Out-of-Home advertising has always had a quality that sets it apart from every other media channel - it is woven into the fabric of the city itself. You cannot skip it, scroll past it, or block it. It exists in the real world, commanding attention in the moments between everything else. That is true across the full spectrum of the medium, which continues to prove its value in every form.

But something is shifting at the top end of the market. Super-premium OOH is entering a new era - and the infrastructure underpinning it is what makes that possible.

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At Wildstone, our role is to own, develop, and steward the physical assets that media operators bring to life. We are not in the business of selling advertising, we are in the business of building the environments in which great advertising can happen. That distinction matters enormously when it comes to luxury brands, whose relationship with context is everything. A campaign for a heritage fashion house does not exist in isolation - it exists in dialogue with the space around it. Which means that space has to be worthy of the conversation.

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In our view, truly super-premium OOH is defined by several things working together. Location is the foundation - irreplaceable, high-traffic, in the right catchment. But location alone is not enough. The surrounding environment has to reinforce the message; the physical infrastructure has to reflect the standard of the brands it hosts, the display technology has to be flawless. And perhaps most importantly, there has to be a degree of scarcity. Luxury does not thrive in ubiquity.

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This is the thinking behind our partnership with BackLite UK, and the ongoing refurbishment programme we are carrying out across some of London’s most prestigious OOH locations. At the Wandsworth Roundabout - on a major arterial route through an affluent pocket of South-West London - we have transformed a site that was always strong on location into one that is now uncompromising on every other dimension too. Franck Muller, David Morris, and Tissot are among the brands that have followed. At The Knightsbridge, our flagship installation in the Piccadilly Underpass alongside Hyde Park Corner, the result is the same: a site that sits at the heart of one of the world’s great luxury retail corridors, now upgraded to match that address. Burberry was among the first to recognise it.

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The commercial case for this level of investment has never been clearer. New econometrics data from Independent Marketing Sciences, drawn from over 270 campaigns across 24 advertising channels over the last decade, shows that OOH delivers an average ROI of 12.8x for luxury brands - meaning every pound spent generates £12.80 in revenue, against a cross-channel average of just 4.7x. Luxury advertisers are already responding: spend on OOH nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023.

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This is not a market trend we are reacting to. It is one we are helping to shape. When the infrastructure is right - when every element of a site, from its location to its structure to its technology, is built to the highest standard – luxury advertisers take notice.  

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We will be carrying out a number of further high-end refurbishments across our portfolio in partnership with BackLite UK - and beyond that, we have some extraordinary, architecturally ambitious super-premium sites in the pipeline, unlike anything currently on the market. Watch this space.