Product News | October 11, 2021

Digital transformation in out-of-home with Broadsign’s Burr Smith

The out-of-home industry is in the middle of a major transformation. As automation, programmatic buying, audience data, and more reshape how campaigns are planned and transacted, the industry is moving toward a more connected and scalable future.

Few people have had a front-row seat to that evolution quite like Burr Smith, Chairman, President, and CEO of Broadsign. Under his leadership, Broadsign has evolved from a digital signage CMS provider into one of the industry’s leading global OOH advertising platforms, helping unify the buy and sell sides of the market through automation, programmatic technology, and strategic acquisitions.

That impact was recently recognized by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), which honoured Burr with its inaugural Digital Transformation Award at the 2026 OAAA Honors Circle Awards. The award celebrates leaders driving the modernization of OOH through innovation, automation, and technological advancement.

We sat down with Burr to discuss how OOH has evolved, why unification matters, and what needs to happen next to keep the industry growing.

You’ve been focused on modernizing out-of-home for years. What did digital transformation in OOH look like when you first started, and how has that vision evolved over time?

When I became CEO, Broadsign was primarily a content management system (CMS) company. At the time, there was an internal discussion about whether we should remain focused solely on CMS technology, but it became clear to me that it wasn’t a sustainable long-term strategy. So we decided to evolve beyond content management and move closer to where the advertising dollars were actually originating: the demand side.

That meant building products across the ecosystem to better connect buyers, sellers, and media owners and, ultimately, reduce friction across the industry. That shift marked the beginning of Broadsign’s broader transformation and shaped the vision we continue to build toward today.

You’ve led Broadsign through multiple waves of transformation. How do you prioritize where to invest as the industry continues to evolve?

We invest in two ways: through products and through acquisitions. When we see an opportunity to acquire and integrate a company that can accelerate progress faster than building organically, we’ll often take that approach. It allows us to move more quickly and bring capabilities to market sooner.

Traditionally, we’ve focused our investments on technologies and capabilities that help connect different parts of the ecosystem more effectively over time. Sometimes, the fastest way to move the industry forward isn’t always the most obvious or direct one. It can mean building complementary products or investing in areas that help create a more connected and scalable market overall. Ultimately, the goal has always been the same: reducing friction across the industry and making it easier for advertising dollars to flow into out-of-home.

Where do you see the biggest disconnect between how OOH is perceived and what the medium is actually capable of?

I’d say the biggest challenge is that OOH still hasn’t reached the point where it’s as easy to buy as some other advertising channels. The industry has evolved quickly, and many companies are bringing new ideas and technologies to market, creating a wide range of workflows and solutions across the ecosystem.

Over the years, Broadsign has focused on building technology that helps create more seamless connections between the demand side and supply side. Publishers, agencies, and technology partners will always have their own approaches, and innovation is important, but the industry also needs more standardized and connected transaction paths that can scale efficiently.

The industry talks a lot about collaboration and growth. What does real collaboration actually look like across OOH?

OOH represents roughly 5% of the overall advertising market, and the focus is on how to continue growing that share. But the way to grow the industry isn’t by competing for incremental share within the existing programmatic market. Rather than competing for share within OOH or pDOOH, the bigger opportunity is growing the broader OOH market across both digital and static.

As the industry becomes more connected and standardized, OOH increasingly operates like other major media channels, making it easier for larger advertising investments to flow into the space. That’s one of the reasons we acquired Place Exchange. We’re committed to long-term industry growth, and over time, industries naturally consolidate as it becomes less practical for multiple companies to keep building the same technologies in parallel.

The acquisition strengthened our ability to help unify the ecosystem and create a more connected path between the demand side and supply side of the industry. We’re already seeing stronger momentum toward that kind of unification through greater consolidation and integration across the ecosystem, which is naturally attracting more investment and attention from the broader advertising industry.

What does the next phase of digital transformation in OOH look like over the next few years, and how do you hope it ultimately shapes the future of the industry?

The next phase of digital transformation really comes back to unification. A lot of people focus on growing the industry incrementally, but the most important thing is building a more connected market. That’s been a major focus for Broadsign for a long time, and it’s why we continue investing across different parts of the ecosystem, including static.

AI will also play an important role, particularly in improving operational efficiency. It can help streamline workflows, campaign planning, and many day-to-day processes. But at this stage, there’s a significant role for technology providers to support the end-to-end transaction infrastructure and the broader flow of ad dollars. Beyond that, any technology, trend, or opportunity that broadens the market ultimately accelerates industry growth. That’s part of the reason we’re also interested in areas like retail media and audience analytics.

Audience measurement will be especially important moving forward. OOH already has unique strengths as a medium because it exists so close to the point of purchase, but the industry still needs stronger audience analytics and measurement capabilities to fully demonstrate that value to advertisers.

You’ve emphasized culture as a core part of transformation. What role has it played in enabling meaningful change across the business?

Culture has been a huge part of Broadsign’s success. A lot of that comes back to our values and the fact that people genuinely believe in them. We try to make decisions based on doing the right thing for the business, our customers, and the industry overall. There’s very little internal politics because the focus has always been on building something better together.

That mindset becomes especially important during acquisitions and periods of transformation. When new teams come in, we don’t approach it from a place of protecting turf. If another company is doing something better, we want to learn from it and embrace it. That’s one of the reasons the Place Exchange acquisition worked so well. The two companies had very complementary strengths with very little overlap, so it wasn’t about duplicating efforts; it was about bringing together capabilities that made the combined business stronger.

What does the Digital Transformation recognition mean to you personally, and what impact are you most proud of?

I’m proud of what Broadsign has become and the role it’s played in moving the industry forward. Over the years, we’ve continued investing in products and acquisitions we believed would improve the industry, even when it sometimes took time for the market to fully adopt them.

We may not always move as quickly as some other industries, but we’ve always had a relentless focus on getting better and helping push the industry forward along the way. I think Broadsign has earned its position in the industry because our motivations have always been rooted in building something meaningful and creating long-term value for the ecosystem. I’m grateful to the OAAA for the honour because it reflects the collective effort behind everything we’ve built. We’re committed to this industry for the long term, and we’ll keep working to help it evolve, grow, and improve.

Product News | October 11, 2021

Digital out-of-home for holiday marketing: How to win high-intent shopping moments

A busy two-level shopping mall atrium with shoppers gathered along the upper-floor railing. A large digital billboard dominates the center, displaying a SportChek holiday advertisement beneath a glass skylight.

If your holiday marketing strategy is still built around the same playbook from a few years ago, you’re already behind.

In 2026, consumer trends point to a more deliberate, hybrid holiday shopper: one who starts deal hunting months before decorations go up, takes more time to research and compare options, and routinely moves between mobile devices, AI tools, and physical stores before making a purchase. As a result, the path to purchase is becoming longer and more fragmented, creating dozens of high-intent micro-moments where brands have an opportunity to inform or influence what shoppers do next.

As agencies and marketers seek ways to connect digital discovery with brick-and-mortar purchasing behaviour, digital out-of-home (DOOH) inventory offers them a unique opportunity to reach consumers at key moments throughout their IRL holiday shopping journey. And with programmatic making campaigns faster and easier to launch and adjust, DOOH can play a vital role in an omnichannel holiday strategy — with the flexibility to meet campaign needs as they evolve.

Why holiday shopping micro-moments matter in 2026 — and how DOOH can help

Major sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain at the centre of the holiday shopping calendar, but they represent just a few moments in a purchase journey that now starts earlier and moves fluidly between digital and physical touchpoints. According to new Microsoft research, the average holiday conversion journey now takes 52 days, with 63% of U.S. shoppers starting before Halloween. That journey is also increasingly hybrid: per Salesforce, 42% of shoppers visit stores to buy products they previously researched online, while 79% use smartphones while shopping in-store.

It’s within this extended, omnichannel journey that holiday shopping micro-moments occur: reflexive, high-intent windows when consumers turn to a device or their surroundings to act on an immediate need, like:

Comparing gift ideas or researching products
Looking for a nearby store or point of sale
Seeking inspiration for holiday hosting, decorating, or gifting
Checking local product availability, promotions, or seasonal offers
Making a last-minute purchase

For advertisers, these moments create opportunities to reach shoppers with messages that reflect what they need in that moment. And because DOOH combines broad reach and repeated exposure with the ability to deliver relevant messaging in real-world contexts — often close to the point of purchase — it’s particularly well suited to making those moments count.

Chanel campaign displayed on Simon Media’s DOOH inventory at The Galleria in Houston, Texas

Strategy #1: Leverage advanced targeting to reach holiday shoppers at high-intent moments

Use advanced DOOH targeting to activate screens in and around the physical locations where your target customers are most likely to be — particularly when proximity to a store, venue, or other destination signals stronger purchase intent.

Depending on the campaign objective, advertisers can narrow their inventory using:

Location targeting: Go broad with nationwide or city-level campaigns, or get more granular with zip codes, POIs, custom geofences, and individual screens. A retailer promoting a Black Friday sale, for example, could prioritize screens within walking or driving distance of its stores.
Audience targeting: Use first-party data and third-party audience segments to identify screen locations where target customers are most likely to be present — whether that’s parents shopping for toys, beauty buyers looking for gifts, or travellers heading home for the holidays.
Venue and asset targeting: Match placements to the activity happening around them, from gift shopping at malls and stocking up at grocery stores to dining, celebrating, and travelling over the holidays.
Dayparting: Adjust when ads appear to align with relevant shopping and travel behaviours throughout the day.
Layered targeting: Combine multiple signals to get more precise. For example, target mall-adjacent inventory within a specific New York City geofence during peak afternoon and evening shopping hours.

De’Longhi recently put this kind of high-intent targeting into practice with a programmatic DOOH campaign promoting its Eletta Explore coffee machine during the competitive holiday shopping season in Poland. By activating inventory in high-traffic shopping malls, reaching gift-seekers close to the point of purchase, and using dayparting to align ad delivery with peak shopping hours, the campaign ultimately drove a 121% lift in brand preference and a 190% lift in intent to interact with the brand or visit its website.

For holiday campaigns focused on purchase-ready micro-moments, targeting can extend all the way into the store. According to Salesforce, 77% of consumers plan to shop in physical stores this holiday season, making in-store advertising a particularly valuable way to reach shoppers when they’re most likely to make a purchase. The same targeting principles still apply: advertisers can prioritize the stores, audiences, locations, and times most relevant to what they’re selling rather than treating all retail foot traffic equally.

Cineplex Media DOOH screen at CF Carrefour Laval in Quebec, Canada, directs shoppers to nearby Bell stores

Strategy #2: Use dynamic creative and contextual triggers to match DOOH messaging to the moment

Targeting can help put a holiday ad in the right place at the right time. Dynamic creative in DOOH takes that relevance a step further by adapting the ad itself based on what’s happening in that moment. Using signals like time, weather, location, proximity, product availability, or other live data, advertisers can automatically serve the creative variation that best fits the current context.

For holiday campaigns, that opens up practical ways to make creative more useful and timely:

React to the weather: Promote coats, hot drinks, delivery, or indoor activities when temperatures drop, then switch creative as conditions change.
Make proximity useful: On screens near a store, dynamically show the closest location, distance, or a directional call to action.
Adapt as shipping deadlines approach: Shift from standard delivery messaging to expedited shipping, pickup, immediate availability, or digital gift cards as Christmas gets closer.
Build urgency around key sales moments: Use live countdowns to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, promotional deadlines, or other limited-time offers.
Respond to inventory levels: Feature products or offers based on what’s currently available at nearby locations rather than promoting something shoppers can’t buy.

The most effective dynamic DOOH creative strategies are built around signals that meaningfully change what’s useful or relevant to the shopper, allowing advertisers to adapt messaging at scale without manually building and trafficking every possible variation.

Strategy #3: Pair physical DOOH exposure with mobile activity to extend reach and drive action

Mobile plays a major role in holiday commerce, with eMarketer projecting that nearly 60% of online holiday purchases will happen on mobile devices in 2026. That makes mobile and DOOH a natural pairing, with each channel reinforcing the other across the shopping journey. OAAA research also found that 74% of mobile users took action on their devices after recent exposure to DOOH ads, while an Ocean Neuroscience study found consumers are 48% more likely to engage with a mobile ad after seeing the same campaign on a DOOH screen.

For holiday campaigns, advertisers can use that relationship in several practical ways:

Location-based retargeting: Extend a DOOH campaign with follow-up mobile ads served to audiences who were near campaign screens. A shopper who encounters a holiday campaign while out shopping, for example, could later see a mobile ad featuring the same product or promotion.
Mobile push notifications: For opted-in app users, use location signals like geofencing or beacons to deliver relevant notifications when they’re near a store or campaign location — for example, alerting loyalty members to an offer nearby.
Interactive QR codes: Give shoppers a direct path from a DOOH ad to an offer, coupon, product page, store locator, or other mobile experience. Dynamic QR codes are particularly useful on screens where consumers are close enough — and have enough dwell time — to scan.
In-app AR experiences: Use DOOH creative as an entry point to augmented reality experiences on a shopper’s phone, like virtual product try-ons, interactive holiday experiences, or content designed for social sharing.

The best approach depends on what you want the shopper to do next. QR codes, push notifications, and AR can encourage action while a shopper is still nearby, while mobile retargeting can reinforce the message later in the purchase journey.

Ready to make the most of this year’s holiday shopping micro-moments? Explore our inventory catalog to discover premium digital screens in high-impact locations.

Product News | October 11, 2021

How VAST Billboards is redefining out-of-home in New Zealand

In a market long shaped by a handful of dominant players, VAST Billboards has carved out a distinct identity as New Zealand’s independent, Kiwi-owned out-of-home (OOH) network. Headquartered in Christchurch, VAST has built its growth story not by trying to out-scale the biggest networks, but by complementing the broader OOH landscape with a strong presence across regional cities, suburban corridors, and strategically important locations.

We sat down with Gary Rosewarne, Head of Growth Strategy at VAST, to talk about the company’s rapid growth, its programmatic ambitions, and why Broadsign has become a core part of how VAST runs its media operations.

A network built on purposeful growth

VAST’s strategy is built on a simple but deliberate idea: the network doesn’t need to be the whole plan — it needs to be the right complement to it. “We don’t believe VAST needs to be the whole plan,” Rosewarne explains. “In Auckland, for example, we can provide a complementary layer around established networks; in Christchurch, we have significant strength across suburban and arterial environments; and regionally, we give brands access to audiences across a growing number of markets.”

That positioning shapes where VAST builds inventory and how it prices and packages it, with a focus on keeping the network competitively priced and easy to buy. Its predominantly digital, large-format footprint extends beyond New Zealand’s largest cities into regional markets including Tauranga, Hamilton, Napier, Hastings, Taupo, Nelson, Blenheim, Timaru, and Invercargill, across both landscape and portrait formats.

“The objective isn’t simply to accumulate screens, but to add locations that create useful geographic spread, strengthen coverage and give advertisers access to audiences they may not be reaching elsewhere,” says Rosewarne. “That combination of metro, suburban and regional inventory is really what defines the VAST network.”

VAST digital billboard on Ferry Road in Christchurch, New Zealand

Serving national brands and local businesses alike

The company’s advertiser base spans national agency clients, major brands, and local direct advertisers. In 2025, its network saw strong growth across these segments, becoming an increasingly important part of national campaign plans while maintaining its strong connection to businesses looking to reach audiences in their local communities.

VAST has also used its own network to experiment with new ways of engaging audiences and demonstrating the potential of OOH. One example is Bill Is Bored, a campaign that used curiosity-driven billboard creative to capture attention and encourage people to continue the experience online. More recently, the Win A Grand – Your Region, Your Voice campaign invited New Zealanders to share what matters most in their local communities. The responses helped inform Beyond the Big Three, a research study examining the scale, value, and audience opportunity of regional New Zealand beyond the country’s three largest cities.

Together, these campaigns have given VAST a way to test ideas, gather audience insights, and demonstrate what OOH can achieve beyond simply delivering impressions. “These projects let us test ideas on our own network, learn from the response and build evidence that can ultimately help advertisers use OOH more creatively and effectively,” Rosewarne says.

That combination of clarity of purpose and consistent execution earned VAST recognition as Beacon’s 2026 Sales Team of the Year—one of New Zealand media’s leading industry awards, and a notable achievement for a relatively small team competing against some of the most established names in OOH.

“In 2025, VAST grew revenue at 5x the pace of the broader market, but the story was bigger than the numbers,” Rosewarne says. “We stopped thinking about ourselves as simply selling billboards and became much more focused on solving planning problems.”

Central to that shift was the “complete, not compete” philosophy, helping agencies see where regional and suburban audiences could add incremental value. Being a smaller, independent player also gave VAST room to move quickly. “Being small probably helped as well: we could be nimble, authentic, try things, have some fun and respond quickly when an opportunity emerged.”

VAST roadside screen in Ashburton, New Zealand

Why VAST chose Broadsign

As both the network and ambitions have grown, so has the need for technology that can scale alongside them. That search led VAST to the Broadsign Platform.

“For us, Broadsign came down to trust, reliability and fit,” Rosewarne says. “We wanted an established platform with deep expertise in OOH, rather than something we would potentially outgrow. As we scale, the technology sitting underneath the network has to be dependable, but it also has to give us the flexibility to keep evolving how we package, manage and monetise inventory.”

Broadsign’s position within the programmatic DOOH ecosystem and its established relationships with major trading platforms and partners were other deciding factors, particularly as programmatic became a larger part of VAST’s business. “Broadsign brings experience, expertise and an established ecosystem that we can grow alongside.”

Programmatic as a new route to market

Programmatic buying has shifted how the media owner thinks about its inventory, moving the conversation beyond locations and weeks toward a more dynamic view of audiences, availability, and demand. “It creates another route into the VAST network and makes it easier for advertisers who may already be buying other digital media programmatically to include OOH within that ecosystem,” Rosewarne explains. “For a challenger network like ours, reducing that friction is particularly valuable.”

That shift has also prompted VAST to rethink how it values and packages inventory for programmatic buyers, treating it as a distinct buying pathway with its own use cases rather than a variation of direct bookings. Just as importantly, programmatic expertise has been embedded across the sales team, helping ensure the right buying approach is recommended for each campaign.

Looking ahead

VAST’s long-term vision centers on purposeful growth, not expansion for its own sake. Rosewarne describes the goal as building “a highly useful independent OOH network that has a clear role within the New Zealand market”, one that continues to strengthen its regional footprint, protect its position in Christchurch, and selectively add metropolitan inventory that creates genuine new audience opportunity.

Looking at the broader industry, Rosewarne sees OOH becoming increasingly measurable, connected, and flexible, with programmatic adoption and audience measurement both continuing to mature. “Our job is to combine those capabilities with the things that still make OOH powerful: great locations, simple creative, local relevance and real-world visibility,” he says. “If we can keep doing that while remaining independent, nimble and easy to work with, we think there is a very exciting future for VAST.”

Ready to scale your network without scaling your workload? Learn more about the Broadsign Platform here.

Product News | October 11, 2021

How Canadian Tire achieved a 64% lift in store visits with programmatic DOOH

Canadian Tire Canada’s Garage and Triangle Rewards digital billboard displayed in a busy downtown office building.

To support its next phase of service-led growth, Canadian Tire, a staple in the Canadian retail landscape, launched a high-impact programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) campaign to reach its target audience at scale. Specializing in essential mechanical care and seasonal maintenance, the brand sought to strengthen its position as a premier automotive service provider and drive measurable foot traffic to its stores across the country.

Objective

The campaign aimed to drive measurable foot traffic to Canadian Tire Auto Service Centres nationwide. To achieve this, the campaign targeted Canadian car owners, with an emphasis on growth segments including Gen Z, Millennials, and Newcomers to Canada, by highlighting that consumers can both earn and redeem Canadian Tire Money on automotive mechanical services.

Strategy

Partnering with Broadsign, Talon and Touche, the campaign deployed programmatic DOOH alongside Canadian Tire’s national TV, digital, and social media channels. Ads were activated programmatically on digital screens near Canadian Tire Auto Service Centres to reach drivers when vehicle maintenance was a priority.

The campaign ran across multiple placement types, including billboards, transit shelters, shopping malls, fitness centres, and campus environments, to remain highly visible throughout the day. Layering these location and venue parameters with contextual triggers and Canadian Tire’s first-party audience data maximized efficiency, ensuring the messaging reached high-intent drivers in real time.

Results

The campaign delivered a 64% net lift in store visits compared to the unexposed lookalike control group, achieving a 100% confidence level.

Want the campaign highlights? Check out the infographic below.

Product News | October 11, 2021

3 strategies for planning smarter programmatic DOOH campaigns: Data-backed tips from our new industry report

LinkNYC digital advertising kiosk on a busy New York City street corner, surrounded by pedestrians, cyclists, and storefronts.

As the programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) market matures, the question for many advertisers is no longer whether to use it, but how to make it work harder. At the same time, the rise of new targeting signals, creative formats, and deal models means buyers are navigating a more complex landscape — one where maximizing ROAS and aligning DOOH outcomes with broader campaign goals are top of mind.

To better understand how these shifts are shaping advertiser investment and planning strategies, we analyzed aggregated transaction data from the Broadsign and Place Exchange SSPs — together representing the world’s largest independent programmatic OOH ecosystem, with more than 1.7 million programmatically-enabled screens.

Drawing on the findings published in our new 2026 Programmatic DOOH Trends Report, this article highlights three practical strategies buyers can use to plan smarter, allocate budgets more effectively, and get more value from their programmatic DOOH campaigns.

Understanding today’s programmatic DOOH marketplace: Insights for agencies and advertisers

No longer limited to a small group of early adopters, today’s category mix — spanning sectors associated with everyday consumer purchase decisions as well as those with longer consideration cycles — shows programmatic OOH being used across a wide range of business contexts.

Top spending advertiser categories

*Global, full-year 2025 | Categorized by IAB category*

The diversity of advertiser investment reinforces programmatic DOOH’s growing role as a mainstream media channel rather than a specialist one. It also reflects increasing confidence in the channel’s ability to support a wide range of campaign objectives across different industries. But as the market matures, buyers are navigating a more sophisticated programmatic landscape — one where performance is increasingly shaped by the planning decisions made before a campaign ever goes live.

3 strategies for planning smarter programmatic DOOH campaigns

Whether you’re launching your first programmatic OOH campaign or looking to level up your pDOOH performance at scale, we’ve got you covered with practical insights — backed by real transaction data from activations across the globe.

1. Think beyond core outdoor environments

Advertisers have long relied on out-of-home to reach audiences in busy public spaces like city centres and along major highways. And digital OOH — especially when transacted programmatically — gives buyers a faster, more flexible way to activate campaigns in those same high-traffic settings. But as digital screens extend into a wider array of everyday environments, buyers have an opportunity to think beyond traditional outdoor settings and choose inventory based not just on visibility, but on its potential to align messaging with audience mindset.

Spend distribution by venue category

Our transaction data reflects this reality. Outdoor remains the largest venue category, accounting for nearly half (48.4%) of all programmatic OOH spend. But meaningful investment across other context-rich environments like Retail (18.5%) and Transit (12.7%) points to strong buyer demand to reach audiences in relevant moments throughout the physical world.

Today’s strongest programmatic OOH plans evaluate the role different environments can play in achieving campaign objectives and use those insights to guide more intentional, performance-oriented allocation decisions. In many cases, that means combining high-reach environments for foundational coverage and layering in more targeted or context-driven placements to meaningfully engage audiences as they move about their days.

2. Check whether you can repurpose existing creative before commissioning new assets

Programmatic OOH gives buyers the flexibility to activate campaigns at scale across a growing mix of digital inventory. While different file specs across networks can take a little extra coordination, it’s getting easier as the channel evolves. pDOOH video and display creative is increasingly aligning around a few common formats, making it simpler to activate across networks, repurpose creative from other channels, and spend less time building custom assets.

*Spend by video ad size (width x height)*

The findings in our Programmatic DOOH Trends Report illustrate just how concentrated creative specifications have become. For example, two asset sizes — 1080×1920 (vertical portrait) and 1920×1080 (landscape) — together accounted for 77% of all programmatic video spend in 2025. And the top three display ad sizes — 1080×1920 (31.4%), 1920×1080 (23.3%), and 1400×400 (24.2%) — made up 79% of total display spend.

For buyers, it’s easier than ever to scale creative across screens, with technology simplifying activation across a wider range of formats through automated reformatting. That gives brands more flexibility to focus their resources where they can have the most impact, whether that’s exploring unique formats or investing in capabilities like dynamic creative optimization (DCO), which allows messaging to adapt automatically based on changing real-world conditions.

3. Match your deal type to your campaign objectives

Advertisers are taking a more considered approach to buying digital out-of-home programmatically, using different transaction models depending on campaign requirements. Real-time bidding via the open exchange (oRTB) provides a fast and flexible way to activate DOOH campaigns at scale, while private marketplace (PMP) deals provide access to curated inventory through pre-established deal structures.

Spend by transaction type

*Global, full-year 2025 | Place Exchange transactions only*

Our data shows that PMP transactions accounted for more than 86% of programmatic OOH spend in 2025. This includes Custom PMPs, which allow buyers to build deals around specific inventory and audience criteria, and Always-on PMPs, which provide turnkey access to curated inventory without requiring new agreements.

This distribution doesn’t suggest that one transaction model is inherently better suited to programmatic DOOH. Each serves a different purpose depending on campaign objectives: open auction can support scale, flexibility and speed; PMPs can address specific inventory, audience or contextual requirements; and programmatic guaranteed can provide delivery commitments or secure specific placements.

Transaction model selection should therefore be driven by campaign requirements as part of the broader planning process, rather than by a preference for one buying method over another.

Explore more data-backed findings in our 2026 Programmatic DOOH Trends Report

Access additional benchmarks, regional trends, and category-level insights drawn from aggregated transaction data from the world’s largest independent programmatic OOH ecosystem.

Download the 2026 Programmatic DOOH Trends Report