Every month, OAAA’s marketing team sits down with an industry leader to discuss the latest insights, trends, and best practices for the OOH industry.
Read Kevin’s Q&A in The Drum.
What excites you about OOH right now?
What excites me most about OOH today is how it’s come full circle. It’s still about connecting brands with audiences in real environments, but now we have tools to do it with a level of precision and scale that I couldn’t have imagined in the 1990s, when I began in the industry in New York City.
Back then, I built one of the first pre-show cinema networks in the country, producing 35mm slide programs that ran before movie showtimes. We managed up to 8,000 screens and shipped as many as 160,000 physical slides every two weeks, from small local theatres to U.S. Navy Base Cinemas around the world. That hands-on grounding taught me how powerful theaters are as a community gathering space; and that truth still holds today.
Today, controlling the theater lobbies gives us a unique vantage point. These spaces are now digital environments; dynamic, data-driven, immersive, and where brands can meet audiences in a state of excitement and anticipation. The technology may have changed, but the mission remains the same: capture attention and deliver a message that feels like part of the entertainment experience, not an interruption of it.
What message do you have for brands that haven’t bought OOH before?
For brands that haven’t stepped into OOH yet, I’d say this: you’re missing the last truly shared media experience. While everyone is fighting for fragmented online attention, OOH reaches audiences who are leaning in, not scrolling past.
Theater environments, in particular, deliver a rare combination of physical presence and emotional context. From the moment audiences enter the theater lobby, they’re already engaged in storytelling. This mindset sets the stage for brands to tell their stories in a premium, cinematic way.
Now, thanks to digital and programmatic advances, OOH is now as measurable and flexible as digital media. We can target by geography, daypart, audience demographics, or content type, and optimize in real time. It’s no longer about buying a billboard; it’s about owning a moment in a customer’s real-world journey.
What’s the next big thing for OOH?
We’re entering the era of context-aware and data-driven creative. A blend of location, emotion, and timing that creates smarter OOH experiences. Programmatic DOOH is exploding, allowing advertisers to buy impressions as easily as online ads, but with far less clutter and far greater impact.
From my vantage point in the theater industry, the next big opportunity is in “digital lobby networks.” Theater lobbies are transforming into full-fledged experiential spaces, part retail, part gallery, part media. As technology integrates with audience analytics, we’ll see DOOH campaigns that evolve dynamically based on audience composition or even movie genre.
The next evolution of OOH won’t just be about screens; it will be about environments that move and react with their audiences.
How do you see video content shaping the evolution of OOH, and why is video becoming such a critical part of how brands show up in the physical world?
Video is the bridge between digital storytelling and real-world engagement. Motion, sound, and narrative have always commanded attention, and OOH is finally matching that cinematic quality. In theaters, we have a natural advantage: audiences are already primed for video storytelling.
In the lobby environment, video is transforming static space into living, reactive media. It lets brands run creative that breathes by highlighting promotions one moment, and telling emotional stories the next.
What’s driving its importance is synergy. The same creative assets produced for social or CTV can now live in physical environments, uniting online and offline strategies. That’s incredibly efficient for brands, but more importantly, it resonates because it feels native. Video doesn’t just say “look at me”; it says, “experience this.”
Published: February 17, 2026