Colum Harmon, Marketing Director, PML Group with this week’s Out \ Look on Out of Home
OOH media continues to demonstrate sustained effectiveness, delivering stronger results and greater impact for brands year after year. This momentum is reinforced by new analysis of more than 1,000 campaigns measured through our IMPACT research programme in 2025, which shows OOH performance rising significantly year on year, following on from an impressive increase in 2024.
Powered by independent Ipsos B&A research, PML Group tracks several real drivers of OOH potency: recall, creative rating, call to action, message clarity, and creative relevance. In 2024, these metrics combined for an impressive 5-point uplift. In 2025, the medium pushed even further, building on that momentum with an additional 4-point boost.
With campaign investment levels and panel volumes broadly in line with the previous year, the uplift is not solely down to scale, it’s down to smarter context, sharper creativity and well-planned format mixes. Put simply: OOH is cutting through more effectively.
In 2025, we released The Multi-Format Effect, showing that multi-format OOH doesn’t just boost reach, it’s genuinely valued by audiences. Multi-format campaigns are at the heart of how OOH works, creating brand stories that are encountered in more than one place, more than one way, and often more than once in a single day. One key statistic was that seven in ten respondents (71%) agreed that seeing ads across different formats makes them easier to remember. This was borne out in end of year recall analysis, showing the multi-format campaigns (in research terms this represents mostly campaigns of 2-3 different formats) indexing more than 40 points higher than the base index of single format campaigns.
Campaign recall is a key driver of effectiveness. When indexed against 2024, overall recall of OOH campaigns rose by five points, a highly significant uplift that reflects the strong level of cut‑through achieved across roadside, retail and transport environments. This improvement aligns directly with an equivalent rise in clarity of understanding, highlighting a clear relationship between stronger creative comprehension and higher recall levels. While overall design ratings for OOH remained stable year‑on‑year, the gains in understanding are proving instrumental in elevating recall and, ultimately, enhancing the effectiveness of campaigns across the OOH landscape.
Relevant creative continues to be a cornerstone of OOH effectiveness, shaping how rapidly and clearly a message resonates within dynamic, real‑world settings. When creative is strongly aligned to audience needs and context, it breaks through busy visual environments, accelerates recognition and understanding, and strengthens brand memorability well beyond the moment of exposure. Through our ongoing research programme, PML Group measures how personally relevant respondents find OOH campaigns, providing a direct indicator of creative resonance. Location, data and technology each play a role, individually or in combination, in delivering highly relevant messaging, and consumer perceptions of relevance have steadily improved in recent years. In 2025, this relevance index increased by a further three points year‑on‑year, underscoring the growing importance of relevance in driving campaign performance.
Clarity and simplicity are established drivers of OOH effectiveness. When messages are easy to understand at a glance, audiences can quickly process and store them – even in fast‑moving environments. Strong visual hierarchy, concise copy, and a single clear idea reduce cognitive load, making the ad more memorable. Understanding of OOH campaigns improved again in 2025 and the research indicates a correlation between understanding and recall.
Overall, the 2025 results reinforce a clear and compelling trajectory for OOH: a medium that is not just maintaining its effectiveness but actively improving it. With gains in recall, clarity, relevance and multi‑format impact, OOH is proving more capable than ever of cutting through busy environments and connecting with audiences in meaningful ways. As brands continue to leverage smarter planning, stronger creative discipline and more contextually intelligent use of formats, the medium’s performance is set to climb even further. The evidence is consistent and conclusive – OOH is evolving, and its effectiveness is accelerating.
