Billboards make a comeback as a shared cultural and experiential moment

As streaming platforms multiplied, billboards slid into oblivion. Now they are making a comeback, serving once again as a shared cultural and experiential moment

A sweater shouldn’t be the most interesting thing in the sky. Yet earlier this week in Delhi, a blue argyle one hung off the edge of a yellow billboard. Not printed on it, but tilted forward as if left there to dry above a crowded intersection. For a moment, the city paused. A scooter slowed. Someone lifted their phone to click a picture. And Delhi, a place that rarely sees its own skyline through the smog, looked up at this quiet, slightly absurd interruption — a billboard pretending it was never just a billboard.

 

For years, billboards were simply part of the urban backdrop. Loud rectangles selling cement, insurance, electronics, fairness creams. Anything that needed height more than imagination. They demanded attention mostly because there was no escaping them. Then attention drifted elsewhere. As streaming platforms multiplied and social media became a second home, advertisers followed the glow of screens. Billboards didn’t disappear. They just faded into the periphery.

 

The shift back began quietly. A few brands started treating billboards less like instruction manuals and more like personality statements. Bumble led with its witty one-liners that felt lifted from a group chat rather than a marketing deck. Short, self-aware, lightly cheeky. The kind you smirk at at a signal because the billboard seems to know exactly who it is talking to. It was the first sign that outdoor advertising had realised something simple: To be noticed again, it had to feel alive again.

 

Then billboards began stepping outside their frames. Literally. A chocolate bar lifted itself out of a hoarding. A sneaker in Bengaluru burst forward in anamorphic 3D, startling people into filming it. Britannia wrapped its billboard around real trees instead of slicing through them. In Vijayawada, a Taj Mahal Tea hoarding did something stranger still. When it rained, it played. Raindrops brushed against santoor strings stretched across the board, filling the junction with a few seconds of Megh Malhar and turning a passing shower into a small concert for whoever happened to look up. Blinkit set up visual riddles you kept thinking about two junctions later. Ikea whispered small morning jokes.

 

Billboards were just ads once. Now they are content, slipping into our camera rolls and conversations with the same ease as anything we scroll past. They are now Instagram stories, banter, tiny civic moments we archive. Proof that the city still has a sense of humour. Outdoor advertising quietly figured out that competing with screens does not require being louder. It requires being clever enough to land on those screens by choice.

 

The numbers adjusted accordingly. Out-of-home advertising, which dipped during the lockdown years, has climbed steadily back across India. Brands have realised a billboard does not need attention for long. It needs it for precisely three seconds. Just long enough for surprise and a photograph. But beneath the economics lies something more human.

 

In a world where most of our visual life happens through glass, we now notice the things that break that boundary. These new-age billboards behave almost like installations. Tactile, playful, occasionally mischievous. They don’t overwhelm. They interrupt. They remind us there is still something in the physical world that can earn our gaze without tracking it.

 

The country’s biggest cities have quietly turned into open-air galleries. A strange object suspended above a junction becomes a shared experience for strangers who will never meet. A punchline on a flyover makes a whole bus grin for a second. A billboard shaped around a tree makes people feel oddly protective. These aren’t ads in the old sense. They are small edits to the everyday.

 

Perhaps that is why these new billboards stay with us. Not because they are louder or brighter, but because they ask for a moment in a city that rarely gives us any. A billboard might once have shouted for attention. Now it only hopes for a brief look up from the blur.

 

Their return is marked not by a spectacle, but a reminder — that in a life lived through glass and scrolls, the world outside still has its own ways of tapping us on the shoulder. Not to sell us something, but to say: We are here, in this place, in this moment. Look up while it is still happening.