Product News | October 11, 2021

4 post-COVID-19 retail DOOH trends to watch

Illustrating a curbside pickup offering at a retail location

The world is opening back up, but it is not going back to the way things were. Changes made over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to stick around, including in the world of retail. New conveniences and preferences may be too appealing or important to let slip away.

This new dynamic in retail will carry a number of important implications for DOOH operators and their retail partners. To maximize success in the years ahead, a few changes may need to be made.

Curbside pickup is here to stay, and DOOH should be there too

Curbside pickup has been around for years. Originally, it was deployed as part of a push towards “buy-online, pickup in-store” (BOPIS) services by retailers looking to compete with the convenience of online-only shopping.

But it’s during the pandemic that curbside really took off. A McKinsey survey of Canadian consumer sentiment showed that 18% of respondents had tried curbside pickup for the first time during the pandemic, with a further 11% continuing prior use throughout.

It’s likely to continue. For one thing, it’s likely to take some time before we fully recover from life under COVID-19. For another, there are indications that consumers will continue to prioritize hygiene and cleanliness even after the pandemic’s end. Both suggest that options to shop hands-off will remain in demand for some time.

This will require some strategic rethinking of how to communicate with customers. Indoor point-of-purchase displays, after all, will not be suitable for providing messaging for an increasing cohort of customers who choose to remain in their cars. Depending on the manner in which curbside pickup is managed at a store, even the common approach of placing digital displays near the entrance to a retailer may not suffice.

Addressing this new reality could be a great opportunity. Curbside pickup, like other BOPIS offerings, is not faster than regular in-store shopping. Buyers who go this route, whatever their reasons for doing so, will be sitting in their vehicles, waiting. Deploying larger displays that are visible from a larger portion of the parking lot, or several smaller DOOH displays distributed throughout a parking lot, could be valuable for reaching this audience while they have nothing else to do.

Screens like this one employed by MMD Media’s gas stations could help reach customers in parking lots

And for better odds of capturing these people’s attention, media owners should ensure that their selected DOOH platform offers the ability to display dynamically changing content and messaging. This can allow advertisers to deliver different creative based on external triggers, like weather. It can also allow for advertising to display up-to-the-minute information of interest – traffic, weather, news, etc – alongside advertising.

Having these kinds of dynamic content playing around the pickup area will help the screens deliver messaging that better meet the needs and interests of consumers. This will maximize the value for the retailer, the consumer, and the advertiser all at once.

Shift to value-for-money bodes well for relevant DOOH messaging

As you might expect of the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, consumers are demonstrating increased value consciousness in their buying decisions.This will demand that brands change tactics in order to appeal to a different buying mindset, but it also presents an interesting opportunity for media owners with DOOH assets in and around retail environments.

Network owners can use DOOH installations positioned in and around shopping centres, malls, and other retail environments to promote sale items, special promotions, and other kinds of value-focused offerings related to nearby businesses. It’s an easy way to connect buyers with products they want at prices they like, and a good opportunity to leverage the contextual power of location-based DOOH.

Example: See how Starlite Media connects brands with buyers on location via shopping centre DOOH

Even better, the power of the sale-assisted impulse buy extends beyond just people walking into stores to start their shopping. A survey by Doddle (via Retail Dive) found that 85% of people who go to a store to pick up an online order will make additional purchases while there.

This means that displaying compelling sales content on displays positioned near the entrance to a location, just inside the entrance, or even in parking lots (to appeal to the aforementioned curbside crowd) could go a long way towards generating additional revenue from all kinds of shoppers. There’s stronger immediate appeal in seeing an ad for products purchasable on location, after all, than in seeing an ad for something you would need to purchase later on.

Touchscreens won’t go away, but the way they’re used needs to evolve

We’re big fans of interactive digital signage as a method of delivering ad-supported content and tools to audiences. Interactivity just drives more eye-catching experiences, which is exactly what media buyers and network owners alike want to achieve.

Touch, of course, is the primary type of interactivity deployed across many digital signage installations, and it had its share of detraction even before COVID. Cleanliness has long been a concern, especially after notable stories of harmful bacteria found to be prevalent on touchscreen kiosks. Thanks to COVID, there’s more attention than ever being paid to what we all touch, how clean those things are, and how we can improve hygiene in a bid to stop the spread of harmful bugs.

Because of COVID-19, touchscreen kiosks are under increased scrutiny

With all of this said, there’s nothing to suggest that touchscreen interactivity will disappear anytime soon. Now that virtually everyone on the planet has a touchscreen in their pockets at all times, touch has become our default method of interaction, and it’s something more people expect to be able to do with public displays. What’s more, the fact that viruses like COVID-19 tend to spread during interaction with others means that interacting with touchscreens can actually be preferable to many people who would rather avoid speaking to a stranger.

Early data from Perch Interactive seem to back this up, suggesting that engagement with public-facing touchscreens had already rebounded to better-than-pre-COVID levels by late June.

Perch Interactive

Since touch is unlikely to disappear, the priority becomes finding ways to make the touch experience safer or more palatable to the audience. Simple measures, like offering touchless access to hand sanitizer next to screens, or wipes to clean the display before use, can go a long way to increasing user confidence.

It’s also worth considering changing the manner in which users are expected to interact with a touchscreen. Providing a QR code to send on-screen information to a user’s mobile browser can help limit the amount of time users are expected to interact with a screen to get the info they need. This might draw more users to engage with the screen in the first place, and make a habit of turning to interactive displays for timely and relevant information they can take on the go.

There are many ways to improve on the touch experience, and media owners would do well to explore the various options and see which ones can be incorporated across their networks. It will likely prove a worthwhile use of time.

It will pay off to reconsider the ways people should engage with touchscreens

Additional forms of interactivity are maturing and can help reach more customers

Alternatives to touch interactivity have emerged as increasingly viable options in the past few years. While they may not serve as total replacements for touchscreens, they may be beneficial as options for retail establishments wanting to err on the side of caution, or as a tool for engaging with a cohort of customers who are now reluctant to engage with public touchscreens.

Hand tracking and mid-air haptics technology from companies like Ultraleap, or voice-controlled interaction (another technology seeing huge increases in popularity thanks to mobile) seem to be strong early contenders for touch alternatives in retail DOOH.

It’s important to note, of course, that these options are not perfect replacements. Mid-air gesture control just isn’t quite as mainstream as tapping on a screen. Voice control is notoriously imprecise in noisy environments, and can struggle particularly in correctly registering the words spoken by women, racial minorities, and people speaking with different accents or in different dialects. In other words, it’s a difficult thing to get right in a retail environment with diverse consumers.

Voice activation isn’t perfect in controlled environments, and will likely struggle in busy retail locations

Still, incremental improvements are to be expected with these technologies, and deploying one, two, or several different types of interactivity will likely help appeal to a wider range of customers and provide redundancies in instances where a given option is either unpalatable or non-viable.

For media owners with the means, offering multiple options for interaction may prove best in coming out a winner on the other side of the pandemic. In order to successfully take this approach, however, it will be necessary to carefully consider the digital signage platform underpinning the supported functionality. The right choice should help streamline content delivery, integrate easily with all the technologies you want to use, and allow you to leverage your solutions at whatever scale you need, now and in the future.

Want to put your retail DOOH network ahead of the pack?

We can help! Contact us to get started

Product News | October 11, 2021

What’s new in the Broadsign Platform: Sophisticated targeting, creative management and UI improvements

Spring has finally sprung, which means fresh air, greenery, and, most importantly, fresh updates to the Broadsign Platform. This season, we are bringing you sophisticated targeting tools, streamlined creative management, and major UI improvements to make the campaign planning and management process for directly-sold campaigns as seamless as possible for campaign planners. 

Why does this matter? While the activation process for digital out-of-home (DOOH) may only require a couple of minutes, the campaign planning and management process often requires much more time. Discovering available and relevant inventory, collecting data to prove the medium’s effectiveness in meeting campaign goals, and managing campaign creatives are all time-consuming tasks.

The new spring updates introduce a new level of automation that not only reduces the time and complexities of getting DOOH campaigns out the door but also helps make out-of-home (OOH) a competitive and attractive medium for buyers. Let’s dive in!

Sophisticated targeting tools that find the best inventory 

Granular targeting shouldn’t be exclusive to programmatic. That’s why last year, we introduced targeting tools for directly sold campaigns executed through the Broadsign Platform, giving campaign planners the same flexibility and comprehensive targeting capabilities as online and programmatic media buyers. 

The targeting tools included the ability to filter your inventory by location and key points of interest (POIs), enabling campaign planners to find the most relevant inventory for each campaign at the click of a button. An intuitive map view was also introduced, allowing you to better visualize your inventory with quick filtering options by area, support for bulk location uploads, and setting radius parameters. 

This year, we’re introducing two powerful targeting upgrades for directly sold campaigns: demographics and criteria targeting. With demographics targeting, you can filter inventory by attributes like age, gender, or occupation to find the screens that will maximize campaign impact. We’ve also enhanced criteria targeting, giving you more granular control over inclusion and exclusion rules. For example, when building a proposal for an alcohol brand, you can now quickly exclude screens that don’t allow alcohol ads from your inventory search in just a few clicks. 

These new additions to the Broadsign Platform not only reduce the manual work required for inventory discovery but also give your team the opportunity to be a more strategic partner to buyers. We’re also excited to share that these enhanced targeting capabilities are now available to Broadsign customers worldwide! 

Simplified creative management and centralized campaign planning

Media owners juggle multiple campaigns and creatives at the same time, and without the right tools, the creative management process can become complex and stressful for your teams. Last year, we released our in-platform creative management tools, which allowed you to create, edit, manage, and assign campaign creatives with ease. On top of that, we also made it possible for you to push your campaigns live through the Broadsign Platform, eliminating the need to go through Broadsign’s desktop tools. 

In this latest update to the Broadsign Platform, we’re introducing creative scheduling. You’ll now be able to apply multiple scheduling options to your creatives, making it easier than ever to deliver the right message at the right time. You can also target your content by time of day or event, making it easier than ever to adapt your messaging to dayparts or changing campaign goals. Finally, you can update your creatives in real-time, allowing you to plan and deliver up to 55% of your campaigns in one unified workflow directly in-platform. 

Additional management tools for an improved user experience

Along with comprehensive creative management and targeting tools for directly-sold campaigns, additional tools and UI enhancements have been added to improve the usability and user experience of the Broadsign Platform:

Inventory package accessibility

Access inventory packages effortlessly through the platform’s updated navigation bar, enhancing efficiency and ease of use.

Centralized settings management

Administrators can now adjust and manage all necessary settings for digital and static inventory, user management, and more directly within the platform’s web-based UI through a centralized hub for control and configuration.

Campaign monitoring enhancements

With the newly implemented progress indicator, real-time monitoring of campaign pacing is now possible, giving immediate insight into campaign performance. This allows for quick adjustments to be made, as needed, to meet campaign goals effectively.

Search functionality and filters

An improved search mechanism, complemented by additional filters like campaign, client or contract names, enables quicker and more accurate campaign retrieval, saving time and improving workflow.

Line item list

You can now access a list of all line items directly through the navigation bar. Operations teams now have a more precise and comprehensive view of all bookings made on your network.

Dashboard customization

Tailor the platform’s dashboard to meet individual needs, ensuring that the most relevant and important information is always front and center.

Interested in testing out these new features? Book a demo today

Product News | October 11, 2021

How to integrate in-store digital signage into your retail media network

If your retail media network (RMN) is thriving online but underutilized in-store, you’re not alone, and there’s untapped value waiting on the sales floor. While many retailers have monetized their websites and apps, in-store signage often remains overlooked and disconnected from broader retail media efforts.

Forward-thinking retailers are closing the gap by deploying in-store screens or connecting existing ones to their broader retail media ecosystem using specialized digital signage software. From investing in new displays to syncing with data systems, workflows, and programmatic platforms, they’re transforming stores into dynamic, measurable environments that complete the omnichannel shopper journey.

The benefits go far beyond operational efficiency. As of 2025, more than 200 RMNs operate globally, each with its own formats, technologies, and measurement frameworks. This fragmentation has become a major challenge, with marketers calling for more standardization to unlock the next wave of retail media investment. Integrating in-store signage into a cohesive strategy helps retailers close the loop—connecting the full shopper journey, enabling comprehensive measurement, and driving long-term growth for both themselves and their brand partners.

Whether your goal is to enhance in-store advertising, maximize ROI on existing hardware, or deliver smarter, data-driven shopper experiences, this roadmap will help you turn screens into a strategic cornerstone of your retail media network.

Why digital signage is critical to your retail media strategy

Despite the rise of e-commerce, 80% of purchases still happen in-store, making the physical store a high-impact, yet often underutilized, media environment. Still, many RMNs prioritize digital channels like websites, apps, and email, overlooking the opportunity to bring that same power to the sales floor.

Digital signage bridges the gap between digital media and in-person purchase moments. It turns your store into a full-funnel, monetizable channel that enhances, not competes with, your broader retail media strategy. Here’s how:

  • Connects online precision to in-store decisions: Bring the targeting and flexibility of digital media into the physical store, where buying decisions are made, with dynamic, contextually relevant content—brand campaigns, personalized promos, seasonal messaging—delivered right where buying decisions happen.
  • Monetizes real-world traffic: Turn foot traffic into a scalable revenue stream by offering brand partners premium placements on high-visibility screens, targeted by location, time, or context—especially impactful during add-to-cart moments.
  • Delivers measurable, flexible performance:  Modern digital signage platforms integrate with your data and ad tech stack, enabling real-time scheduling, updates, and reporting. Track key metrics—product engagement, sales lift, dwell time—and connect in-store exposure to online behaviour.
  • Enhances the shopper experience: Effective signage supports the customer journey, not disrupts it. From back-in-stock alerts to curated promotions, digital displays make in-person shopping more engaging, relevant, and responsive.
  • Powers your omnichannel strategy: Signage closes the loop between discovery and conversion, syncing messaging across email, mobile, online ads, and in-store screens so shoppers experience a consistent, connected journey.

READ ALSO: Why in-store media is essential for forward-thinking retail media strategies

Integrating digital signage into a unified retail media strategy

Whether you’re building from scratch or integrating existing screens into your retail media stack, you need to lay the right foundation. That means designing a signage strategy built for scale, content relevance, and future monetization — and then connecting it to the data, workflows, and systems that power your RMN.

As Jonathan Franco, Broadsign’s Global Head of Retail Media, notes in a recent piece on bridging lessons from digital out-of-home (DOOH) to in-store media: “The OOH market has taught us that success isn’t just about having screens in impactful locations; it’s about playing the right content in the right place at the right time.”

In other words, a successful signage strategy goes beyond high-traffic ad placements or hardware specs. It’s about creating strategic touchpoints that support the full shopper journey and integrate seamlessly with your broader digital media operations.

Here’s how to bring it all together:

1. Plan your screen zones with both placement and content in mind

Think like a media planner, not just a merchandiser. Whether you’re starting from scratch or expanding an existing setup, begin by aligning screen placement with key shopper moments:

  • Entrances: High-impact campaigns and branded takeovers
  • Main aisles: Seasonal themes or product spotlights
  • Promo zones & end caps: Shoppable content, limited-time offers
  • Checkout areas: Loyalty messaging, app signups, basket-building prompts
  • Specialty departments (e.g., pharmacy, bakery, butcher): Context-specific content like curated product picks, pairing suggestions, or department-specific promos 

Once placement is mapped, define content zones and use cases that bring structure and scalability to your network:

  • Utility-first content like wayfinding, back-in-stock updates, and localized promos
  • Retailer-owned storytelling through seasonal campaigns or private label features
  • Brand-sponsored media with paid placements, co-branded messages, and monetizable ad space

Pro tip: Map screen zones based on foot traffic, dwell time, and product affinity to guide content planning and ad pricing. This helps ensure a coherent in-store experience while maximizing the media value of each screen.

2. Keep it flexible and connected

Retail moves fast — and so should your signage. Choose a retail digital signage platform that’s not just flexible but also built to integrate with your broader retail media stack. In particular, look for solutions that support:

The more your signage tools sync with your RMN systems, the easier it is to deliver value to brand partners and internal stakeholders alike.

READ ALSO: How to choose the best digital signage software for your business

3. Align signage with your cross-channel media strategy

The same shopper might see your ad on social media, browse your website, and visit your store—all in a single day. To keep pace, your content and media offerings should reflect a cohesive journey. When deployed strategically, in-store screens become physical extensions of your digital media plan — not standalone inventory.

For marketers, that means:

  • Repurposing assets from other RMN channels (e.g. email banners, social creative, seasonal campaigns)
  • Reinforcing digital campaigns or driving app engagement via in-store screens
  • Ensuring messaging is consistent across in-store and online touchpoints
  • Bundling signage with other digital placements in your media kits
  • Offering tiered packages with omnichannel reach or localized activations
  • Providing turnkey creative support to streamline advertiser onboarding

When thoughtfully integrated, digital signage becomes a powerful part of your go-to-market strategy, helping brands reach shoppers with the right message at the right time, both online and offline. Integration isn’t just about technology; it’s about alignment across content, channels, and teams.

4. Centralize measurement and reporting

One of the biggest hurdles in building or scaling digital signage within your retail media strategy is measurement. Without a clear plan, in-store signage can quickly become disconnected from your broader performance story—making it harder to justify spend or demonstrate value to advertisers.

To avoid that, build signage into your reporting framework from day one. Start by tracking foundational metrics:

  • Screen-level impressions and play counts to understand exposure volume
  • Dwell time to assess attention and engagement
  • Content playback logs to validate ad delivery and campaign pacing

Then, go deeper by connecting signage exposure to in-store outcomes, like product interaction, add-to-cart moments, or sales lift. These insights help prove that your in-store media is driving real business results, not just awareness.

By applying consistent measurement frameworks across both online and offline channels, you can tell a unified, full-funnel story. Mirroring key OOH and digital metrics—like reach, frequency, and lift—helps demonstrate how in-store signage works in tandem with campaigns on email, mobile, and paid social.

Modern digital signage platforms provide unified in-store reporting, making it easier to analyze performance, share results with brand partners, and refine campaigns in real time—turning in-store media into a measurable, scalable revenue channel within your retail media network.

READ ALSO: Discover how the OOH industry is leveraging technology to achieve more measurable campaign outcomes in our guide to out-of-home measurement, attribution and audience extension.

Ready to make your in-store signage a seamless part of your RMN?

Whether you’re planning your first deployment or optimizing existing screens, Broadsign’s industry-leading platform makes it easy to connect your in-store signage with the rest of your retail media ecosystem. With over two decades of experience in digital out-of-home, we help retailers build, manage, and monetize scalable signage networks that align with your broader media strategy.

Get in touch to see how we can help you unlock the full value of your in-store presence.