincing sense of physical depth requires an understanding of movement, lighting, reflections, shadows, perspective and the relationship between digital content and the structure surrounding it. Content designed for a conventional LED or LCD display cannot simply be transferred to a holographic display and expected to create the same effect.

The technology is also evolving extremely quickly. Holographic systems can increasingly be combined with cameras, directional microphones, touchscreens, sensors, computer vision and artificial intelligence. The display can potentially see someone approaching, respond to them, change language, answer questions, recommend products, provide directions or introduce a new product. A celebrity, athlete, brand ambassador or entirely digital character can become an interactive presence in the physical world.

Developing those experiences requires specialist knowledge. For a multinational OOH company, holographic technology might represent one emerging format among hundreds of business priorities. For a hologram company, it is what the team thinks about every day. Questions about image depth, ambient light, camera position, full-body avatar movement, content production and AI integration are not side projects. They are the core product. That level of specialisation has real commercial value.

The partnership model is obvious

There is little commercial logic in hologram companies trying to recreate the infrastructure already built by the world's largest OOH organisations. They do not need to become the next global media owner. Equally, established OOH businesses do not necessarily need to spend years building holographic expertise internally. The two sides already possess complementary assets.

OOH companies have the locations, audiences, agencies, advertisers, measurement systems and sales infrastructure. They understand how to monetise physical space. Hologram companies bring specialist display technology, spatial content expertise, rapid experimentation and the ability to integrate emerging AI capabilities without having to transform an international advertising estate at the same time. Large companies bring scale. Small specialist companies bring speed. Together, they can potentially bring new advertising products to market much faster than either could independently.

Holographic advertising does not need to replace anything

One of the biggest mistakes emerging technology companies make is assuming that a new format has to replace an existing one. Holographic advertising does not need to replace print, LED or conventional digital signage. There will continue to be thousands of locations where a printed poster is the most commercially sensible advertising medium, enormous roadside sites where a spectacular LED screen is exactly the right format, and millions of conventional digital screens capable of delivering campaigns efficiently to large audiences.

Holographic advertising is something different. It can become another layer of inventory, and more specifically, premium experiential inventory. An advertiser might buy hundreds of conventional digital locations for reach and then add a small number of holographic locations to create impact. A movie studio could run trailers across an entire DOOH network while placing a life-size holographic character at flagship locations. An automotive company could run conventional advertising throughout an airport while using a holographic installation to reveal a new vehicle in one of its highest-footfall areas. This is not replacement. It is enhancement.

In an attention economy, different has value

This distinction becomes particularly important when we consider how little time advertisers have to capture attention. Research published in 2026 by dentsu and JCDecaux used eye tracking, facial coding and survey research to examine how people interact with OOH advertising in real-world environments. It found that 56% of passers-by fixated on OOH advertising, but average visual attention lasted only around one to two seconds. The same research found that creative execution plays an important role in driving emotion and advertising effectiveness. dentsu and JCDecaux, Captivating on the GO

That makes formats capable of interrupting expectation particularly interesting. Consumers know what a poster looks like and they know what a conventional digital advertising screen looks like. A human being apparently standing inside a display is different. A trainer rotating in what appears to be physical space is different. A digital person making eye contact with a passer-by and beginning a conversation is very different. The objective is not technology for technology's sake. The objective is attention.

Physical experiences are becoming more valuable, not less

There is an interesting contradiction taking place in advertising. The world is becoming increasingly digital, but physical experiences appear to be becoming more valuable precisely because of that digitisation. Research released by OAAA and The Harris Poll in September 2026 found that 73% of adults aged 18 to 64 prefer products or retailers that engage them through in-person experiences or local outdoor events, while 69% said OOH advertising feels more human than online or mobile advertising. OAAA and The Harris Poll

The same research found significant appetite for live marketing experiences. Among people who had attended such events, 40% made a purchase and 33% posted about the experience on social media. This is where holographic advertising can move beyond the traditional definition of an advertising display. It can become an experience that brings a brand into the real world in a way that is designed to be noticed, interacted with and shared.

One physical audience can become a much larger digital audience

There is another reason spectacular physical advertising is increasingly valuable: the audience does not necessarily end at the location. People carry cameras everywhere, so an unusual installation inside a shopping centre or airport can be filmed, photographed and distributed across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social platforms within minutes. The physical audience becomes the first audience and the social audience becomes the second.

This creates a compelling opportunity for OOH companies. A premium holographic installation can potentially be sold not simply as impressions on a media network, but as a physical brand experience designed to generate earned digital reach as well. For advertisers, that changes the economics of the installation and gives premium physical inventory a role far beyond the people who happen to walk past it.

Retail could become one of the biggest opportunities

Perhaps the most interesting opportunity lies in retail, where the boundary between advertising, retail media, experiential marketing and commerce is becoming increasingly blurred. Research from OAAA and Winterberry Group published in 2026 found that 98% of surveyed marketers already incorporate OOH into purchase-driven initiatives, while 86% expect their investment in these activities to increase during the following two years. Digital billboards, digital in-store screens and promotional displays were among the formats most commonly being used. OAAA and Winterberry Group

The closer advertising moves to the point of purchase, the more interesting interactive formats become. Separate OAAA research found that 50% of consumers said retail OOH encountered in the days before shopping could influence their purchase decision. That increased to 59% when advertising was immediately outside the store and 64% when it was inside the retail environment. A holographic display can therefore sit exactly where awareness becomes consideration and consideration becomes purchase.

A holographic AI brand ambassador could promote a product only metres from the retailer selling it, explain that product, answer questions, provide a QR code or direct someone to the store. Eventually, these systems could connect directly into stock information, loyalty programmes and commerce systems. At that point, the distinction between advertising and retail technology begins to disappear, opening a potentially important growth area for OOH companies beyond traditional roadside and transport networks.

The infrastructure for the next generation is already being built

OOH is also becoming increasingly connected. Programmatic DOOH is growing, and the World Out of Home Organization's independently aggregated study found that $1.339 billion of DOOH advertising was traded programmatically in 2025 across more than 40 markets. That matters because holographic displays do not have to exist as isolated installations. Over time they can become nodes within larger digital media networks. WOO Global pDOOH Expenditure Study

Imagine an advertiser buying an international OOH campaign that includes conventional digital screens for reach, large-format spectaculars for visibility and selected holographic installations for engagement. The advertiser does not need to choose between the formats. They become different products within the same ecosystem. That is a much larger opportunity than treating holographic advertising as a novelty installation.

Innovation does not always come from the biggest companies

There is a broader lesson here that extends beyond OOH. Smaller businesses have an advantage when technology is moving quickly because they can take risks that would be insignificant for a small company but difficult to justify across a multinational organisation. They can concentrate their resources on solving one problem, move from an idea to a working prototype without navigating layers of corporate decision-making and, importantly, fail quickly when an idea does not work.

That ability to fail quickly is an underrated part of innovation. A small specialist business can test ten ideas and discover that nine are not commercially viable. The tenth might create an entirely new product category. For a global company, conducting the same experiments internally can be considerably more expensive and complicated. Partnership allows the incumbent to access that innovation without having to recreate the environment that produced it.

OOH companies do not need to invent holographic advertising. They can help scale it.

The relationship between OOH companies and hologram companies should not be adversarial. Holographic advertising is not coming to take away the billboard, eliminate print or make existing DOOH networks obsolete. If anything, the opposite is true. The established OOH industry has exactly the infrastructure required to take holographic advertising from individual installations to a genuine media category.

The world's major media owners already control some of the best physical advertising locations on Earth. Hologram companies can bring them new ways to monetise those locations. OOH companies provide scale, audiences, commercial relationships and operational infrastructure. Hologram companies provide specialist knowledge, rapid experimentation and new forms of experience. The combination is far more powerful than either side trying to duplicate the other's strengths.

The future of OOH innovation is holographic

The out-of-home industry has already evolved from hand-painted signs to print, from print to digital displays, and from standalone screens to connected and increasingly programmatic networks. The next transformation will not simply be about making those screens larger or increasing their resolution. It will increasingly be about changing the relationship between digital content and physical space.

Advertising will become more three-dimensional. Characters will become interactive. AI will allow digital people to communicate. Retail media will become more experiential. Physical installations will generate digital audiences, and advertising displays will begin to behave less like screens and more like interfaces between brands and the physical world.

The world's largest OOH companies have the scale to make that possible. Specialist hologram companies have the technology, knowledge and agility to help them get there faster. The future does not require one side to replace the other. It requires them to work together.

Large OOH companies bring scale. Specialist hologram companies bring speed, specialisation and innovation. Together, they can create the next generation of out-of-home advertising.