Hong Kong’s outdoor ads stand firm in the digital era

From modest bus shelter posters to the giant billboards beside the city’s cross-harbour tunnels, a distinctive element of Hong Kong’s cityscape is its sheer abundance of outdoor advertising. This aesthetic was already so embedded in popular consciousness by the 1980s that it served as the inspiration for the look of a futuristic Los Angeles in Blade Runner, whose grim skyline in 2019 was then imagined to be dominated by vast adverts for the likes of Pan Am and Coca-Cola.
Today, this same outdoor advertising ecosystem might appear to be in danger from the screen-saturated habits of the real 21st century. After all, if Hong Kong’s “smartphone zombie” commuters remain fixated on their screens, not looking up at the ads around them, how can this industry possibly survive?
According to local experts, quite easily, as out-of-home (OOH) advertising is evolving with the times.
Traditional formats of OOH advertising have a strong foundation in Hong Kong. Johnny Ng, vice-president for marketing and growth at WPP Media, specifically credits Hong Kong’s population density for making it one of the world’s most powerful out-of-home cities, with display sites seeing fierce competition.

“It is perfect for media people like me because securing a site means you have constant exposure throughout the day,” Ng explains. “It’s not like you’re in the boonies somewhere where you’ve bought a site that no one’s ever seen.”
Complementing this physical density is the unshakeable daily routine of the city’s residents. Kara Chan, associate dean and professor of the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University, has studied the relationship between the city’s commuters and OOH advertising since the 1990s. She believes that high-frequency use of public transport has defined OOH as Hong Kong’s only “real” form of mass media and it is an effective format that wins through sheer persistence.
“You can’t book MTR spots for just one day; the unit of buying posters is in weeks,” Chan says. “As a result, even though you may not pay attention the first time, the second time, or the third time you pass by, if you take a single look, then you will notice something.”

That is likely all that is needed, as Chan’s research has also found the medium’s advantage is that it requires little cognitive ability to be effective. In an age of visual bombardment, this is a superpower. While a video may require several seconds of sustained focus to deliver its message, it takes a commuter only a split-second glance to absorb a poster. “People just take a look [at OOH] and within one to two seconds, they already get the message. That’s how posters gain high awareness,” Chan says.
Hilda Cheung, marketing director at Cody OOH, explains that, while it may be cynical and humorous to imagine otherwise, smartphone users inevitably have to look up from their devices at multiple points during their commutes. When they do, OOH has an advantage that digital ads do not.

“OOH is basically top-funnel awareness that you can’t miss. You can’t swipe past it or skip it like on a mobile phone; it’s right in your face,” Cheung explains. This unavoidability is why the industry remains bullish. And far from viewing them as a competitor for their clients’ ads, Hong Kong’s OOH experts see smartphones as a positive factor – the ultimate catalyst for their medium.
“Smartphones don’t take away attention from OOH, they give physical advertisements an instant, digitalised and interactive fulfilment channel,” says Shirley Chan, managing director of JCDecaux Transport Hong Kong and Macau.
She explains that real-world advertising can now send potential customers on virtual explorations of interactive campaigns across multiple formats: from mobile mini-games, lucky draws and live voting polls all the way to AI-powered tools that allow users to create their own visual content to share online. And all of this offline-to-online [O2O] synergy can take place during the course of a single train or bus ride.
“By turning a daily commute into an experiential gaming or interactive destination, we create a continuous, multi-screen journey that converts passing footfall into high-value digital engagement and direct, measurable data to build long-term brand loyalty,” Shirley Chan says.

Cody OOH’s Cheung describes mobile devices as adding extra seasoning to the effectiveness of OOH advertising. “It’s a secret spicy sauce. If a campaign is purely OOH or if it’s purely digital, it’s flat. With mobile devices, we create O2O journeys for brands.”
The digitalisation of traditional screens has unlocked data-driven opportunities enabled by the ubiquity of smartphones – such as programmatic displays, where ad content can be swapped in and out in reaction to the specific audience in the area at the time. Ng says that many of the digital solutions WPP Media now offers are built around using mobile device tracking and IDs to “better serve ads in context with relevance to digital out-of-home screens, often programmatically”.
It’s not only smartphones providing data, though – ad displays themselves can now contribute insights, confirming which adverts have been looked at and by whom. AI computer vision systems built into and around displays can monitor glances and engagement in real time while still preserving the anonymity of those individuals detected.

“Brands can actively validate their creative strategies and optimise campaigns using empirical data. We’re now delivering the holy grail of marketing: data-proven precision, real-time relevance, and verifiable attribution across our MTR advertising network,” Shirley Chan says.
JCDecaux first piloted its AI audience measurement system in a campaign for pharmaceutical company Wong To Yick. The system tracked more than 385,000 traffic flows and validated that women aged 25-34 were the highest-engaging core demographic.
According to Shirley Chan, this real-time optimisation directly contributed to a significant growth in sales. “These campaigns clearly demonstrate how a sophisticated AI engine decodes real-time audience behaviour to drive tangible business growth. They prove that when you blend massive physical sensory impact with hyper-precise data analytics, the return on investment for brands is unprecedented.”