Spotlight on OOH at Cannes Lions 2025

Publicis, Viant, and the UAE Government Media Office represent only a small handful of several companies and organizations that leveraged billboards, buildings, streets, and other static and digital OOH formats to transform the iconic Cannes Croisette waterfront boulevard (and path to it) into one of the most impressive OOH advertising showcases of the year. 

OOH also showed up in the form of interactive activations by major technology companies like Meta, TikTok, Netflix, and LinkedIn, which caught the attention of festivalgoers. Many of these ads either gave us a good chuckle or pause, and were hard to forget.

The irony of it all, however, is that these attention-grabbing OOH ads and activations likely represented only a small fraction of massive Cannes Lions budgets, proving OOH’s return on investment, especially in driving brand lift and recall.

Despite many brands successfully leveraging OOH to stand out at Cannes Lions, OOH often remains an afterthought in omnichannel campaign planning – even as programmatic digital (pDOOH) investment continues to climb. While this may be partially due to how OOH transactions have been manually executed and measured in the past, advances in AI automation, like Broadsign In-Advance, are changing the game.

At Cannes Lions this year, OOH’s prominence (and effectiveness) may have been the biggest takeaway for our team, but we’d be remiss not to mention a few other big ones, and our take on what they mean for OOH.

• AI has moved beyond hype into an era of practical implementation. Most brands, agencies, publishers, and ad tech providers are already leveraging or will use the technology to streamline operations and unlock more time to build better relationships and foster creative ingenuity. Technology like Broadsign’s AI Assistant, announced earlier this year, presents a step forward, simplifying creative approval workflows to accelerate campaign turnaround, and more advancements are sure to follow this year.
• Storytelling, with an emphasis on human touch, drove conversations at the festival, especially given AI’s growing influence across the industry. From an OOH perspective, this is where using real-time data to fuel dynamic creative optimization can be powerful. As the technology advances and becomes more accessible, we’re going to see OOH creative grow more relevant and personalized to audiences.
• Retail media and commerce networks continue to mature rapidly, but their role in the broader ad industry is still being defined. Cannes Lions 2025 saw the most significant retail media presence yet, with many players in the space, from CVS to Instacart, making announcements leading up to and during the show. Given the event theme of the convergence of commerce and storytelling, Albertsons’ in-store media network announcement was a standout. Hitting stores this summer, the grocer previewed the network via an experiential storefront. The move is indicative of growing advertiser demand to connect the digital and physical worlds, which introduces a whole host of new opportunities for in-store media.
• The creator economy’s massive footprint at Cannes Lions was hard to ignore, with an expanded talk track and appearances by creators such as Alix Earle, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Adam Waheed, and Keith Lee, among others. How it fits into and will impact the OOH universe is still taking shape, but with advertisers funneling more dollars into the space, it’s certainly a development to watch.
• Once again, the Cannes Lions Award Show didn’t fail to impress, particularly in the Outdoor category, which saw more than 1,900 entries, with The Paris 2024 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony and KitKat’s ‘Phone Break’ taking home the Outdoor Grand Prix Awards. Congrats to all the winners and the creative industry at large. Your innovative use of OOH continues to break new ground and showcase the untapped potential of this incredible medium.

If Cannes Lions this year is any indication of where OOH is heading, its role in the omnichannel universe is on track to expand significantly in the next few years. The industry is beginning to understand and appreciate OOH’s role in bridging online intent and real-world engagement, just as OOH is rapidly digitizing and improving the technology infrastructure behind it to support more data-driven, measurable campaign planning and execution. 

With these developments, OOH will become easier to integrate into omnichannel strategies, which means the stunning display of OOH ads at Cannes is only a preview of what’s to come with the medium’s continued growth worldwide.