Out-of-home has spent years quietly making its case. Now, with digital formats accelerating, programmatic buying maturing and creative ambition growing to match the scale of the medium, the industry doesn't need to make that case anymore.
The Outdoor Media Awards, run by Bauer Media Outdoor, are where the best of that work gets recognised. This year marks the awards' 20th anniversary, celebrating two decades of standout OOH across the UK. Winners will be announced on 18 June in London, with one gold-winning campaign taking home the Grand Prix and £150,000 of media space across Bauer Media Outdoor's digital network.
Carat has four shortlists this year, spanning Planning Excellence, Creative and Effectiveness. Here's what's in the running.
Two is Better Than One
Category: Planning Excellence / Cross Format Award | Client: VodafoneThree
When Vodafone and Three merged in May 2025, there was a regulatory catch. The two brands couldn't appear together in the same ad. Which, when your entire campaign message is "two networks are better than one," is a fairly significant problem.
The solution was to make OOH do the work. Across roadside, rail and underground environments, the campaign turned a legal constraint into a creative principle. Dual-site formats let the two brands hold a visual conversation without ever sharing the same frame, while iconic placements gave the launch the stature it needed.
The campaign reached a significant proportion of the UK population, with the vast majority of those exposed recognising the VodafoneThree launch. Brand trust surged, and the campaign's core message, that two networks are better than one, landed clearly with Vodafone customers.
Trigger the Taste
Category: Creative / Outstanding Poster Award | Client: Kraft Heinz
In 2025, Heinz faced a challenge it hadn't encountered in a long time. The cost-of-living crisis had turned the brand, embedded in British food culture for 150 years, into a symbol of rising prices. The work needed to shift taste perceptions without explanation, just pure appetite appeal.
The creative answer was deliberately stripped back. Close-up, hyper-detailed product shots paired with the iconic Heinz font reimagined around the food that completes the pairing: Chips. Toast. Fries. Bread. No logo. No product name. Just the image and a prompt that trusted people to finish the thought themselves.
The campaign rolled out across London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Glasgow and Leeds, with large-format digital sites amplifying the sensory detail and classic 6 sheets building frequency. The Beanz Bus, a full-wrap red London bus, became its own cultural moment and generated significant organic reach on social media.
Trigger the Taste: Year-Round Brand Building
Category: Effectiveness / Brand Building Award | Client: Kraft Heinz
The second Heinz shortlist recognises what happens when you commit to OOH as the backbone of a brand plan rather than a line item in a broader mix. Faced with an audience questioning whether Heinz was worth paying more for, the strategy was singular: shift taste superiority perceptions across the entire portfolio using OOH alone.
Kantar research confirmed that taste is the strongest driver of perceived quality for Heinz, which led to the "Trigger the Taste" creative and a year-round deployment built in two phases. Phase one was a high-impact national takeover. Phase two was about sustained memory building, with long-term Paper and Digital placements maintaining rhythm week after week with effectiveness-optimised weekly weighting ensuring every pound worked harder.
Comfort at the Right Moment
Category: Planning Excellence / Programmatic OOH Award | Client: Kraft Heinz
Heinz Soup was entering 2025 with declining sales, a cost-of-living headwind and consumers increasingly questioning whether premium was worth it. The brief was to reverse that trend, and the answer came from regression analysis rather than instinct.
The data showed a clear relationship between temperature and soup sales, with demand rising sharply as the mercury dropped. That insight shaped a programmatic OOH strategy that activated only when conditions matched, serving different creatives at different temperature thresholds to catch people at the precise moment they were most likely to reach for something warm and comforting.
Rather than spreading spend nationally, the team used sales data to identify where Heinz Soup already had strong category share and focused there exclusively. A cold snap at the start of 2025 allowed the campaign to launch ahead of schedule. Post-campaign analysis confirmed the approach contributed to a positive media ROI.
Good luck to all the teams involved. Winners will be announced on 18 June.
