The true gains of digital-out-of-home will be realized in 2025
Illustration by Reagan Hicks Shutterstock / The Current
Modern consumers are no strangers to moving seamlessly between digital and physical environments. And for advertisers, there’s one channel that is critical for bridging these experiences — digital-out-of-home (DOOH). The channel has moved beyond its brand awareness roots, proving it can drive engagement, conversions and business impact where it matters most: in the real world. As the industry increasingly embraces advertising with omnichannel platforms and cracks down on non-transparent practices, here are four predictions for how programmatic digital out-of-home can change the advertising landscape in 2025.
Context shifts to the real world
DOOH uniquely gives advertisers the ability to tailor messaging based on “physical contextual” relevance to what is happening at a specific place and time. That real-world relevance is in part why DOOH has been proven to drive higher levels of consumer recall, engagement and favorability than other digital channels. It also allows DOOH to serve as an extension of other channels, like CTV and retail media. More than just a digital billboard, many DOOH screens are in fact connected TVs, airing premium video content and ads to highly engaged audiences, only it’s not in living rooms, but in hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, gyms, sports arenas, airplane seatbacks and more. Many DOOH screens are located in, at, and near retail points of purchase – at grocery and convenience stores, pharmacies, big box retailers and malls, delivering messaging throughout the shopping journey where and when decisions and purchases are made. Cinema advertising and digital audio also have strong adjacencies to DOOH. While “channels” today (and the messaging within them) are defined largely by devices, 2025 will see those definitions continue to blur, in favor of consumer-centric contexts and experiences. And where real-world context comes into play, DOOH will play a critical role in bridging the digital and physical worlds that consumers so easily transverse.
Omnichannel wins the day
Driven by the impact of real-world relevance, I predict 2025 will be the year that DOOH spending on omnichannel DSPs finally surpasses the spend on siloed “DOOH-only” DSPs. We know from history that marketers don’t want a separate DSP for each media channel, but instead want the power of a single platform where they can seamlessly plan, target, execute, optimize, report and measure all channels. With omnichannel DSPs developing increasingly powerful DOOH features, combined with the proven benefits of omnichannel unification, DOOH will finally break out of its historical silo and take its rightful place in the omnichannel mix.
Transparency shines through
In the DOOH space, with only one notable exception, every company that owns a major DOOH SSP also owns a “DOOH-only” DSP. Not only is playing both sides of the market a conflict of interest, it also opens the door to potential non-transparent practices like hidden arbitrage, whereby platforms playing both sides of the market can manipulate the difference between the price paid by the advertiser and the amount paid to the publisher to extract a non-disclosed amount far in excess of their contracted fees. The marketplace, led by the ANA, has clearly spoken: programmatic platforms siphoning huge sums via opaque arbitrage will not be tolerated. But now that the scales are shifting from two-sided DOOH-only platforms to omnichannel DSPs, who will demand to understand exactly whether and where such practices are happening, 2025 will be the year that sunlight breaks through, arbitrage is exposed, and more value ends up in the hands of advertisers and media owners.
Targeting and measurement become front and center
Those in the DOOH space know that with tremendous innovation in recent years, audience targeting and attribution measurement for DOOH are now on par with other digital channels. Individual DOOH screens can be targeted based on how they index against any demographic, behavioral, interest, or other segment, or against custom 1st party audiences. Reach, frequency, Gross Rating Points (GRPs) and Target Rating Points (TRPs) for DOOH can be measured pre-, mid-, and post-campaign, and combined and de-duplicated with other channels. Outcomes attributable to DOOH spending can be more precisely quantified across the funnel, from brand awareness and affinity to in-store foot traffic, website visits and app downloads, to online or offline purchases – all leveraging sophisticated incrementality approaches. DOOH campaigns can be optimized against performance metrics midflight, and log-level data can be seamlessly incorporated into multitouch attribution models and marketing mix models alike.
It has taken some time for DOOH to shed the perception of being a branding-only medium. But programmatic has accelerated the realization that DOOH can be targeted and measured as effectively as any other digital channel, and the results speak for themselves. 2025 will be the year that DOOH is more broadly recognized for its power to drive not just branding, but engagement, conversion, or any outcome that matters to an advertiser.
This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.