Every month, OAAA’s marketing team sits down with a brand marketer to discuss creativity in OOH, the role OOH plays in the media mix, and their perspective on the future of advertising.
Read Adam’s Q&A in The Drum.
What role does out of home play in your media mix?
Out of home does something digital can’t: it makes a message impossible to scroll past.
For Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, that matters. Our mission is about shifting how people see mentorship in society. When our message shows up in the real world—on billboards, in transit, in iconic public spaces. it signals that mentorship isn’t niche. It’s cultural.
OOH creates legitimacy and scale in a way few channels can. It tells people this is a movement, not just a campaign.
We often use OOH to anchor major cultural moments—from sports partnerships to national awareness efforts and then let digital and social extend the conversation. We view OOH as a stage where the message first appears, and the rest of the media ecosystem as the amplification.
How do you approach creativity in OOH advertising across formats?
OOH is ruthless about clarity. It forces marketers to strip the idea down to its essence.
For us, the most powerful creative is often the simplest: a mentor(“Big”) and a young person (“Little”) – participating in a simple, everyday activity – paired with a line that reminds people it doesn’t take much to make a positive impact on the life of a young person. We also think about how OOH connects to larger cultural storytelling. Take The Big Draft, where we borrow the language and excitement of the NFL Draft to “draft” mentors. The creative isn’t just a billboard, it’s a cultural metaphor people immediately understand.
When the message works in three seconds and then extends into social, sports partnerships, and earned media, that’s when a campaign moves beyond advertising and into culture.
What challenges do you face in balancing creativity and data in marketing?
Marketing has become obsessed with optimization. Every impression, click, and conversion is measured and that’s valuable. But it can also make organizations risk-averse.
Data should guide decisions, not replace imagination.
Some of the most powerful ideas don’t emerge from a dashboard. They come from a creative insight about people, culture, or emotion that numbers alone won’t reveal. Our latest campaign “It Takes Little to be Big” was built on two insights that prospective mentors consistently shared as their biggest barriers to volunteering as a mentor; 1. It takes too much time, 2. You have to be perfect, a misconception we call “the burden of mentorship”. We’re asking consumers to give up their most precious resource, their time, and we’re asking them to step out of their comfort zone because we know the best mentors only need be present and persistent. Our creative for “It Takes Little to be Big” highlights that simple moments – i.e. conversation over a slice of pizza, a 30-minute coffee, a scoop of ice cream – can all make a life-changing difference. No super powers required. Mentorship changes lives in these micro-moments. OOH became an imperative tool as we launched our new campaign to address these biggest barriers and showcase what mentorship really looks like.
The goal isn’t choosing between creativity and data. It’s letting data sharpen strategy and inspire creativity to breakthrough in the marketplace.
How do you see the future of advertising evolving?
Advertising is moving from interruption to participation in culture.
The brands that will win aren’t just buying media—they’re showing up in the moments people already care about. For us, that means embedding mentorship into culture – like sports, media moments, arts, fashion, entertainment and more. When mentorship shows up in these environments and we can remind our target audience that mentorship is the infrastructure the moves ideas and inspiration from one generation to the next, it changes how people think about mentorship. It suddenly feels familiar and more attainable.
Through partnerships like NFL Inspire Change where we collaborate on value-driven initiatives like The Big Draft and mentorship storytelling around major NFL moments—we’ve been able to connect mentorship with one of the most relevant, powerful cultural platforms in America.
At the same time, campaigns like “It Takes Little to Be Big” prove that purpose-driven storytelling can scale when the creative insight is clear and relatable.
The future of advertising belongs to brands and organizations that combine purpose, creativity, and cultural relevance—and deliver it in places where people actually live their lives.
Published: March 24, 2026