Shanil Chande, Chief Programmatic Officer at Talon, joined the panel at i-media’s Driving Change launch event for ANPR Audiences. Here is what he said about where out-of-home stands now, and where ANPR Audiences takes it.
For much of the last decade, out-of-home has been making the case for itself against digital. Shanil Chande, Chief Programmatic Officer at Talon, thinks that argument is over.
We’ve now arrived at the point where out-of-home is seen as the starting point of plans for a lot of brands.
Speaking on the panel at Driving Change, i-media’s launch event for ANPR Audiences, Chande made the case that OOH’s position has shifted fundamentally, and that the arrival of deterministic audience data is one of the reasons why.
For Chande, out-of-home is in the unique position of being able to learn from the evolution of other channels. Every lesson from digital’s maturation, the pitfalls of bot traffic, the erosion of brand safety, the privacy consequences of one-to-one identifiers, is now available as a playbook for a channel that never had those problems to begin with.
Out-of-home has last-mover advantage now, where we can look at everything that’s gone before us, borrow the best of digital and apply those principles to a brand-safe, trusted medium which can’t be skipped, and reaches human beings in a really cool way.
For Chande, this is part of a much bigger transformation taking place across the OOH sector.
We're entering a new era of audience intelligence. The conversation is no longer just about accessing data, it's about how that data can be shaped, refined and applied to solve specific business challenges. Across the industry, we're seeing a shift towards richer behavioural insights, more customised audiences and greater flexibility in how campaigns are planned and activated.
The programmatic opportunity is also important to him. DCO in out-of- home has historically been underutilised, despite the channel being particularly well suited to personalisation at scale, given its reliance on broader, macro-level triggers rather than individual-level targeting.
Out-of-home should really be the channel where it’s easiest to transact DCO, because it doesn’t rely on one-to-one identifiers. We can use brilliant data together with really cool creative, and that’s where we start to create real impact.
The final point Chande made, on AI and planning tools, captured a tension the whole panel returned to: how do you bring automation into a channel without losing what makes it distinctive?
We talk a lot about being human-led and tech-enabled. Our new planning engine, Atlas Planner, is designed to get you 70% of the way there in five minutes rather than five days, but it’s not designed to get you 100% of the way. That last 30% is where human creativity has to flourish. Other channels have been through this transformation and a lot of the plans end up looking very similar. We have to leave space for human ingenuity.
Shanil Chande was speaking at Driving Change, i-media’s launch event for ANPR Audiences, held at Frameless, London, on 8 October 2026.
