The useful thing about a city is that nobody experiences it alone. A subway car fills. A crowd leaves an arena. A billboard catches ten pairs of eyes at the same red light. Stacy Minero has spent much of her career studying how attention moves, first across television and digital plans, then through the Twitter feed, then through real-time 3D worlds. Her new canvas at OUTFRONT Media is older than all of those and, in her telling, newly relevant: the physical places where people pass one another.
Minero joined OUTFRONT in December 2025 as executive vice president, chief marketing and experience officer. The assignment came with a category problem. Out-of-home advertising is familiar enough to sound finished. Everyone knows the billboard. The harder task is to make marketers see the network behind it: digital screens that can change with context, transit environments that can become experiences, stadium approaches that can extend an event, creative services that can shape the work, and measurement that follows what people do next.
Her preferred name for that bundle is “IRL media.” It is less a slogan than a bid to redraw the market. The old category sells locations and impressions. The broader category sells presence: a brand showing up in a public moment with enough relevance that the encounter travels beyond the site itself.
“Out-of-home is often dessert, and we think it should be in the apps and the entrees.”Stacy Minero, on moving the medium earlier in the plan
The missing middle
The argument began long before OUTFRONT. In 2013, while leading content strategy at Mindshare, Minero described a “missing middle” in marketing insight. Planners knew channels and properties. They knew audiences in demographic slices. What they often lacked was a practical understanding of the affinities, motivations and mindsets that make somebody receptive to a particular story.
Her response was systematic. Build road maps. Decide what the brand should create, curate or co-create. Plan distribution and amplification as part of the content itself. The work was already moving away from a single master advertisement pushed through a set of pipes. It asked a more native question: what does this audience want to do here?
Her agency years supplied a wide field of view. At Mediavest and Mindshare, she worked on integrated strategies for American Express, Hershey, Coca-Cola and P&G. Her public portfolio reaches back to American Express programs involving Project Runway, Small Business Saturday, local-business grants and the talent-led “My Life, My Card” work. Television, digital, social, partnerships, events and outdoor were not separate religions. They were materials to arrange around an idea.
Feed first, people first
Twitter hired Minero in March 2014. By 2016 she was leading content planning and creative agency development, helping brands stop treating a social feed like a small television. Her team called itself an in-house consultancy. It audited content, evaluated performance and worked with agencies to make ideas behave properly on Twitter. Short text, sound-off video and real-time conversation demanded different creative reflexes.
A published account of one working day shows how tactical that education could be. On the commute from Hoboken, Minero reviewed Twitter Moments like a morning paper. Before a Planning Studio with more than 20 McCann strategists, she realized the presentation was missing a point about consumer moments and asked a teammate to add it. In the workshop, the group moved from brand stories to an exercise called “designing participation,” intended to move people from viewing to doing.
The day kept widening: a conversation about scaling the studio globally, strategy work for Netflix and L’Oréal, a discussion about live brands, and planning with the 3 Percent Conference. She was due to meet her husband near Madison Square Garden and was running late. Adele finally supplied the off switch. Minero wrote that the singer’s voice and lyrics made her do something she found difficult: unplug. After midnight, she returned home, greeted Daisy, her Goldendoodle, and checked Twitter once more.
The detail is charming, but it also reveals the operating tension of the era. The platform never slept. Brands needed more assets, more versions and more cultural awareness without slipping into repetition. Minero’s answer grew into Twitter ArtHouse, launched in 2019. The studio brought together strategists, producers, creators, influential voices and editors. It gave brands a way to make platform-native work while giving creative talent a route into paid collaboration.
In 2020, when physical production stalled, Minero said people still wanted to hear from brands if those brands had something meaningful to say. ArtHouse adapted existing footage, worked with creators recording at home and treated constraints as a creative brief. The studio’s durable idea was that distribution and creation belonged in the same room. A creator understood the audience because the creator had built one.
A bigger canvas, rendered in real time
After a short consulting interval with BARK and The Recount, Minero joined Epic Games in August 2022. She oversaw strategy, campaign development and paid media for Unreal Engine. The shift looked dramatic, from tweets to real-time 3D software, but the job preserved her favorite problem: explain a technology through what creative people can make with it.
Unreal Engine had long escaped the boundary of games. Minero’s team highlighted its use in film, television, fashion, automotive design, architecture and live experiences. Her portfolio records campaigns around the animated short “WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” which won an Academy Award, and the launch of Fab, Epic’s unified marketplace for digital content. She also developed a pilot conversation with director Tim Miller about his work and his attachment to creative storytelling.
The engine was a product, a platform and a possibility. Marketing it required proof in many dialects. An architect did not need the same story as a filmmaker. A marketplace creator did not value the same outcome as an automotive designer. The work rewarded the same instinct that shaped Minero’s content road maps: locate the native need, then make the technology legible through that need.
Plan across the system
Integrated media and content strategy for consumer brands at Mediavest and Mindshare.
Teach the feed
Content planning, creator collaboration, video adaptation and the launch of Twitter ArtHouse.
Show what the engine makes possible
Global campaigns for Unreal Engine and its expanding creator ecosystem.
Turn the city into the medium
Brand strategy and experience at OUTFRONT, organized around IRL presence.
When the billboard becomes source material
At OUTFRONT, Minero arrived with an advantage: she understood the digital funnel well enough to question its defaults. Her critique is not that screens have stopped working. It is that automated, crowded and fragmented online environments make a verified encounter with a person more consequential. Public media reaches people where they live, work, travel and gather. Strong creative can then multiply online because somebody photographed it, discussed it or used it as the setting for a story.
Consider a British Airways activation she has described. A New York subway environment was made to feel like a plane. Commuters could hear audio from cabin crew, meet staff on site and receive boxes with scones and tea. The scalable media carried the message, while the experience supplied surprise. Creators captured the moment and shared it. Physical reach produced digital evidence.
Or consider the way technology companies have moved into New York transit. The copy can appear cryptic to the average rider, but the context is intentional: founders, investors, operators and buyers share the same stations. Minero has pointed to OUTFRONT’s technology advertising growth and to campaigns that generated sales pipeline, arguing that transit can supply both reach and credibility. The city becomes a business network with turnstiles.
This is the stealable part of Minero’s playbook. Begin with the medium’s native advantage. Design participation instead of exposure alone. Build the path from the encounter to its next expression. Decide what behavior would count as success. At Twitter, that could mean conversation or adapted video performance. At Epic, it could mean adoption by a new creative industry. In the subway or outside a stadium, it could mean store traffic, a scan, an event interaction or earned sharing.
“We can break out of the category convention and get brands to see us as an alternative to their mobile funnel.”Stacy Minero, describing the IRL media opportunity
The return of presence
At Cannes Lions in June 2026, OUTFRONT put up its first billboard to market itself at the festival. “You can’t AI IRL,” it read. The line worked because it carried two meanings. A machine could help make an ad, optimize a buy or produce endless variations. It could not duplicate the fact of people occupying a place together. Presence remained stubbornly physical.
Minero paired the provocation with a practical portfolio: sports, experiential work, digital formats and programs built around events such as the World Cup and Super Bowl. Her ambition is to move out-of-home earlier in the strategic conversation, where it can shape an idea rather than inherit one. A city-scale canvas becomes more useful when the creative team knows it exists before the campaign is finished.
There is a pleasing loop in this career. The planner who once tried to understand the “missing middle” now works in the literal middle of public life. The Twitter executive who asked brands to think feed first now asks them to think about the street, station and stadium on their own terms. The Unreal Engine marketer who showed how one tool could serve many creative industries now has to show how an old category can perform several new jobs.
Minero’s bet does not require the internet to disappear. It depends on the opposite. The more time people spend in mediated environments, the more distinctive a shared encounter can feel. The physical idea becomes the memory. The feed becomes its echo. And the billboard, once treated as the campaign’s dessert, has a chance to become the table where the campaign begins.