The Argument for Analog

Why less can sometimes be way more

I recently spent a day with a group of digital marketers at Profound’s Zero Click conference. If you haven’t come across Profound yet, they’re one of the organizations leading the charge on AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), helping marketers optimize their authority ranking within GPTs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, etc.).

The room was filled with brilliant marketers who have dominated in digital marketing and search engine optimization. What struck me sitting through each panel was how openly everyone admitted that the old game was simply a numbers game. Build to the appetite of the algorithm, and you’ll be rewarded accordingly.

That brute force execution is now being disrupted. In its place is a system that prequalifies and establishes relevance and authority with the hopes of creating a more authentic and guided experience, one that shifts from a probabilistic output based on associated words to more of an empathetic engine that understands you and knows what it believes best fits your needs.

Newsbreak: Empathy Isn’t New

Empathy as a key component of communication is not new. It’s core to any analog experience.

One-to-one: a conversation, a cuddle session with your favorite pet, and even the viewing of a single static billboard.

When executed masterfully, a static display can convey an outsized, direct message. There’s no countdown until the next ad or some competing overlay. It’s just the consumer and the message.

What a Static Board Actually Does

A classic billboard, in the right place, does something almost no other surface in modern advertising can do. It sits there. It doesn’t refresh. It isn’t competing with another brand’s message rotating every 6-15 seconds. There’s no urgency to get through it before the loop moves on, no quiet anxiety that you might not be able to finish the message.

The board is just present. The person is just present. The exchange between them can be unhurried in a way that almost nothing else in a consumer’s day is. Unhurried.

Elliot Ward of Excite OOH made a related point in The Drum recently: a static posting typically runs for about 2-4 weeks, long enough for a brand to stop merely appearing somewhere and start belonging to the place. The walk to work. The school run. The drive home. It settles into the environment until it’s part of the tapestry of someone’s week.

That stillness is magic. The same magic that a great painting might have. Stand in front of Edward Hopper’s Automat for a few minutes. The woman at the table. The dark window behind her. The soulless overhead lights. No optimized messaging needed; the painting trusts you with the silence.

A well-placed static display can have the same effect when the timing is right. Nike can write a masterclass on these executions (think Caitlin Clark in 2024 or Michael Jordan throughout the 90’s), but they’re far from the only brand that understands the value of that analog experience.

It’s not a nostalgia argument. It’s a behavioral one.

Static is different from digital. It’ll never have a CTR (click-through rate), and it is heavily discounted in most mixed-media models. But as the famous quote goes, the medium is the message, and this medium does one job, and does it incredibly well - it delivers an immutable message at the rate of the consumer’s desire.

What This Means for the People Who Sell It

I’m not suggesting we slow the digital build-out, and I’m certainly not suggesting operators rip out screens and put up vinyl. The economics of digital inventory are real, and we’re not going backward. What I am suggesting is that we stop treating static as the legacy half of the portfolio - the part you mention quickly before getting to the programmatic packaging.

There are conversations and strategies that can only be executed through a static board or a cool custom mural. Brand messages that require processing and consideration, campaigns that want the audience to feel found, not chased. They aren’t consolation prizes. They’re a category of value that the rest of the advertising world chases, but can seldom achieve.

The Quiet Channel in a Loud Year

As I left Zero Click, I found myself thinking a lot about what the future might look like. A world where decisions are generated through language models, coffee is served by single-armed robots (that’s a whole different article), and everything is precisely calculated and optimized for conversion. And it became ever more evident that in a world operating through digital exchanges, more and more we all yearn to feel, interact, and engage with something direct. Something tangible. Something analog.

Eric Kung is the GM of the Americas at Moving Walls, a global digital out-of-home platform that enables media owners and advertisers to plan, activate, and measure OOH campaigns at scale.