There was a time, not so long ago, when the billboard was regarded on Madison Avenue with roughly the same enthusiasm that record executives reserve for the cassette tape. It was analog. It was immovable. It did not offer "engagement metrics."

Now, at gatherings like Advertising Week, the billboard — and its cousins the bus shelter, the subway card, and the humble wheatpaste — have become objects of renewed professional interest. The reasons, according to executives who spoke at the conference, have less to do with nostalgia than with a growing unease about what the internet has become.

The digital world, it seems, is experiencing a credibility problem. A 2024 report from Adobe found that 87 percent of American consumers said the rise of generative artificial intelligence has made it harder to distinguish fact from fiction online. (One imagines the remaining 13 percent have not yet encountered a deepfake of a celebrity endorsing cryptocurrency.)

But the challenge is not merely that the internet has become cluttered with what industry observers have taken to calling "slop." It is that consumers may soon stop visiting websites altogether. Products with names like Muse and Dots promise to accomplish tasks on behalf of users, extracting information from the web without ever encountering the advertising that pays for it. Last week, Amazon blocked one such service from crawling its site — a dispute that, whatever its specific origins, hints at a larger existential question for the advertising-supported web.

Against this backdrop, out-of-home advertising offers something that has become unexpectedly scarce: physical presence. Digital out-of-home displays, the industry's somewhat clunky term for programmable screens in public spaces, can now be targeted and scheduled with the precision marketers have come to expect online, while retaining the defining advantage of the format. You cannot skip a billboard. It simply stands there, patiently, waiting to be seen.

The logic has begun to spread. Ride-share companies, airlines, grocery chains, and retailers have recognized that any business controlling a physical space where people linger possesses the raw ingredients of a media company.

Whether this development makes cities more valuable to advertisers or merely less pleasant for everyone else is, perhaps, a column for another day.

Original story published in adweek.com: "AI Is Pushing Advertising Back Into the Physical World"