By Neil Morris

At Apparatix’s Unleashed 2026 conference in Orlando, I ran live polls during my session with around two dozen independent billboard owners and managers. I expected to spend the session making the case that creative matters. It turned out the room was already there, and the real story was the gap between what operators believe and what they see every day.

Operators rate creative very highly. 87% said creative accounts for more than half of a campaign’s success, and over half put it at two-thirds or more. Nobody said less than a quarter. Research from Nielsen and NCSolutions attributes around half of advertising’s sales impact to creative, so if anything, operators are ahead of the research.

But most of the artwork they receive falls short. 96% said less than half of the artwork clients send them is fit for purpose. 39% said less than a quarter is. Only one person in the room said most of what they receive is good. Taken together, that means the factor operators consider most important to a campaign’s success is also the one they’re least happy with.

AI is making the problem bigger. 78% of operators see AI-generated artwork from clients every week, and 95% see it at least monthly. AI has made an ad almost free to produce, but it hasn’t changed what makes a billboard work. A board still has to deliver one clear idea, in a few words, to a driver who glances at it for a couple of seconds. More artwork arriving faster, from clients who haven’t designed for the medium, means more boards that don’t do their job.

The cost shows up at renewal. Operators estimated that about a quarter of their non-renewals trace back to weak creative, and 41% put it at 25% or more. For a business that lives on renewals, that is a large share of lost revenue, and much of it is preventable.

There’s another tension in those numbers. Operators credit creative with two-thirds of a campaign’s success but blame it for only a quarter of lost renewals. I suspect churn from creative is under-counted. Advertisers rarely say “your board didn’t work because our ad was weak.” They just decide billboards don’t work for them and quietly don’t renew.

Pushing back is hard. Every operator in the room said they push back on weak creative, but half said the conversation is usually lengthy and painful. That isn’t surprising, because it’s the operator’s opinion against the client’s, about the client’s own ad.

The opportunity is to treat creative as part of the product rather than something the advertiser hands over. That means checking artwork before it goes up, and making the conversation about evidence instead of taste. If a quarter of lost renewals really do come down to creative, the operators who address it first will keep advertisers their competitors lose.

Neil is the founder of Super Optimal, which provides pre-flight testing for OOH creative, scoring billboard artwork before it goes up.

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