By Elizabeth McIntyre, CEO, Outdoor Media Association (OMA)
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When we launched the first OMA Creative Awards last year, we hoped to spark a new platform for outdoor creative ambition. The diversity of 100-plus entries we received proved OOH as the canvas for increasingly ingenious ideas, with 2025 delivering some of the most decisive, culture-shaping creativity we’ve seen.
That ambition also carried well beyond our shores. On the global stage, Australia brought home two World Out of Home Organisation Awards, with the inaugural OMA Creative Awards Grand Prix winner – Specsavers’ ‘Welcome to Melbourne’ by TBWA\Melbourne – taking out the Classic category.
A great deal has been written about the campaign: a deceptively simple, site-specific execution that reinforced what the multiplier effect of a razor-sharp creative idea, timeless power of a Classic outdoor format, and the confidence to own the site it lived on, can do for a brand.
The impact was immediate and undeniable. 97.2 million people reached, $2.4m in earned media, and more than 10,000 social shares. And critically, a record high in consideration for Specsavers during the campaign period. That’s what happens when a brand commits to outdoor wholeheartedly – attention follows, conversation compounds and business outcomes move.
Digital Out of Home proved just as tenacious. Suncorp Insurance’s dynamic ‘Storm Season’ alerts showed how data and creativity can work in lockstep, using real-time conditions to deliver messages that were impossible to ignore and genuinely useful. A great example of the intelligent application of tech and an example of DOOH as a powerful public service tool too.
AWARD Awards and Cannes Lions both celebrated outdoor ideas that understood their role in culture, including Ogilvy Sydney’s ‘Meet Me At The Coke Sign’, which picked up a Silver Lion in Outdoor. Built from decades of shared stories and lived experience, it showed that when outdoor taps into collective memory, it can become something people actively seek out as a destination in its own right.
The through-line is clear. Outdoor is a playground for serious creative ambition, ingenuity, confidence and scale, whether via Classic, Digital, Special Builds or multi-format takeovers.
If your work this year owned space, made people stop, or proved that the boldest idea in the room belonged outside, we want to celebrate it. Enter the 2026 OMA Creative Awards now. If you’re a Grand Prix winner, you’ll also be jetting off to Cannes next year, just as the Specsavers creative team did this year.
Let your work speak in the way outdoor always has – OUT LOUD and in public. Because if it turned heads out there, it belongs in here. omacreativeawards.com.au
