Adding Out of Home Lifted ROI by 39% in Analytic Partners' Two-Decade Study. The Pure Digital Media Plan Is Underperforming.

Analytic Partners published a study this week pulling from more than $30 billion in ad spend across 700 marketing mix modelling studies built over two decades. The headline finding is clean. Campaigns using both classic and digital out of home delivered 39% greater ROI than campaigns running digital OOH alone.

The numbers underneath are equally clear. Suburban placements drive up to 37% stronger ROI than CBD-only activity. Multi-format OOH campaigns post a 30% lift over single-format. Multi-environment campaigns run through a single scaled partner can lift ROI by 36%.

The data is unusual because the period covered spans the entire shift from digital-led to digital-default media planning. Through every major change in attribution, audience targeting and platform spend, OOH has been quietly compounding.

For brands that pulled OOH budget into pure-digital in 2020-2022, the recovery has been slow. Out of home was painted as a legacy channel. The MMM data tells a different story.

Australian advertisers are sitting on a ROI pattern most of them ignored. The growth of oOh!media's digital network, JCDecaux's council expansions and the BVOD-OOH stack has created an integrated outdoor product that did not exist five years ago.

For brand-led businesses, OOH is the channel that remains hard for competitors to copy at scale. Premium sites are finite. Pricing is transparent. Creative effectiveness compounds over the campaign window. None of those statements are true for any AI-mediated channel.

The case for reallocation does not require a leap of faith. The Analytic Partners dataset is one of the largest in the market. The conclusions hold across categories, scale and time periods.

The cheap headline is "billboards are back". The honest reading is that the brands who never left OOH have been quietly outperforming for years.