At this year’s Drum Awards Festival, Jaime Byrdak, Chief Executive Officer for North America at billups, was among the jurors judging advertising work designed to make audiences stop, look, and, ideally, remember.

The distinction is simple.

“People remember things that make them feel something; what they simply see just fills space,” Jaime said.

It is also a useful way to understand where Out-of-Home advertising finds itself today. OOH has never lacked scale. The harder question has been what happens after someone sees the ad.

For years, the medium was largely sold on reach, awareness, and gut feel. When budgets tightened, OOH could become one of the first channels on the chopping block.

Jaime sees that perception as one of the medium's biggest misunderstandings.

“The most misunderstood thing is that people still treat OOH as a ‘brand awareness’ channel that can’t be measured,” Jaime said. “When the truth is, it’s now one of the most accountable channels we have.”

That is where the conversation has changed.

Advertisers can now connect OOH exposure with outcomes such as store visits, website activity, and conversions, depending on the campaign objective. Instead of ending with an impression count, the conversation can continue into what people actually did next.

The question is no longer simply, “How many people saw it?”

It is, “What happened after they did?” which changes where OOH sits in the media plan.

“The moment you can prove it drives performance, it stops being a ‘brand awareness’ only line item and becomes accountable to the same standard as every digital channel,” Jaime said.

That accountability does not have to come at the expense of creativity. Jaime sees measurement as what creates more room for it. Once marketers can demonstrate that the media is working, there is more confidence to invest in “the creativity, the scale, the storytelling,” she said.

The same tension between immediate results and long-term value shapes how she thinks about brand building.

“Short-term activation alone doesn't build lasting demand,” Jaime said.

The challenge is making both work together: building familiarity and fame while giving marketers evidence that the immediate investment is producing an outcome. OOH can do both, putting a brand in front of a broad audience while measurement helps determine what happened next.

That balance is becoming relevant to another part of the business, too: artificial intelligence.

AI is already being used across planning, optimization, and measurement. Jaime credits billups Chief Technology Officer Shawn Spooner and audrai™, the industry’s first agentic AI system, with accelerating certain workflows by as much as 50%.

The value, she argues, is not simply doing the same work faster. It is what happens with the time that comes back: more room to understand an audience, decide when a brand is ready to take a creative risk, and determine whether an idea has something worth saying.

“AI handles the ‘what’ and the ‘how fast,’” Jaime said. “We still own the ‘why.’”

The distinction matters as the technology continues to change. Jaime expects the next generation of leaders to need curiosity as much as technical expertise, while relationships remain firmly human.

“Building trust, developing people, and telling a story that makes a client believe” are responsibilities she does not expect AI to take over.

It brings the conversation back to the standard Jaime applied as a Drum Awards Festival juror. Advertising can be measurable without becoming mechanical. It can be built for performance without losing what makes people remember it.

The strongest work still has to make someone feel something.

The difference now is that OOH has more evidence to show what happened after they did.

The receipts are no longer the end of the story.

They are what make the next decision possible.