When Billboards Think: Ethics and AI in the Future of DOOH
Digital out-of-home is evolving fast, blending programmatic buying, AI-driven creative, and retail media links. Rebecca Callaghan and Anu Bijoy explore how DOOH can balance ethics, privacy, and performance while embracing innovation.
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For an industry that has existed for centuries in some form, out-of-home advertising has never been more dynamic or more fraught with new responsibilities.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) has grown from static billboards into a data-driven, programmatic medium that can integrate with retail media networks, adapt in real time, and even experiment with AI-generated creative.
But with such power comes a new set of questions: Where are the ethical boundaries? What counts as true ROI? And how far should we trust automation in shaping messages that live in the public’s everyday spaces?
The Ethical Line: Personalisation Without Intrusion
Rebecca Callaghan, Agency Account Director and DOOH Lead Specialist at Hawk (an Azerion company), is unequivocal: the ethical red line in the UK is clear.
No targeting that singles out individuals in public. “Personalisation in DOOH should always be at an aggregated audience level,” she says.
That principle is more than just a compliance checkbox; it’s foundational to trust. Unlike other digital channels scrambling to reinvent themselves post-cookie, DOOH has always been cookie-less, inherently privacy conscious, and rooted in self-regulation.
Callaghan points out that the industry has a history of proactively setting standards before regulators step in, citing how media owners established HFSS ad guidelines as early as 2018. This isn’t just about compliance; it’s about credibility.
When messages appear in shared public spaces, brands become “guests in people’s environments,” she notes and guests, by definition, must be respectful.
Beyond Clicks: Rethinking ROI in a One-to-Many Medium
Marketers conditioned to worship clicks risk undervaluing DOOH. Callaghan warns that applying one-to-one digital metrics to a one-to-many medium is a fundamental error. DOOH, she argues, is both a performance driver and a brand builder.
It boosts measurable actions such as store visits or search uplift, while also providing long-term brand growth through a trusted, visible presence in the real world.
In a landscape plagued by ad fraud, intrusive formats, and skippable content, DOOH’s reliability and unskippability are not minor details—they are its unique advantages.
Research supports this: nearly half of UK consumers trust OOH more than social media, and premium DOOH formats can lift brand trust by double digits.
As Callaghan puts it, clicks are a sugar hit; DOOH is the full meal that sustains brand health while still delivering actions.
AI Enters the Picture: A Smarter, Faster Creative Cycle
If Callaghan highlights the boundaries and fundamentals, Anu Bijoy, Senior Manager at Dolphin Digital OOH Media, looks to the horizon, where AI is already reshaping what DOOH can do.
Her team uses AI to rapidly generate and adapt creative, scaling visuals and copy variations for different times of day, weather conditions, or audience types. “The creativity still starts with humans,” she says, “but AI enhances the process.”
The impact is measurable. Dolphin tracks impressions, QR scans, and even store footfall in real time, running A/B tests mid-campaign to refine messaging.
Brands are increasingly demanding creative intelligence data, not only on which ads performed but why. Bijoy’s team delivers post-campaign reports that break performance down by creative, location, and audience behaviour.
The result: smarter campaigns that evolve while still live, not months after the fact.
Promise and Peril: Balancing Human Insight with Automation
Bijoy is bullish on AI’s ability to make DOOH “smarter and more responsive, adapting in real time to moments that matter.” But she also cautions against over-automation.
The danger is that algorithms optimise for efficiency at the expense of human nuance. Great advertising still requires cultural sensitivity, emotional resonance, and ethical oversight. AI may accelerate testing and deployment, but the judgment calls remain human terrain.
This tension between possibility and responsibility is perhaps the defining challenge for DOOH today. On one hand, programmatic systems and AI offer precision, scale, and speed once unimaginable.
On the other, the channel’s power stems from its presence in physical, communal spaces where missteps can feel more intrusive than a poorly targeted banner ad.
The Future Fabric of DOOH
So, will the true disruption come from better screens and smarter tech, or from deeper integration with commerce and retail media networks?
The answer, as both Callaghan and Bijoy suggest, is both. Smarter tech allows for dynamic creative, advanced targeting, and programmatic agility. But linking DOOH with retail media, mobile, and ecommerce turns awareness into measurable action.
The opportunity and the responsibility is to view DOOH not as just another channel in the mix, but as a strategy in itself: a bridge between digital intelligence and physical presence, between cultural trust and commercial outcomes.
If there’s a lesson to take into the next decade of outdoor advertising, it’s this: DOOH must continue to blend automation with accountability, performance with presence, and AI’s speed with human oversight.
The brands that thrive will be those that treat ethical boundaries not as limitations but as the bedrock of trust and those that see AI not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a catalyst for a culture of experimentation in the public square.
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