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Canada’s media landscape is shifting fast — and the second half of 2025 will separate the winners from the rest. In this exclusive Canadian Advertising and Media Midyear Check-In series, industry leaders share the insights and strategies media buyers and planners can’t afford to miss.
In the first edition of our interview series, we speak with the team at the Canadian Out of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau (COMMB) to gain a deeper understanding of the Canadian Out of Home (OOH) industry. As brands increasingly seek meaningful, high-impact ways to engage audiences, OOH is undergoing a dynamic transformation—blending traditional formats with digital innovation, new measurement techniques, and evolving consumer behaviours.
We explored the first half of 2025, including how COMMB supports industry growth, the challenges and opportunities facing Canadian marketers, and how out-of-home (OOH) advertising is evolving to stay relevant in a screen- and data-heavy media landscape. Insights from COMMB will offer you a clearer understanding of the OOH sector’s past, future directions, and how marketers can make smarter, more measurable investments in outdoor media.
What have been the most significant changes in the Out-of-Home (OOH) industry during the first half of 2025, especially regarding the adoption of programmatic technology and dynamic creative strategies?
COMMB - 2025 has been a tremendous year for change and innovation in the Out-of-Home space. COMMB launched ROADMAP Reach & Frequency in Q2, which brought levels of granularity and insights to the Canadian market that we’ve never had before. This tool and data allow members to truly understand what drives effective OOH campaigns.
Additionally, in Q4 COMMB members will be reporting OOH revenue for aggregated insights into Canadian OOH. As an industry, we’ll be able to understand high-level breakouts such as performance of Digital vs Static, Roadside, Place-Based, Transit, and more.
Lastly, COMMB is actively working to update measurement recency on all fronts. That includes bringing roadside measurement to reflect 2024 data, updating place-based methodologies, and introducing place-based Reach & Frequency later this year.
Have there been any surprising new ways that advertisers are leveraging OOH to create engaging and memorable campaigns that COMMB has observed?
COMMB - Out-of-Home has endless opportunities for creativity. At this year’s Canadian Out-of-Home awards, we witnessed show-stopping winning executions that are noteworthy from a creativity and memorability perspective. Topping the leaderboard were campaigns that strategized beyond the billboard. Here are some trends we saw:
- Augmented Reality has become a significant trend amongst Out-of-Home users. By bridging the gap between the online and offline world, brands can maximize their reach by combining both online and Out-of-Home impressions. Audiences are still longing for real-world experiences, and combining these two mediums is a match made in heaven.
- Out-of-Home campaigns that are coupled with experiential moments, such as pop-up shops, are also heavily leaned into with the objective of building a memorable experience for attending audiences.
- We’ve said it before: creativity is key. Bold colours and imagery with minimal text is ideal for Out-of-Home campaign success. AI platforms are now being leveraged to provide avenues for brands and advertisers to test their creatives prior to campaign launch. The use of these tools showcases the significance of creativity in Out-of-Home. The award show leaderboard consisted of high-impact creatives that followed ideal guidelines for creatives using the medium. Bold imagery, clear, concise messaging and limited text. This is the recipe for successful campaigns, and we see it year over year at the Canadian Out-of-Home awards.
Based on your measurement and research, what is the top piece of advice COMMB would give to a media planner to maximize the impact of their OOH spend over the next six months?
COMMB - There have been many learnings from the launch of the new ROADMAP Reach & Frequency tool. With the new data, we can now see that there’s more to buying Out-of-Home than just buying GRPs. OOH has always been a geographic medium, and COMMB’s new data reflects that. The four key takeaways that we’ve consistently seen are that effective OOH campaigns are driven by distribution, weight, format mix, and time. By buying heavier weights and mixing product types, media planners can create geographically distributed campaigns that drive massive reach to all corners of a market. Planners can also identify sites that index highly against desired audiences and tailor their campaigns accordingly.
How can OOH media be best utilized in combination with digital and television campaigns to create a cohesive and impactful media strategy?
COMMB - Out-of-Home delivers messaging to audiences that TV and digital simply can’t reach, including in highly relevant environments—airports, gyms, office towers, entertainment venues & retail environments. Without it, campaigns risk missing those critical real-world moments when people are active, engaged, and ready to connect. OOH makes a campaign truly omnipresent and unmissable—turning good media plans into great ones.
High-impact OOH formats extend the reach & frequency of TV/digital campaigns as a one-to-many medium. OOH’s presence in the real world can also spark action like search, social sharing, or QR/AR engagement.
- Reinforces brand messaging – OOH keeps your campaign messages alive between screen time.
- Drives Action – Drives search, social, and clicks from the real world to digital.Increases
- Campaign Reach – Captures audiences that TV and digital alone can’t reach.
Be sure to check back in our next instalment in the series....
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