#OAC 2026: Can OOH have its own performance marketing metrics? Yes, says Santosh Kumar of INNOCEAN India

Speaking at OAC 2026, Santosh Kumar, Chief Operating Officer at INNOCEAN India, questioned whether out-of-home advertising should be viewed through the lens of performance marketing, urging the industry to rethink the conversation. His presentation delivered on Day 2 of the 20th edition of OOH Advertising Convention, was titled ‘Will OOH Talk Performance Marketing? The ‘X’ Lingo for Competitive Edge — A Reframe’ 

Santosh opened with a simple idea that every industry’s edge today sits at an intersection. For OOH, that meeting point is physical presence x digital accountability. Not one or the other, he said, the entire case for OOH’s future lives in that ‘x’. 

The old pitch for OOH, Santosh said, was that it lived only at the top of the funnel, good for awareness, not much else. He argued that’s no longer true. With digital-out-of-home, OOH can now show up across the whole customer journey, building awareness through mass reach and memory, feeding consideration by driving people to search online, and even prompting action through hyperlocal ads that pull people into stores.  

As Santosh pointed out, OOH may not have a single-click metric, but its impact can still be measured. He pointed to three key indicators – more store visits, higher search volumes after ad exposure, and stronger hyperlocal engagement near the advertised location. Since there’s no single industry-wide metric yet, he said the honest approach is triangulation, cross-checking OOH exposure against search lift, footfall lift, and sales lift together at a market level.  

To back this up, Santosh shared an example where British Airways’ ‘Magic of Flying’ campaign used live flight data to trigger digital billboards in real time, showing a child pointing at the exact plane flying overhead. The campaign generated 350 million impressions, 330 million YouTube views, 17,000 social media mentions, and 75,000 direct visits to the airline’s website. 

Santosh highlighted an important point about artificial intelligence. He said, “AI will make every screen on earth personalised, predictive and synthetic. Which is exactly why the unfaked, the shared, the physical will matter more, not less.” Genuine human attention in the real world, he said, is becoming the rarest kind of advertising inventory there is and should be priced accordingly. 

He described OOH as the last civic medium, which is public, impossible to skip, and impossible to fake, seen by a city rather than a cookie. AI’s role, in his view, isn’t to make OOH act more like digital advertising, but to make physical sites smarter, more accountable, and more responsive. 

In three to five years, Santosh predicted, Digital will cross half of all OOH spending in India, with screens increasingly bought based on audiences rather than just locations. He expects retail media to move off apps and onto the street, a shared measurement currency to finally emerge, and OOH to move further up the marketing funnel into the consideration stage, not just awareness. 

Santosh’s closing line reframed the entire debate: “OOH won’t win by learning to talk like performance marketing. It wins when performance marketers realise they’ve been missing what OOH always had – real attention, in the real world, that they can finally measure. That’s the X.”