Digital displays are part of our everyday environment, from busy transit stations to retail spaces and malls. Advertisers benefit from this media, which opens new opportunities to reach their audience in real time, in real places, with contextually relevant messages. The evolution of technology and data improves the ability to make these out-of-home experiences measurable, dynamic, and connected to broader campaign strategies.
Read on this glossary page to learn the key elements behind this growing medium, how it works, and why it’s reshaping outdoor advertising.
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Digital Out‑of‑Home (DOOH) is the display of digital advertising content on screens located in public spaces, such as digital billboards, transit hubs, retail locations, and kiosks. This type of media goes a step forward from static signage by featuring dynamic and contextual messaging that can be updated in real time. The programmatic form of DOOH, known as pDOOH, allows advertisers to purchase and activate ads across networks of screens through automated platforms.
DOOH is important because it combines online precision and physical impact. DOOH ads can adapt instantly to changing contexts, such as day parting, weather conditions, or nearby events, which makes them highly relevant to audiences on the move. That makes DOOH increasingly popular among brands and agencies, as a scalable, measurable channel, ideal for omnichannel strategies.
As such, the global DOOH market is forecast to grow by around 6.76% annually from 2024 to 2029, reaching $26.33 billion by 2030.
At the core of DOOH operations is a programmatic stack that integrates demand‑side platforms (DSPs), supply‑side platforms (SSPs), and ad servers optimized to work in real-time. For example, Perion’s platform enables advertisers to plan, activate, and measure DOOH campaigns, and publishers to monetize their inventory with full creative control.
The first step in a DOOH campaign is where the brands define the criteria for showing the ads, such as location, audience segments, data triggers (e.g., geofences, timelines, environmental signals), and creative assets. Ads are then served according to such criteria on DOOH screens in real time.
During execution, in‑flight monitoring allows marketers to allocate their budget to top-performing ads. Once the campaign is complete, the results are evaluated through brand recall, awareness lift, and foot traffic attribution dashboards that measure offline sales impact.
Perion’s lift dashboard and awareness dashboard leverage anonymized mobile data to quantify campaign efficacy, including impressive case study outcomes such as a 314 % increase in store visits for Lululemon.
DOOH ads come in several formats according to the diverse environments where they appear. For instance, large-format digital billboards are used to deliver high-impact visuals to drivers on highways. Advertisers also use vertical screens, video, and interactive kiosks in places with high pedestrian traffic, such as airports and transit hubs. DOOH can also take the format of urban installations in squares or venues. Finally, for malls and retail settings, place-based screens offer targeted displays with proximity triggers.
DOOH offers several advantages over other types of advertising, especially static OOH.
DOOH provides scalability, context, and measurability to advertising campaigns. Leveraging dynamic creative optimization allows content to adapt in real time, enhancing engagement. DOOH also delivers precision targeting that enables custom audience segmentation. Cross-screen continuity is other of the benefits of DOOH ads, connecting messaging from outdoor screens to other digital environments.
Another benefit of using DOOH is the control of the campaigns in real time. Advertisers can monitor the delivery pacing, the budget, and even pause underperforming screens instantly. DOOH platforms provide post-campaign analytics that can analyze offline results such as brand recall and foot traffic lift. Perion’s measurement approach has shown that DOOH is not only visually striking but also effective in driving business outcomes.
