Aaron Poole, Marketing Executive, PML Group with this week’s Out \ Look on Out of Home, 19th December 2025
By the final cycle of the year, Outdoor stops being a backdrop and starts behaving like part of the season’s infrastructure. Not “Christmas is coming” energy, more “Christmas is already in the room”. You feel it in the commute, the last-minute shop, the station bottlenecks, and the little threshold moments where people are moving quickly but still clocking everything around them.
Christmas is also the clearest stress test the medium gets. Attention is fragmented, clutter is relentless, and everybody wants a slice of the same few weeks. If Outdoor lands in December, it is rarely because it said more. It is because it understood the mood better, then used the physical world to make the brand feel present, not just visible.
This week is a neat bridge into 2026, because it shows Outdoor at its most honest: rewarded for fit, not volume. Our “OOH with IMPACT” theme is simply a way of putting structure on what the streets prove every December. Impact comes from work that fits the place, the mindset, and the moment, and can be learned from, not just admired.
This cycle, the most effective work is not shouting louder, it is changing the environment. Planned by Starcom and Source out of home, Centra’s Santa Milk is a clean example where the format does the stopping power before the line even lands. The Golden Square build takes a simple, legible line, “Santa’s on his way…”, and turns it into a proper interruption, with the Santa Milk pack sitting off-frame as a vertical feature that holds its own in low light.
That same principle scales in Connolly, where the tunnel wrap turns a commuter cut-through into a branded passageway, with added sound and a cinnamon aroma layered onto a special message from Santa playing to passers-by. It is not a gentle choice, but December is not a gentle media environment. A sensory cue can be a shortcut to memory, which is exactly what brands are competing for when everyone is trying to be seen at once.
On a smaller canvas, Sky Mobile proves the same point in Drumcondra, using one shelter to create a moment people can physically clock. Planned by Starcom and Source out of home, the shelter is a full panel takeover, but the detail that matters is the pane itself, built as a snowglobe with snow particles moving inside the unit. It turns a standard waiting moment into a seasonal beat people can actually feel, and it gives the message a physical property that earns attention before anyone has even finished reading the line. In a week where most festive advertising is competing on colour and sentiment, a small piece of street-level theatre goes a long way.
Sometimes the Christmas cue is not a rebuild, it is one physical detail that makes a panel feel seasonal at a glance. Also from Starcom, National Lottery has leaned into that physical, seasonal layer with its Golden Square site at Rathmines Road Upper. Taking on a seasonal flair by virtue of being wrapped in tinsel, it ties into the brand’s wider Christmas activity amplified by a simple production choice that changes how the panel reads on the street. In December, that little bit of dimensionality is often the difference between something that blends into the clutter and something that feels like part of the city’s Christmas dressing.
December is where ‘less can be more’ stops being a creative cliché and becomes a production decision. Planned by PHD and Source out of home, Smirnoff’s Christmas Tree artwork is built around a red core with a spangly finish, so it catches light and shifts as you pass. It reads instantly then it earns a second look because the surface is doing something standard print cannot. In a period where half the city is trying to sparkle, this one does not need more words, it just needs craft.
If specials win on texture, stations win on sequencing. At this time of year people are not lingering, they are flowing, so connected elements can outperform isolated placements. Planned by Zenith and Source out of home, Disney+ have approached the season with a transit special designed as one unit across three of the capital’s stations. In Heuston, vinyl over the glass at the turnstiles above the gates carries Home Alone and All’s Fair. In Connolly, the underpass wrap turns the panels into a continuous wall. At Tara Street, the northbound staircase takeover completes the journey. It is less about owning a single panel and more about owning the corridor of attention, stacking repeated visibility across the same commuter flow.
And none of that corridor thinking works if the brand is not unmistakable, which is why Christmas has a habit of exposing vague, interchangeable creative. Christmas advertising is where distinctive assets either show their value, or get exposed. Mark Ritson has long argued that festive work can drift into emotion so broad it could belong to anyone. That critique lands every year for a reason. In December especially, if the branding becomes an afterthought, the impact will be too. The strongest work is not always the most cinematic, it is the work that is unmistakably itself, repeated consistently in the right places, until it becomes the obvious choice in someone’s head.
If you want impact to mean something, meet people at a moment that already matters, then let the site do the emotional heavy lifting. Planned by PHD and Source out of home, with creative elements by the PML Group CREATE team, Guinness and Guinness Storehouse at Dublin Airport suit the location perfectly. At T2 arrivals the arch presence does the scale work with door wraps carrying the harp at full height, turning a functional entry point into a welcome moment people walk through rather than walk past. The Aerpods have now been altered to display the classic Guinness footsteps ad which marks a midpoint Guinness ‘corridor’ that expands across the Skybridge before and after customs. At its best, Outdoor does not interrupt life, it attaches itself to it, and that is where recall and meaning come from.
Taken together these are not just Christmas tricks, they are a reminder that December rewards work built for real behaviour – speed, pressure, and habit. The campaigns that feel strongest are the ones built for recognition at speed, gifting pressure, social plans, and the small rituals that dominate the final run into Christmas. It is less about saying something new, and more about showing up with the right cue, in the right place, at the exact moment people are already in that mindset. That is the kind of impact December rewards, and the kind 2026 will demand.
Happy Christmas from all of us at PML Group, and we will see you in the first Out \ Look of 2026.
