AI Made Content Cheap. Reality Makes Attention Expensive Again.

When I tell people I work in innovation, they assume my job is all about technology (and they’re not wrong), but the more interesting work is asking how and why people evolve with it.

Which brings me to something that might sound unexpected: billboards.

Not the digital kind at the top of a website. The big old signs on the side of the road. Somewhere along the way, they became background. Static. One-way. The opposite of innovation, really. A relic of mass media in a world obsessed with personalization, interactivity, and data.

But lately, I’ve been noticing a renaissance. In a culture saturated with endless content and an exponentially growing pile of cheap, AI-generated slop, the billboard itself has quietly become… cool again?

Take the Percy Jackson Season 2 billboard, for example, with a real, functional waterfall flowing off the structure itself. Actual water. Or the billboard  for Stephen Curry’s new book, Shot Ready, designed to come to life so the real moon (from the right angle) completed the arc of his jump shot.

Perhaps there is no stronger example than the latest work from Red Wing. Their billboards were built “the hard way” out of leather hides and wood (real scraps pulled from the boot-making process) to reinforce the brand’s belief that there’s still value in doing things the right way, even when it takes more time and more effort. 

But what stands out isn’t just how they were made; it’s that they chose to make them real at all. These billboards trigger that rare, childlike awe that comes from seeing something that feels bigger than life, especially in a moment where virtual OOH, CGI, and AI make simulation cheaper and faster. 

For brand marketers, this tension matters. When so much of what we consume is infinitely reproducible, attention is genuinely harder to earn. Big, high-impact ideas aren’t easy to make (or easy to come by), but they’re powerful precisely because they require real creative conviction and real effort. It’s also a reminder that while it’s tempting to chase the newest technology, innovative ideas on tried-and-true media channels can still crush it.  File this under: humans still got it.