Q & A-gency - Curtis Weir

Welcome to the first edition of Q & A-gency, where Shape Insight’s Alex Holmes speaks with a leading voice in creative development and media planning. The goal? To explore how insight shapes their work - and whether their approach is evolving in today’s rapidly changing world.

This time around, I had the pleasure of speaking with Curtis Weir, OOH Group Director at Publicis Media UK and mentor/role model at Media For All.

Q. What change has had the most significant impact on what you do today?

Digital technology is terraforming public space. It is changing how we relate to social life and how we relate to places.

Two generations ago, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, said, “Computing is not about computers anymore, it is about living.” That feels increasingly literal. Computing takes place in the cloud remotely while also becoming embedded in our most intimate and most public interactions. Two spheres are converging.

Digital systems have become a material layer. They shape how we trade, transact, date, organise, or protest. They influence where we go and how we move. As computing becomes more ambient and pervasive, the change is often subtle rather than spectacular: frequent, cumulative, and informed by vast amounts of spatial data flowing from systems designed to respond to us and, in some cases, reconfigure us.

Q. What does that mean for OOH (out-of-home media and advertising)?

Out-of-home (OOH) sits at the intersection of commercial communication and public space. It covers posters, billboards, murals, screens, and increasingly experiential and immersive digital activations. OOH is increasingly about understanding how people encounter brands as they move through the environment, so any changes to how people move through public space should change how we communicate as marketers. Commuting and commerce are where OOH is the most prevalent. In turn, they are the main drivers of movement and mobility and the infrastructure, which is shaped by how we travel reshape, behaviour, and attention.

Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” is useful here. It helps explain how expectations of public space are changing, and how the communications industry must adapt to audiences that now experience media as part of their environment rather than separate from it. There is an OOH adage is that ‘the panels are where the people are’ and extension, the communication in collective space helps shape the community itself.

The internet evolved from a destination to a continuous stream of feeds and information that shape our orientation. It transformed from a place we visit to something we carry, wear, and augment reality through feeds, lenses, filters, and wearables. These tools mediate our relationships with others and organisations. We shifted from surfing portals to sharing content, commenting in feeds, to now interacting models that in can make sense of Inputs and prompts and respond.

That progression mirrors our understanding of media and how things have shifted from a mass consumption to mediated experience.

As modern digital production tools have matured, they have changed our relationship to private, parochial, and public space alike. Tools such as Figma and Adobe Firefly codify experience and allow efficient deployment of systems that can use automation to adapt and enhance as also deployed content assets. The remaining constraint is often distribution rather than creation.

It is inevitable that the expectations shaped by adaptive environments like apps and websites will influence how content behaves in public space. The question is not whether OOH will change, but how sensitively it does so as situation shape attention, emotion, and memory.

The fundamentals of OOH have not changed. What has changed is how those fundamentals sit within the wider media system. Mobile behaviour shows us what people attend to. Spatial data shows where they are and how they move. Emotional research helps us understand how messages land. Insight now lives at the intersection of all three.

OOH has always relied on simplicity. It works in conditions of movement, distraction, and shared attention. In that sense, it aligns more closely with signage, civic graphic design, and photography than with filmic storytelling. The work of Harry Beck, Edward Johnston, and the Design Research Unit shows how public communication shapes behaviour by clarifying meaning within an environment.

Design languages like Material Design or Liquid Glass are blueprints for mobile and smart technology rather than cities. However, signal a shift away from static layouts towards systems that account for interaction, responsiveness, and state.

Just as night mode responds to condition, OOH creative is becoming increasingly situational. Dynamic creative optimisation allows work to respond to location, context, and patterns of movement or dwell. This is not yet turning cities into interfaces. It is about acknowledging that public communication now exists in environments that change, among audiences that move.

Q. How has your approach to insight changed?

OOH planning is shifting from the logic of placement to the logic of experience. Not personalised in the individual sense, but adaptive at a collective level. The task is no longer just to reach people, but to understand how a message feels when it is encountered publicly, in a real place, at a real moment.

OOH remains unusual in that the audience still shows up. Attention, however, is more fragile as the medium becomes more digital. Designing only for visibility produces shallow communication. Designing for experience produces work that is more memorable and more rooted in place.

Insight has expanded beyond who someone is to where they are and how they feel. Light, pace, density, movement, and the behaviour of others all shape perception. With richer spatial and behavioural data, insight becomes less about long-range prediction and more about reading the moment.

Route, the UK’s joint industry currency for OOH, is still the backbone of planning while evolving alongside the medium the inclusion Attention modelling from working with Lumen, behavioural signals from mobile and transaction data, and new modelling approaches allow for more nuanced understanding.

Tools such as System1and Dumbstruck go beyond attention and fluency into emotional response. Physical cues like facial expression, posture, and voice reveal how people feel, especially when experienced collectively. Again, the increasing ability in measuring attention, in addition to the efficacy. There has also been an increasing need due to the vast number of touchpoints that audiences encounter.

OOH is encountered among others, in shared space. That context matters. We never read a poster alone. We read it through the news cycle, our feeds, and the emotional temperature of the space we are standing in.

Research from UCL, particularly through Daniel C. Richardson, shows how emotional states can synchronise across groups. EyeThink and Neurolive explore how perception shifts when stimuli are experienced collectively. CASA’s modelling connects spatial dynamics with social behaviour. Together, these disciplines help us understand not just where people are, but how shared emotional states form in public space.

Insight is moving towards environments that can adapt. The aim is not surveillance. It is communication that feels situated, sensitive, and respectful of the people moving through it.

Q. Will tools like System1, Lumen and JCDecaux’s VIM lead to homogeneous creative output?

Good design principles create clarity but they do not in themselves tell you how to design to create emotional connection. As creative effectiveness at the point of comprehension is the biggest variable in campaign performance.

These tools help us understand how people process messages in motion: recognition speed, contrast, hierarchy, legibility. They describe human perception, not aesthetic taste.

OOH demands design that works across distance, movement, and crowd density. These constraints do not limit creativity. They sharpen it. Strong OOH draws from graphic design, photography, motion, and the art of compression. Knowing perceptual principles does not make work generic. It gives creators the ability to bend and break them with intent. British Airways’ recent campaign for BA is a good example. It feels intriguing and slightly strange. In a feed it feels personal. In public, it becomes a shared moment.

Q. How can insight help work remain distinct and emotionally resonant?

Insight makes work intentional. It reveals the tensions between brand, category, audience, and culture. Those tensions are starting points, not obstacles.

I see these elements as layers rather than a hierarchy. They behave like a living network, each shaping how the others are read. Understanding that network helps brands operate within culture rather than simply broadcasting into it.

Creators understand this instinctively. They build audience, build culture, and then commercialise the attention that follows. Brands need a similar sensitivity. Insight identifies the emotional cues, behavioural signals, and cultural references that anchor meaning.

Our ability to observe movement and behaviour has expanded through spatial analytics, neuroscience, and urban modelling. But interpretation still belongs to people. Insight turns signals into understanding and places brands where they feel authentic rather than performative.

Trust sits at the heart of this. OOH does not always drive immediate action, but it shapes belief. Its public visibility, cost of entry, and reputational risk make false claims harder to sustain. Accountability is built into the medium.

As digital environments struggle with credibility, OOH benefits from being visible, regulated, and physically anchored. That shapes what people believe is grounded and real.

Q. If demographics are outdated and AI enables hyper-personalisation, how are you now thinking about audiences?

Many people see OOH, ideally, many times but for only a second or two. Insight that helps it to land social intelligence and cultural awareness. Less about how identity can inform interests that then inform shared emotional experience.  

The question shifts from who someone is socially to what they value and how do place, and other people shape feeling?

While Demographics remain a layer, but they no longer solely define our social landscape. Alone, they are too blunt to capture how culture moves or how people experience public communication given that people see it, types of people and context can vary so much. There is a collective dynamic, that relates to herd effects social proof on they widen range of ideas and values that increasingly shape our identity. The crowd matters. Mood matters. People read public communication socially, through the presence and behaviour of others.

Research from UCL, EyeThink, and CASA shows how stimuli are processed collectively from an audience and that the congruency of collective physiological responses as indicators of emotional responses.

Q. With programmatic digital OOH, is there a risk of fragmented brand identities?

Fragmentation does not come from programmatic but the absence of coherent ideas that can live both within a moment but can also connect to other moments.

That said, fixed placements take on added valuables of continuity, permanence and exclusive typically in sacrifice of scale.

Q. Tell me about your work with MEFA (Media For All).

MEFA supports media and marketing professionals in the UK from Black and Asian backgrounds, primarily focusing on mentoring and retention. It provides a community where individuals with diverse experiences that are different from those typically found in the industry can feel a sense of belonging.

There is clear evidence that diversity of thought, fostered when people from varied backgrounds and cultures feel supported, enhances innovation and improves decision-making. I feel that the work that MEFA helps to support the industry at large by enabling those who at times may feel othered also feel like they belong within the industry at large and be a voice of the many who share similar lived experiences of vast population of the British society.

Lastly, I think that the splits that occur by those by who are marginalised experiences help to the core. That could be Sociological and psychodynamic thinking explain organisational behaviour and make change possible that help enhance organisations once they and observed and better understood.

Q. Do researchers need to look harder for what is hidden?

Yes, but that requires new tools to aid reflection. Tools shape perception and create feedback loops that quickly become invisible.

Try explaining a computer file without metaphor and you see how inherited abstractions shape thinking. The same applies to synthetic audiences. Researchers will need to design systems that help participants reflect rather than simply respond.

If research offered insight rather than incentives, exchanges would become more honest.

Shared discovery could become a new form of value.

Q. Final question, will AI make insight better, or just faster?

Right now, faster. Which may make things better overall.

New technology rarely transforms practice overnight. It sits alongside existing processes before reshaping them.

Insight still requires judgement. AI can generate possibilities quickly, but refinement comes through dialogue and testing. The opportunity lies in combining speed with thoughtful understanding, ethics and values.