“Welcome to the New Normal” – Research findings [video]
For marketers and media buyers, navigating our unprecedented times has definitely been challenging, both professionally and personally. Long gone are the days when we could plan months in advance. And, if you work for an agency, client pressure is at an all-time high. You’re likely being asked to react to rapid changes and back up your media plan recommendations with local insights that are often difficult to find. It’s a lot, but don’t worry – we’ve got your back!
In our Welcome to the New Normal webinar, we go over the results of a national survey of over 1,000 Canadians that we, in collaboration with Caddle, ran in July. The objectives were to better understand Canadians’ changing attitudes regarding the pandemic, returning to the office, activities they look forward to doing, back-to-school shopping, and much more. We also surveyed consumers on media fatigue, as well as on OOH-specific questions.
The goal is to provide you with valuable insights that you can use to better inform your last-minute fall marketing and media plans. Enjoy the on-demand version of the webinar we hosted on August 19, 2021 below. If you would like an editable copy of the presentation, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Caddle regularly takes the pulse of the marketplace and provides its partners with access to recent, relevant and robust insights through reports and events. Sign up for its newsletter to regularly stay in the know, and get access to exclusive reports, events and content.
Product News | October 11, 2021
Planning your holiday retail media strategy? Here’s why you should include out-of-home advertising
We’ve entered the home stretch of the year, and for brands and advertisers, the busiest season is just beginning. Black Friday will soon kick off a wave of campaigns, deals, and opportunities to connect with shoppers—continuing through Cyber Monday, the Christmas rush, Boxing Day, and into the new year.
Like last holiday season, consumers are getting an early start. McKinsey & Company reports that 65% of U.S. adults plan to begin shopping before Black Friday. That early momentum may prove essential, as this year’s holiday calendar is tighter than usual, with Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday falling later (November 27–December 1). According to PwC, 39% of total gift spending is expected to occur during that five-day window, and nearly 80% of budgets will be spent by the end of Cyber Monday, putting added pressure on shoppers and retailers alike to move quickly.
Despite ongoing economic uncertainty, from tariff concerns to shipping delays, the 2025 holiday season is still expected to see steady consumer activity. Forrester predicts that total U.S. holiday retail sales will increase 4.4% year-over-year, reaching $1.05 trillion by 2025. For advertisers and retailers, that means now is the time to fine-tune media strategies and get in front of shoppers early.
This holiday season, marketers have more ways than ever to reach shoppers on the move. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) expands the reach and relevance of omnichannel campaigns by building awareness, inspiring purchases, and driving traffic in-store and online. With the latest programmatic DOOH capabilities, launching timely, data-driven campaigns is easier than ever and helps brands stay visible during retail’s busiest time of year.
Consumer caution shapes this year’s holiday shopping
While no one can predict exactly how the 2025 holiday season will unfold, one thing is clear: consumers are approaching their purchases with more caution. According to PwC, 53% say that rising prices will likely influence their holiday spending decisions this year. That’s not to say they’ll be tucking away their wallets, though. Consumers plan to spend an average of $890.49 per person this year on holiday gifts, food, decorations, and other seasonal items, according to the National Retail Federation, only a slight decrease from last year’s amount.
What does this mean for marketers? Consumers aren’t planning to stop shopping, but with lingering worries around tariffs and higher prices, particularly for electronics, apparel, toys, food, and everyday essentials, value-driven decisions will shape how and where they spend.
Reach shoppers at key moments with DOOH
As shoppers weigh every purchase, standing out ahead of peak season is crucial. Digital out-of-home lets marketers reach consumers throughout their daily routines, whether commuting, running errands, or visiting busy retail areas, building awareness long before purchase decisions are made.
Modern DOOH campaigns can be precisely targeted and dynamically optimized, allowing brands to deliver contextually relevant messages based on real-world signals like time of day, weather, or location patterns. For example, brands can promote holiday offers near shopping centers on weekends, trigger creative for winter gear as temperatures drop, or shift campaigns between markets to match inventory and demand.
For audience-specific strategies, placement and timing matter. A brand targeting department store shoppers, primarily women in the 55-64 age range, might activate OOH ads around shopping centers and big-box stores or close to health and point-of-care facilities. Family-focused brands could target high-traffic entertainment or retail areas during weekends.
Beyond awareness, DOOH plays a key role in driving conversions. Today’s shoppers are on the hunt for value, and real-time, location-based messaging makes it easy to put the right offer in front of them at the right moment. Research from the OAAA and Morning Consult found that 42% of U.S. adults say OOH ads featuring special-offer messaging, like “buy one, get one free,” most influence their in-store spending.
With flexible creative and the ability to trigger campaigns based on live signals like weather, inventory, or store hours, DOOH ensures holiday messaging stays relevant and engaging from first impression to final purchase.
Pandora advertises on a LinkNYC screen at a busy intersection
Drive foot traffic and in-store purchases
OOH continues to prove its power as a last-mile driver, bridging the gap between awareness and in-store action. U.S. in-store sales are projected to climb 3.6% year over year, reaching $780 billion, according to Forrester. Growth is being fueled by value-focused shoppers who are gravitating toward discount retailers, supercenters, and warehouse clubs in search of better deals, making physical retail more competitive than ever.
Per the OAAA, 68% of adults notice OOH ads on their way to a store, and nearly half say those ads influence their purchases. Talon Outdoor adds that 59% of shoppers are likely to buy within 30 minutes of seeing an OOH display—a clear sign of the medium’s ability to convert attention into sales.
By activating OOH along the path to purchase, brands can boost visibility and drive store traffic with timely, location-based messaging. High-traffic formats, like billboards, urban panels, and transit or street furniture near retail locations, can effectively spotlight directions or promotions. Meanwhile, longer dwell-time environments, like those in key markets, help reinforce brand messaging.
Chanel promotes its beauty line with DOOH displays in malls
Extend the reach of omnichannel campaigns
As consumers spend more time researching before they buy, developing a strong omnichannel strategy will be key this holiday season. The hunt for value is increasingly powered by technology: Gen Z now uses social media and search engines equally (43%) to discover gift ideas, and about 15% of Gen Z and millennials expect to use AI to find inspiration. This behaviour underscores how discovery now happens everywhere, making it crucial for brands to deliver a consistent and connected experience across channels.
OOH can play a key role in that journey by bridging digital and physical touchpoints. When integrated thoughtfully, it reinforces messaging across screens and devices, keeping brands top of mind from online discovery to in-store purchase. Interactive formats, like QR codes, hashtags, or short URLs, can drive consumers to learn more, shop online, or engage with a brand’s social presence in a simple, frictionless way. For example, a brand offering an online discount might use QR-enabled OOH creative in transit hubs during commuting hours to capture attention from on-the-go professionals.
Through device ID passback, audiences exposed to DOOH ads in geofenced areas can be retargeted later through mobile or digital channels, multiplying brand touchpoints throughout the shopping journey. As purchasing periods stretch and economic pressures shape consumer behaviour, integrating DOOH into your omnichannel strategy helps brands stay visible, relevant, and connected—driving measurable lift across every channel this holiday season.
As the holiday season approaches, now’s the time to harness DOOH advertising to reach and engage shoppers. Amid economic pressures and shorter buying windows, consumers are actively seeking deals and value-driven offers. Integrating the medium into your omnichannel strategy can help drive awareness, boost in-store traffic, and keep your brand top of mind this holiday season.
3 common friction points in OOH media planning (and how automation helps solve them)
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is on a roll. Global spending hit $46.2 billion last year and is expected to climb to $68.2 billion by 2030, thanks in large part to digital formats. The audience is there, the impact is clear — but the way most OOH campaigns are planned and bought hasn’t caught up. Manual RFPs, PDFs, and long email chains are still the norm, and programmatic trading makes up only about 4% of overall OOH spend.
Automation is reshaping that process. Broadsign’s new eBook, Automation in OOH Media Planning: Streamlining Transactions at Scale, breaks down how advancements in automation are transforming the OOH buying process — giving advertisers faster access to premium inventory, greater transparency, and the confidence to plan at digital speed, while helping media owners cut down on repetitive tasks and focus more on growth.
To give you a preview of the insights included in the full eBook, we spotlight three common friction points slowing OOH down today and how automation is helping to overcome them.
Friction in out-of-home media buying: Why OOH planning still feels stuck in the past
Even as OOH builds momentum, with digital formats fueling new growth, the workflows behind it haven’t kept pace. Campaign planning and booking still involve layers of back-and-forth that slow execution and make it harder to align OOH with the speed of other digital channels.
For agency teams, the issue isn’t just efficiency. Demand for OOH is rising, but campaign timelines are shrinking. As Daniel Mak, SVP of Client Services at Talon Canada, a leading independent OOH agency, explains: “It’s a matter of efficiency and speed. The time frames are getting shorter and shorter. We just need to be as nimble and flexible as possible to take dollars and get them into market within a day or a week — whatever the timeline is.”
Media owners feel the same strain from the other side. Too much time goes into repetitive coordination and proposals — effort that could be better spent on growth. Gavin Lee, Sr. Director of Product at Broadsign, points out that the industry is “spending about 80% of our time managing about 15–20% of revenue,” while CRO Maarten Dollevoet adds that a single transaction can involve “30 or more back-and-forth emails between a single buyer and seller.”
The result? Lost time, missed opportunities, and campaigns that struggle to fully integrate with the rest of today’s fast-moving media mix. It’s a gap the industry is already working to close, with automation paving the way for the next era of OOH growth.
Friction point #1: Planning OOH usually requires separate workflows
Part of the reason OOH transacting feels slow is that it typically isn’t tied to the same platforms planners already use to launch social, display, or CTV in just a few clicks. Instead, activating OOH usually means switching to a separate, mostly manual workflow with extra steps and delays.
That disconnect is the real friction:
For buyers, OOH becomes harder to align with omnichannel campaigns and the growing pressure to prove ROI.
For media owners, it translates into missed opportunities and wasted time that could be spent on growth.
“If we take away the manual side and automate a lot of this, this frees up more time for the people working in this industry… and ultimately we’re going to sell more out-of-home and grow the industry.”
By streamlining the end-to-end transaction process, automation provides buyers with faster, more flexible access to inventory; makes planning and booking more intuitive; and ensures that both parties spend less time on repetitive administration and more time driving results.
Friction point #2: Automation doesn’t just mean programmatic
When many buyers hear “automation in OOH,” they think programmatic ad buying — real-time bidding via open exchange (oRTB) or private marketplace (PMP). And for good reason: programmatically traded digital out-of-home (pDOOH) has gotten a lot of attention in recent years thanks to improved data integration, better targeting, and easier access. But it isn’t suited to every buying scenario.
Agency teams planning during peak seasons, when competition for inventory is intense, or running time-sensitive campaigns with fixed launch dates, often need options that give them more control over where and when their ads appear.
“The biggest challenge for us in doing more non-direct buying,” says Adam Garrity of dentsu, one of the world’s largest marketing and advertising networks, “is whether we can guarantee we’ll be able to deliver a campaign in busy trading periods. If automation can solve that, it changes our mindset completely.”
That’s why automation has expanded beyond bidding models to include newer transaction paths that complement pDOOH. Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) and Automated Direct — Broadsign’s term for a fully automated version of the direct-sold process — give buyers additional ways to balance speed, flexibility, and delivery certainty.
These options give buyers more flexibility in how they plan campaigns, allowing them to lock in high-priority placements in advance, while layering in programmatic agility where it fits. As Daniel Mak of Talon Canada explains: “Having the opportunity to buy in advance, direct, alongside the sort of real-time bidding or open exchange stuff, programmatic stuff, it just gives us another sort of arrow in our quiver, if you will. Another way of answering those briefs, getting them live, doing them quicker than ever.”
That choice matters. Some campaigns benefit from programmatic’s agility, but others — like seasonal pushes — need guaranteed delivery with flexibility in when and where impressions run. Still others, like synchronized brand takeovers, demand confirmed placements and precise timing. The friction isn’t that OOH transacting lacks automation; it’s that buyers who equate automation with programmatic alone risk overlooking the alternative models built to solve these challenges.
Friction point #3: OOH measurement still feels fragmented
Getting a clear view of OOH performance often means stitching together spreadsheets and PDFs from multiple sources — a noticeable contrast to the unified dashboards buyers are used to working with in digital media. Reports frequently come in different formats, with different metrics, leaving planners to reconcile them all manually. The result is a slower, more complicated picture that makes it harder to compare OOH with other media and prove ROI.
Automation can ease that strain by standardizing workflows and consolidating reporting across formats and networks. Instead of juggling mismatched reports, buyers can rely on automated delivery logs that confirm campaigns ran as planned, with dashboards that provide a unified view. Media owners, meanwhile, gain more insight into how their inventory is valued and used.
The bigger impact? Consistency. With integrated data systems and standardized, IAB-aligned metrics, OOH can plug into identity solutions, retail media networks, and omnichannel DSPs. Automation turns measurement from a drag into a bridge — connecting OOH more seamlessly to the rest of the digital ecosystem.
Streamlining OOH planning and buying doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means tackling the pain points that slow it down — siloed workflows, misconceptions about transaction paths, and fragmented reporting. The result: a channel that can move with the same speed and clarity buyers expect from digital.
