Why context matters in digital out-of-home advertising

Picture this scenario: it’s 8:15 on a Tuesday morning. You’ve doubled back home on the school run after realising your oldest has left their homework on the kitchen table. You’ve got a Teams call at 9am, and your youngest has just started screaming because you won’t stop at the playground you’re now sitting adjacent to, behind a broken-down bus. 

Does this sound like the perfect place and time to be served an ad for some new trainers? 

I personally didn’t think so, but according to LinkedIn, a lot of people could imagine nothing better. The post – a picture of a sportswear brand’s ad on a bus shelter – had attracted bountiful praise and numerous “right message, right place, right time” comments from a panel of armchair experts. 

Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the commentators were talking about the message being right for the runners, which app data had shown regularly used this route for their morning blast of cardio. For this audience, sure, “right message, right place, right time” feels accurate – but accurate in the same way a stopped clock is at telling the time: mostly wrong, and then right twice a day. 

This is a problem that out-of-home can suffer from when it comes to contextual targeting. Whilst digital screens, modern CMS systems, and programmatic tech all enable precise delivery of messages to the right person, at the right place, at the right time, the underlying media wasn’t built for that. 

The majority of out-of-home’s infrastructure is designed to maximise efficiency of reach – and that it does better than any other channel. 96% of the adult population in the UK see at least one poster ad every week. 

The downside is that when your goal is to reach everyone, contextual opportunities become diluted. 

For example, if our running brand’s goal is to reach runners in the act – they will achieve that on the bus shelters for sure, but the majority of their impressions will be served to people not running; delivery drivers, cabbies, commuters, home-bound shift workers, and our school run parents, all perfectly desirable audiences for a sportswear brand, but not quite ‘right message, right place, right time’. 

What we often end up with, then, are unnecessarily complicated and at times, incredibly expensive solutions trying to prove that bus shelters are the right medium for the job (and maybe win a few awards) rather than just placing the ads in, say… gyms? 

Whilst roadside and transport posters that talk to us on our journeys can lack contextual finesse, our destinations are often steeped in it. When you walk to the cinema, for example, you share the streets with people bound for all sorts of destinations. Once you’ve arrived, however, you share the space with… cinema-goers. 

Advertising in these types of spaces has a name in the United States: “place-based” media. It includes advertising opportunities in a wide array of places: universities, hospitals, golf clubs, salons – you name it – and it’s popular too. A recent report from Place Exchange – one of the world’s largest programmatic marketplaces – revealed that nearly a quarter of all media transacted on their platform was place-based DOOH in 2025. 

This presents an opportunity in the UK market. Last year, Outsmart reported that 98% of all DOOH spend was in transport, roadside, and major retail environments such as malls and areas outside supermarkets typical OOH fare; but that’s starting to change. 

Contextually relevant ads perform better

A study published in 2020 – The Moments of Truth – demonstrated that when DOOH ads were made contextually relevant, they performed 17% better. Sounds good, right? Except this study again focused on environments with minimal contextual opportunity – the side of a road, for example. 

So the “contextual relevance” of the ads studied included things like having the name of the town in the creative (“Hello Bradford”) or referencing the weather (“It’s raining – time to treat yourself”). 

Clever uses of data and automation of creative, sure; inspiring? The jury’s out for me on that one. 

Instinctively, we know that truly contextually relevant ads can work much better than that.  You’re far more likely to click on an ad for travel insurance whilst booking a holiday than you are riding the bus to work for example. 

With Dwell , we wanted to prove that seeing an ad whilst in conversation with friends would lead to better performance. 

Working with research partners LoopMe and TGI, we measured outcomes for brands across a range of verticals for which conversation is a natural part of decision-making – film, TV, travel, sport, fashion, etc. The results, as predicted, showed that ads in coffee shops and bars were on average 64% more likely to be talked about than those on bus shelters or billboards. 

We also found that individuals exposed to ads on Dwell were 47% more likely to take some form of brand-related action following exposure (book a cab, make a web search, etc.) versus people who weren’t. 

We now offer measurement of this kind as a standard part of nationally weighted bookings on Dwell, providing key accountability and attribution to a medium that has historically struggled to do just that. 

Dwell is leading the UK’s investment into place-based media with over 4,000 full motion portrait screens now live in over 1,000 venues across the country and continued expansion planned into social, conversational spaces throughout the next few years. 

This includes our own office, which proved the point a few weeks ago. Whilst having a chat about where to go for lunch, one of our screens in the office played KFC’s new Pickle Burger ad and prompted a trip to Leicester Square for three Alighters to try it out. 

I can’t speak for the LinkedIn crowd – but to me, that sounds like the right message, in the right place, at the right time. 

The burger was delicious.