the more digital the world, the scarcer real attention

Marketers have never been able to make so many ads. And they've never got so little attention.

AI makes in an afternoon what an agency used to make in a month. Every brand posts more, tests more, targets more. The result? A feed that never ends, and a consumer who scrolls or clicks past everything.

That's the paradox. The cheaper online content gets, the more valuable the place where you can't scroll becomes. The real world. The motorway. The 7.30 a.m. traffic jam.

We believe the real world is the new premium media. And that Moving Billboards are the smartest place in it for your brand. Here's why.

four signs the tide is turning

Out of home is back. Not out of nostalgia, but because the alternatives are clogging up.

1. The money is already moving outdoors.
Global out-of-home advertising grew 15% in 2025 to $54.2 billion, according to the World Out of Home Organization. In the Netherlands, ABN AMRO expects 5% growth in 2025 and 6% in 2026, to around €317 million. By comparison, Dutch TV advertising shrank by more than 5% in 2025, according to Screenforce.

2. Online has become one crowded market.
Alphabet, Amazon and Meta will take 59.7% of all ad spend outside China this year, WARC calculates. Social is growing 21%. Everyone is fighting for the same thumb, on the same three platforms, with the same algorithm as referee. That makes attention there more expensive, not cheaper.

3. AI makes content cheap, and trust expensive.
In a US consumer panel by agency Net Conversion, 54% say they trust a brand less when they see its advertising was made by AI. One poll, by one agency. But the direction matches what every marketer feels: endless content is worth nothing.

4. The click is disappearing.
68% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, SparkToro measured. AI gives the answer, and the consumer stays put. If you still want to be chosen, you need to be in people's heads before they search. That's called mental availability. And you don't build it with a retargeting banner.

The sum of it all: online is where you convert. The real world is becoming where you get known.

why Moving Billboards

If out of home is back, why not just a billboard? Because a billboard waits. A Moving Billboard goes to your customer.

• You can't scroll past it. No ad blocker, no skip button, no algorithm deciding whether you get seen. The trailer is right next to you in traffic. There's no way around it.

• It drives where people are. Motorways, distribution centres, city centres, the A12 at 7.30 a.m. A bus shelter reaches the street it stands on. A trailer reaches a region, and often several countries.

• It feels like your own fleet. A fully wrapped trailer doesn't say "a brand is advertising here". It says "this brand has come so far it has its own trucks". No banner can buy you that signal of scale and reliability.

• It keeps driving. A social campaign lives for a week. A wrapped trailer drives for months, often years. That's exactly how brands are built: consistently visible, not loud once in a while.

• It becomes content. A trailer is photogenic. People take pictures of it, employees share it, the PR team has a story. One physical object, many channels.

That last point is the core. Moving Billboards don't replace your online channels. They make them work better. People who already know you click sooner, compare less and buy faster.

University of Groningen research: we measured sales, not reach

Out-of-home advertising is bought on reach. What happens next usually remains an assumption. That's why we didn't ask the University of Groningen about reach. We asked about sales.

Researchers Veronica Burbulea, Maarten Gijsenberg and Tammo Bijmolt matched the GPS routes of twelve wrapped trailers with the orders of one national online retailer. Per three-digit postcode area, per month. 789 areas, 26 months, 20,748 observations.

The routes were set by the haulage companies, not by the advertiser.

The preliminary findings:

• In areas where the trailers drove in a given month, sales the following month were significantly higher than in areas where they didn't.

• People ordered more often and spent more per order. The effect on revenue is larger than the effect on the number of orders.

• The effect stays local. Where you drive determines where you sell.

Our reading, not the researchers': a higher order value fits a brand effect. People who know and trust you compare less on price.

The researchers also compared the strength of the effect with the literature on other media. Gijsenberg: "The effect of trailer advertising is of the same order of magnitude as what the literature has found for TV advertising for supermarket products. That's quite remarkable for a medium that costs a fraction as much. We were rather surprised by this ourselves."

Earlier research (Frison et al., 2014) found no significant sales effect for other types of out-of-home advertising. That makes the result for Moving Billboards all the more striking.

What the research doesn't say, we say ourselves. It covers one advertiser, one product category and six months of campaign data. "The effect is there, it's significant, and it looks fairly robust to us," says Gijsenberg. "How the comparison with other media turns out exactly may still shift as the dataset grows."

"but you can't measure it"

That's the classic objection. Moving outdoor advertising falls outside NMO Buitenreclame, the Dutch reach standard media planners work with. So every contact figure comes from a supplier. You're right to be critical of that.

But look at what you do measure online. Clicks, views, impressions. Some of those are bots, unsafe environments or a thumb that scrolled too far. Measurable isn't the same as valuable.

We chose a different route. Not more reach figures, but a university looking at sales. With a method we offer to every other Moving Billboards provider. The more players measure this way, the more seriously the whole category will be taken.

And the second objection, "we don't control the routes"? True. You choose the fleet, and with it the area. That's not a logistics detail. That's media planning.

start with the real world

The question isn't whether your brand should be online. Of course it should. The question is where people get to know you before they start searching.

That happens less and less in a feed where everyone shouts the same thing. And more and more in the places where you can't scroll past.

That's why every brand that wants to grow should test Moving Billboards in its media mix. Not as a side experiment. As the foundation under your online channels. Visibility becomes awareness. Awareness becomes trust. Trust becomes preference.

90 m² of brand awareness on the move. Every day. That's how you make your brand bigger than any phone screen.

sources

World Out of Home Organization, Global OOH Expenditure Report 2026 (via Outsmart)
ABN AMRO, Out-of-home advertising flourishes in the digital age (Dec 2025, in Dutch)
Screenforce via ANP, TV ad spend 2025 (in Dutch)
WARC Global Ad Spend Forecast, Oct 2026 (via TheDesk)
Net Conversion, MORE Intelligence Consumer Pulse (via Marketing Dive)
SparkToro zero-click data 2026 (via Search Engine Land)
Trayler, University of Groningen research: proof on the road