Watch the full session

Taking the WOO London 2026 stage, Creative Consultant Katy Hopkins put a deliberately provocative question to the room: creativity, what’s the point? Her answer over the next twenty minutes was a sharp defence of the OOH work that genuinely cuts through — and an unsparing look at most of what does not.

Watch the full session

Hopkins set up the case with a number. Across an average day, a person is interrupted roughly 96 times by notifications, feeds, scrolling and ambient screens — about once every ten minutes, and the count does not stop overnight. Against that backdrop, she argued, the average advertisement does not have a budget problem. It has an attention problem.

What that means for OOH, Hopkins put bluntly, is that the work has to earn the right to be remembered. The question to ask of any campaign is not “will it look good on the panel?” but “will anyone remember it tomorrow? In a year? Will it change how they think or feel?” If the honest answer is no, the work is wallpaper — and wallpaper is what people walk past.

Her thesis came down to three things great OOH creative has to do. Not all of them all the time, but the work that becomes part of the culture, the work people share without being asked, tends to have all three at once.

• D

  Disruptive

  Stand out from the wallpaper of everyday media. Most work does not. The first job is to be different enough to be noticed at all.

• R

  Relevant

  Connect to the brand, the moment, the audience’s actual life. Disruption without relevance is just noise, and noise gets tuned out.

• E

  Engaging

  Invite people in. Let them participate, react, share. When the audience builds the story with the brand, the campaign stops being an ad.

Hopkins walked through a gallery of OOH work to show the three principles in combination. The Economist’s classic line — “I never read The Economist. Management trainee, aged 42.” — does all three jobs in one sentence of copy. Selleys’ Australian “If you can take it, it’s yours” glued real products to the billboard with the brand’s own adhesive. O2’s “Oops” cracked a billboard like a phone screen. Disney’s Percy Jackson billboards crashed water out of the frame. The Guardian’s redacted billboards invited readers to uncover the censored words for themselves. And on the South Bank of the Thames, an unbranded fountain sculpture of a smug executive standing over working figures appeared overnight — closer to a Banksy than to an ad, and exactly the kind of cultural intervention OOH is uniquely placed to host.

• 
  The Economist One line of copy doing all three jobs at once. No production budget, no animation, no second screen — a sentence that knows exactly who is reading it.
• 
  Selleys, Australia Real products glued to the billboard with the brand’s own adhesive. Engagement that turned a media buy into pop culture.
• 
  O2 ‘Oops’ The format itself carries the message. A billboard tilted off its mountings and cracked like a phone screen.
• 
  Disney — Percy Jackson Anamorphic 3D billboard turning crashing water into physical spectacle. The audience’s phones did the digital amplification.
• 
  The Guardian Redacted billboards on press freedom in the United States. The act of uncovering the censored words was the point.
• 
  South Bank, London An unbranded bronze sculpture of an executive standing over working figures. Cultural commentary OOH is uniquely placed to host.

She named others along the way — Canva’s “When ‘make the logo bigger’ goes a bit too far”, Waitrose’s literal skewers through the billboard, Uber Eats and Poke House’s “Life admining”, British Airways’ real-time flight lookup boards, Lynx’s “Scratch & Sniff” placement — but the pattern was consistent: work that earned attention rather than demanded it.

The thread through every example, Hopkins argued, is that the brands that win do not always have the biggest budgets. They have the courage to stand out, the discipline to stay relevant, and the generosity to invite the audience in. Out of Home, with its public space, its scale and its physical presence, is uniquely placed to do all three — provided the industry uses that advantage instead of taking it for granted.

Creativity is what turns the brand from something people walk past into something they want to share. The brands that win do not need the biggest budgets — they need the bravery to stand out, and the craft to make people feel something.

Katy Hopkins, Creative Consultant