Doohers and Shakers: Roxanne Harley

This month, the next guest in our long-form interview series - Doohers and Shakers - is Roxanne Harley, VP Strategy & Growth at Azerion. Roxanne operates at the intersection of brand planning, commercial performance, product innovation and creative execution - or as she puts it, where "the math and the art" meet. Her experience has shaped the beliefs she operates by: reach without receptivity is a blunt instrument, creative is a performance driver not a finishing layer, and insight is worthless if it stays trapped in a deck. At Azerion, she applies that thinking to one of the most exciting questions in media right now - how to turn DOOH from a brand-building channel into a fully accountable growth engine, with measurement, dynamic creative and audience intelligence working together. We hope you enjoy the read!

You recently stepped into an expanded role as VP Strategy & Growth at Azerion. What does that remit actually cover day to day, and how has the scope of what you're responsible for shifted with the promotion?

My remit is really about joining up strategy, proposition and commercial growth.

Day to day, that means looking at where the market is moving, where clients are feeling friction, and how Azerion can help them grow through better audience understanding, smarter activation and more meaningful creative connections. It is a very connected role. I work across our commercial teams, strategy, insight, data, creative, programmatic and channel partnerships to make sure we are not just responding to briefs, but helping shape better ones.

The biggest shift with the promotion is that the role has become more future-facing. I am still very close to agency and client conversations, because that is where the most useful market signals come from. But my responsibility now is to turn those signals into sharper propositions, stronger go-to-market priorities and more scalable growth opportunities for the business and for the brands we work with.

Azerion talks about being a digital growth partner, and that is a useful way to think about my role too. It is about helping brands understand their customers’ lives online and offline, then carrying that strategic intent all the way through discovery, planning, activation and measurement. The important part is making sure the thinking does not get lost when it hits activation. That is where growth either compounds or falls apart.

What is the single most rewarding aspect of your role as VP Strategy & Growth at Azerion?

The most rewarding part is helping clients and teams see a bigger opportunity than the one they came in with.

Quite often, a brief starts with a channel, a format or an audience segment. But when you look properly at behaviour, mindset and context, the opportunity becomes much richer. It stops being “how do we reach this audience?” and becomes “when are they most receptive, what do they actually care about in that moment, and what kind of creative connection will make the message land?”

That is the part I love. Turning reach into relevance. Turning a media plan into a growth plan.

It is also rewarding because Azerion has the tools to make that practical. Our Mind Map work, for example, is built around the idea that audience receptivity matters as much as audience reach. The research shows ad recall can increase by 37% when planning around the most receptive mindsets, which is exactly the kind of evidence that helps move the conversation from theory into action.

Through its omnichannel capabilities, Azerion curates and connects scalable, addressable custom audiences with attention-optimised formats and creative solutions across the entire customer journey. What does this mean for brand growth today?

It means growth is no longer about choosing between scale and precision.

Brands need both. They need the ability to reach large audiences, but they also need to understand when those audiences are actually open to engaging. Media is too fragmented for blunt reach alone to be enough. People move between audio, mobile, DOOH, display, desktop, CTV and video throughout the day, and their mindset changes as they move. A commuter at 8am is not the same person as someone browsing at lunchtime or winding down in the evening.

So the opportunity is to connect the whole journey: discover the audience, plan around their behaviour and receptivity, activate across the right environments, and measure what changed. That is where omnichannel becomes genuinely valuable. It is not just more channels. It is a more connected way of creating growth.

And creative is central to that. Our GTM work references that 49% of media effectiveness comes from visuals, which is a useful reminder that performance is not only a targeting problem. The message has to be built for the moment, the channel and the mindset. That is why our approach brings together audience intelligence, premium supply, creative solutions and measurement rather than treating them as separate disciplines.

Azerion recently launched a new whitepaper, The State of UK DOOH: Momentum, Measurement and the Road to Maturity, and held an event earlier this month. What were the headline findings that surprised you most, and how are they shaping Azerion's thinking on where the DOOH opportunity is headed?

The most striking finding was the distance between belief and behaviour.

The market is clearly positive about DOOH. Our research shows 93% of respondents consider OOH important to their omnichannel strategy in 2026, 68% have increased their use of OOH in the past 12 months, and 61% expect spend to increase in the next 12 months. Programmatic DOOH is also already mainstream, with 77% of respondents buying OOH programmatically and 44% doing so regularly.

But there is still a gap. OOH is important, but not always default. It is valued, but not always measured with the confidence clients need. The whitepaper shows that measurement is the thread running through the biggest barriers: it is the top obstacle to investment, the top thing planners would change, and the area where confidence is weakest.

The other thing that stood out was the creative gap. Creative impact is the number one reason people choose OOH, yet 62% refresh their OOH creative once or never per campaign, and only 4% update dynamically. That is a huge missed opportunity. The technology is moving quickly, but creative practice has not fully caught up.

So our thinking is very clear: the next phase of DOOH growth will come from making the channel easier to plan, easier to measure and more creatively intelligent. The opportunity is not simply more screens or more automation. It is better proof, better creative, stronger cross-media measurement and more sophisticated planning around audiences, context and receptivity.

From your vantage point, where do you see the greatest opportunity for collaboration among competitors in the OOH industry? How can this cooperation lead to a stronger position against other media channels?

The biggest opportunity is around shared confidence.

OOH businesses will always compete on inventory, data, technology, creativity and service. That is healthy. But the industry should be much more aligned on the foundations that help clients invest with confidence: measurement standards, verification, education, cross-media proof and clearer effectiveness case studies.

The research tells us exactly what the market is asking for. When respondents were asked what would increase confidence in OOH measurement, the top answers were better cross-media measurement, more case studies with business outcomes and improved data partnerships. That is not a request for more noise. It is a request for proof and comparability.

That matters because OOH is not only competing with other OOH suppliers. It is competing for budget against digital video, CTV, social, retail media and search. Those channels often feel easier to justify because they have trained buyers to expect dashboards, benchmarks and feedback loops.

If OOH can collaborate on the evidence base, the whole category becomes easier to buy and easier to defend. The industry does not need to make OOH behave exactly like every other digital channel. But it does need to make its value more legible within modern omnichannel planning.

Programmatic DOOH is still maturing as a channel. What are the biggest structural barriers still preventing it from scaling the way pure digital programmatic has, and who needs to move first to unlock that?

The biggest barriers are measurement confidence, workflow simplicity and creative maturity.

Programmatic DOOH has already achieved a lot. In our survey, 77% of industry professionals said they are buying OOH programmatically, with flexibility, faster activation, easier optimisation and integration with digital planning all cited as key benefits. Ownership is also shifting, with programmatic teams responsible for DOOH buying routes in 58% of organisations.

That shift is important because it changes the language the industry needs to speak. Programmatic teams expect DSP integration, audience data, targeting logic, optimisation, reporting and accountability. If DOOH still feels too manual, too inconsistent or too difficult to compare with other channels, it will not scale as quickly as it should.

Measurement is the clearest blocker. The event deck shows that 58% say measurement is a barrier to using OOH, 29% say it is the one thing they would change, and 68% are still only using footfall for tracking. The tools exist, but the market is not using the full measurement ladder consistently enough.

Who needs to move first? I think the industry needs to move together, but the first move has to be proof. Media owners, platforms, agencies and partners need to make measurement easier to understand and easier to activate. Once buyers can see how DOOH contributes to brand lift, search uplift, footfall, sales and incremental reach, the budget conversation changes very quickly.

Veridooh's signature product is independent verification, guaranteeing impressions exactly as booked. From an effectiveness perspective, what is the commercial cost to a brand when a meticulously planned creative lacks verification and is subsequently compromised through missed impressions or incorrect execution?

The immediate cost is wasted investment, but the bigger cost is damaged confidence.

A strong DOOH campaign is not just a set of screens. It is a carefully planned combination of audience, location, context, timing, creative and measurement. If the campaign does not run as booked, or if impressions are missed or delivered incorrectly, then the brand is not just losing delivery. It is losing the strategic logic behind the plan.

That matters because DOOH is increasingly being asked to prove its role in the wider mix. We can now measure across the consumer journey: awareness, attention, intent, perception, action and outcome. Azerion case studies showcase OOH can deliver search uplift, brand lift, footfall and sales uplift.

But if delivery is compromised and not independently verified, it becomes very difficult to interpret the result. Did the creative fail? Did the strategy fail? Or did the campaign simply not run as intended?

That uncertainty has a commercial cost because it can reduce future investment in a channel that may not have been given a fair test. Verification protects delivery, but more importantly it protects trust in the outcome.

What foundational shifts would be required for the OOH industry to turbo charge its growth?

There are four big shifts.

First, OOH needs to move from measurement as a perceived weakness to measurement as a commercial strength. DOOH is no longer a black box. Location data, device IDs, search behaviour and sales panels can measure across the full consumer journey. The issue is not that measurement does not exist; it is that awareness and adoption are still inconsistent.

Second, targeting needs to become more audience-led. Today, 88% use location data to plan or target DOOH, but only 12% use first-party CRM segments. Location will always be fundamental to OOH, but the next stage of growth depends on combining where people are with who they are, what mindset they are in and what they are likely to respond to.

Third, creative needs to catch up with the technology. The deck makes the point very clearly: if creative impact is the number one reason people choose OOH, why are so many campaigns still running one asset for the whole campaign? Dynamic creative does not have to mean complexity for complexity’s sake. It can be as simple as a strong brand layer, a variable message layer and a proof layer that gives people a reason to act now.

Fourth, the industry needs to plan around receptivity, not just reach. Azerion’s Mind Map work is built on the idea that people engage when they are in the right mindset, not just when they happen to be in the target audience. That is a much more modern way to think about effectiveness.

If we make those shifts, OOH becomes easier to buy, easier to prove and much harder to ignore.

What do you see as the biggest trends and technological advancements shaping the future of OOH over the next 5 years?

The next five years will be shaped by the convergence of programmatic buying, audience intelligence, dynamic creative and better measurement.

Programmatic will continue to grow, but the real value is not automation in isolation. It is flexibility, faster activation, easier optimisation and better integration into digital planning workflows. Those were the main benefits respondents associated with programmatic DOOH in our survey, and they are exactly the qualities buyers increasingly expect from every channel.

Attention and receptivity will also become much more important. OOH has always had attention because of its physical presence, but we now need to understand which environments, moments and mindsets make people most open to a message. That is where tools like Mind Map become powerful, because they help translate cognitive availability into activation across channels, days, regions and messaging.

Dynamic creative will be another major shift. DOOH creative should adapt by time of day, location, audience mindset, weather, events or proximity. The same screen can do different jobs at 8am, lunchtime and 6pm, so the creative should not behave as if the audience is static.

And finally, measurement will become more outcome-led. We will see more brands using DOOH to prove search uplift, brand lift, footfall, sales uplift, incremental reach and attention, rather than relying on one metric alone. That is how the channel earns a bigger role in omnichannel growth.

What important truth about OOH advertising do very few people agree with you on?

I think OOH is much more of a performance channel than people give it credit for.

The industry still tends to talk about OOH as a brand-building channel first. And of course it is brilliant at that. It delivers public visibility, fame, attention and cultural presence in a way few channels can. But that does not mean it stops at the top of the funnel.

The evidence is already there. DOOH can shift search behaviour, brand perception, store visits and sales. If you look at Azerion case studies, we saw DOOH linked to higher brand search, awareness and consideration uplift, nearly 34,000 store visits for The Perfume Shop, and sales uplift for Califia Farms measured through store-level transaction data.

So the truth I would argue for is this: OOH does not need to become less emotional or less public to become more accountable. Its performance power comes from what makes it distinctive — real world presence, contextual relevance, high attention and the ability to connect physical moments to digital and commercial outcomes.

The channel’s next phase of growth will come when more people stop seeing those qualities as “brand only” and start recognising them as drivers of action.