By ADWEEK Staff Reporting
Originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg
Main Facts: The Resurgence of Out-of-Home and the Crisis of the Open Web
For decades, the trajectory of modern advertising followed a predictable, unidirectional path: media budgets steadily evacuated the physical world to chase eyeballs onto the frictionless, data-rich expanse of the internet. Marketers traded billboards for banner ads, transit posters for programmatic display, and tangible environments for targeted digital feeds.
Today, that paradigm is undergoing a violent and historic reversal.
At the recent Advertising Week gathering—amid predictable panels on AI agents, creator partnerships, and the endless quest to combat digital fragmentation—an unlikely protagonist dominated conversations behind closed doors: Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising.
Long viewed as a fusty, legacy channel defined by static roadside billboards and paper paste-ups, out-of-home media is experiencing a massive renaissance. Powered by programmatic digital capabilities (DOOH), the channel offers what digital marketers have spent years trying to manufacture online: unskippable scale married to precise, data-driven targeting.
Yet, this physical media boom is not happening in a vacuum. It is the direct symptom of an existential crisis unfolding across the open web.
As generative artificial intelligence floods digital ecosystems with low-quality, synthetic content—colloquially termed “slop”—consumer trust in online environments is plummeting. Simultaneously, the rise of AI-powered "answer engines" (such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) and autonomous shopping and task agents (like Muse and Dots) are fundamentally altering how users interact with the internet. These systems extract the utility of web-published content without ever driving traffic to the underlying sites—and critically, without exposing users to the advertisements that subsidize them.
Consequently, marketers are waking up to a stark reality: as the digital ecosystem becomes less trustworthy, less trafficked, and increasingly mediated by AI gatekeepers, physical space is becoming the most valuable real estate in advertising.
Chronology: How Digital Fatigue and AI Disruption Remade the Media Landscape
To understand how the advertising industry arrived at this physical turning point, one must trace the compounding disruptions that have rattled digital publishing and marketing over the past several years:
- The Remote Work Shift (2020–2022): The global shift toward distributed workforces severed traditional, consistent routines for commuting, networking, and urban convening. This vacuum accelerated the growth of in-person media—specifically live industry events—which quickly transformed from marketing loss-leaders into vital, high-margin revenue streams for major publishers like Condé Nast, Semafor, and ADWEEK.
- The Generative AI Explosion (2023–2024): The mainstreaming of generative AI tools uncorked an unprecedented wave of synthetic content. A landmark 2024 Adobe report revealed that 87% of U.S. consumers believe AI has made it significantly harder to distinguish fact from fiction online. This erosion of trust prompted top creative talent—such as former Droga5 executive creative director Mariano Jeger—to jump ship to physical and spatial media giants like Outfront Media.
- The Rise of Zero-Click Search and AI Agents (2024–2026): Search engines evolved into answer engines, allowing users to query information without clicking through to source websites. Concurrently, autonomous agents began handling complex consumer tasks, threatening to completely bypass publisher websites and their underlying ad inventories. A high-profile flashpoint occurred when Amazon blocked the AI agent Muse from crawling its marketplace, highlighting how intermediaries can harvest web utility while starving publishers and advertisers of visibility.
- The Insolvent Open Web (Late 2025–2026): The structural contraction of the open web claimed major casualties. In October 2026, premier ad-tech firm OpenWeb—once valued at $1.5 billion with backing from The New York Times—was forced to request insolvency protections in an Israeli court after key enterprise clients (like Microsoft) pulled back amid the shifting digital search landscape.
- The Great Physical Expansion (Present): Out-of-home advertising shattered previous records in Q2 2026, growing 10.7% year-over-year to $3.16 billion, with digital formats accelerating at an 18.5% clip. At the same time, retail media logic officially broke containment: airlines, ride-shares, grocery chains, and public transit networks began transforming every conceivable physical footprint into programmable ad inventory.
Supporting Data: By the Numbers
The macroeconomic metrics driving the shift toward physical and spatial media tell a definitive story of capital reallocation:
- $3.16 Billion: Total U.S. out-of-home advertising revenue in the second quarter, marking a 10.7% year-over-year increase, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA).
- 18.5%: The rapid growth rate of Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) media during the same period. DOOH now accounts for nearly 40% of the entire OOH category’s total revenue.
- 87%: The percentage of U.S. consumers who state that generative AI has made distinguishing online fact from fiction more difficult, according to a 2024 Adobe study.
- 38% vs. 1%: Sinclair’s local broadcast stations reach approximately 38% of all U.S. households, prompting its recent experimental pivot into native Substack publishing (The National Press). Conversely, public transit systems like New York’s M.T.A. generate roughly only 1% of their total operating revenue from advertising—a marginal financial cushion that has sparked intense debate over public blight versus municipal subsidies.
- $80 Billion: The towering debt load shouldered by the newly formed media behemoth Skydance (incorporating Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, CNN, HBO, and CBS), illustrating why traditional direct-to-consumer and streaming models are desperately searching for alternative, bulletproof monetization avenues outside the traditional digital web.
Official Responses and Industry Reactions
As the media and advertising sectors grapple with this physical pivot, key executives and creators are navigating the transition in radically different ways:
The Out-of-Home Pivot
Marketers like Mariano Jeger noted that the flight from digital spaces to physical ones is fundamentally driven by brand safety and authenticity. When digital feeds are saturated with unverified AI-generated content, placing a brand message on a physical, unskippable canvas provides psychological reassurance that algorithms simply cannot match.
Sinclair’s Substack Experiment
In a move that caught the traditional media world off guard, local broadcasting titan Sinclair launched a national news brand called The National Press on Substack. Backed by a reporting army of 1,200 journalists across 60 local newsrooms, Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley is using the platform to bypass traditional web syndication and test direct audience monetization via free and paid tiers.
Morning Brew’s Creator Acquisition
Publisher-creator integration continues to accelerate. Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell recently finalized an all-cash acquisition of Express Checkout, a two-person creator-led brand covering the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry via newsletters and short-form video. Co-founders Nate Rosen and Jenna Movsowitz joined Morning Brew directly as the company reported a 50% year-over-year increase in creator-focused monetization.
Piers Morgan’s Uncensored Expansion
Under the leadership of new CEO Rashida Jones (formerly of MSNBC), Piers Morgan’s digital empire Uncensored Media announced plans to roll out individual $4.99 subscriptions across its genre-specific franchises (covering sports, royalty, and history). What once looked like a semi-retirement into YouTube streaming has evolved into a masterclass in independent multi-platform brand monetization.
Implications: The Looming Battle Over Public Space and Attention
While the economic logic driving advertisers toward physical spaces is clear, this trend carries profound societal and operational implications.
1. The Death of the Opt-Out
In digital environments, frequency capping prevents ad fatigue, and users retain a simple, ultimate recourse: they can close a browser tab, delete an app, or put down their phone. Out-of-home advertising offers no such luxury. As digital kiosks, dynamic screens, and programmatic displays colonize sidewalks, transit hubs, and public squares, consumers are losing their ability to opt out.
The phenomenon has drawn sharp criticism from cultural figures. On a recent podcast episode, New York Times journalist Ezra Klein lamented the visual saturation of New York City’s subway system and buses, noting that while advertising is defended as a transit subsidy, it accounts for a meager 1% of the M.T.A.’s operating revenue. He posed a provocative question: Would commuters gladly pay a modest fare increase in exchange for a serene, ad-free public transit system?
2. The Next Frontier: Programmatic Gaming
As physical space faces saturation, the media industry is eyeing the next grand frontier of spatial advertising: video games.
According to Wes Morton, co-founder and CEO of Creativ Company, the gaming ecosystem is poised to become the largest advertising medium on Earth within the next five years. With streaming giants like Netflix and LG investing heavily in gaming crossover experiences—and blockbuster titles like Grand Theft Auto commanding cultural oxygen comparable to major Hollywood releases—programmatic in-game advertising is removing its historical hurdles. Standardized metrics from the IAB and lower friction points (such as high-fidelity cloud streaming directly to televisions using smartphones as controllers) are unlocking massive, captive audiences that cannot be skipped or blocked by traditional ad-blockers.
Conclusion
For two decades, advertising followed human attention from the physical world into the virtual ether of the internet. Today, artificial intelligence, algorithmic saturation, and the decay of trust in digital search are forcing that value back out onto the streets, the rails, and the digital screens of our shared physical environments.
The central question facing marketers, publishers, and cities alike is no longer whether physical space can be monetized—it is how much of the physical world consumers are willing to surrender to the algorithm before pushing back.
