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At WOO’s London 2026 Annual Congress, OUTFRONT Media CEO Nick Brien made a single, decisive argument: advertising is moving from an attention economy to an action economy, trust has become the most valuable economic asset a brand can hold, and real-world media is the channel best placed to compound it.

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Brien framed today’s media landscape as one shaped by privacy concerns, measurement doubts, viewability questions, fraud, adverse context, lack of transparency, fragmentation and digital overload. In that environment, he argued, trust is no longer a soft brand metric — it is an economic advantage, and the channels best placed to compound it will be the ones that win the decade ahead.

The presentation described trust as “the new oil”: as important as quality and price in decision-making, indispensable to growth and profitability, and a force that protects pricing power over time.

Set against that, the deck showed weakening confidence in digital environments — falling trust in online and mobile ads, brand social media ads, and sponsored ads and influencers. Digital advertising, Brien suggested, has too often become intrusive, repetitive, cluttered, privacy-sensitive and insufficiently relevant.

AI, Brien argued, only sharpens the problem. His slides asked whether AI is “better or safer”, pointing to consumer mistrust of AI search results, concern about personal data, and distrust of AI shopping assistants. Against that backdrop, he positioned IRL media not as a legacy channel but as a trusted public interface in an increasingly synthetic, automated and personalised media world.

If that is the diagnosis, the prescription follows from it. Marketing success in the old model was about capturing eyeballs, maximising screentime and selling impressions. In the action economy — what Brien called the next phase of the digital ecosystem — it is about encouraging participation, inviting discovery and driving outcomes. To make that operational, the presentation reframed five of the industry’s default reflexes in terms of what the action economy will actually reward.

The conclusion, for Brien, is that OOH equals IRL. The medium’s power lies in its publicness: it reaches people in shared spaces, connects with real journeys, carries cultural relevance and creates contextual impact.

OOH, he said, is a combination of reach, influence, attention, relevance and trust — qualities that can make it an indispensable part of omnichannel campaigns rather than a supporting channel.

For WOO delegates, the implication was direct. OOH’s next decade will not be won by arguing that the medium is bigger than digital. It will be won by proving that real-world presence builds confidence, drives discovery and turns attention into action.

In a fractured media environment, IRL may be one of the few remaining places where brands, culture and shared human experience still meet at scale.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media