The majority of DOOH spend still flows through direct deals. Discover why guaranteed delivery is the missing capability publishers need to unify demand and maximize revenue.
Perion Marketing
12th Jun 2026
Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) has had a programmatic story for years. Real-time bidding, automated buying, audience-based targeting. The infrastructure is there. The narrative is polished.
But there’s a number that complicates it: 75–80%.
That’s the share of DOOH budgets still booked direct via insertion order, managed outside the ad server, outside the platform, outside the programmatic infrastructure that publishers have spent years building. For all the progress DOOH has made as a channel, the majority of the money has never touched a modern ad server.
That’s not a technology failure. It’s a delivery model gap.
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The persistence of direct IO in DOOH isn’t about buyer conservatism. It’s about a specific type of certainty that programmatic auction dynamics don’t offer: fixed creative, fixed plays, a predictable schedule a brand can plan around and a network can commit to.
A buyer running a transit takeover needs to know those plays will happen. A retail network campaign tied to a product launch can’t afford variance. That commitment, the ability to look a buyer in the eye and guarantee delivery, has kept a structural majority of DOOH spend in spreadsheets and email threads rather than inside any platform.
Programmatic has never been the right answer for that buying pattern. It wasn’t designed to be. The problem is that nothing inside the modern ad server was either.
The operational reality for most DOOH publishers today is two systems running in parallel. Programmatic demand managed inside the platform. Direct IO managed outside it, in separate booking processes, with separate tracking, separate reporting, and no unified view of how their inventory is actually performing across demand types.
That split isn’t just an inconvenience. It means the majority of a publisher’s demand sits outside the tools they use to manage, optimise, and report on their network. It means buyers looking for accountability get answers from two different places. And it means every new direct campaign adds operational overhead rather than flowing into an existing workflow.
Publishers haven’t had a better option. Until now.
Share of Voice (SOV) by Perion is a new campaign purchase type built inside Perion One that brings guaranteed delivery into the ad server alongside programmatic demand. Publishers can book fixed share-of-voice, fixed creative, and scheduled plays directly in-platform, with no separate booking system, no new sales infrastructure, and no change to how they already sell.
Two delivery modes give networks flexibility on how they structure commitments. Fixed SOV delivers a predictable, clean share of voice. Per-Screen Catchup guarantees plays per screen, with automatic catch-up for any missed delivery, a stronger SLA position for buyers who need screen-level accountability.
The direct IO workflow doesn’t go away. It moves into the ad server, where it belongs.
The 75–80% of DOOH budgets booked direct has always represented demand, not a gap in buyer appetite. Buyers want guaranteed delivery. They’ve been willing to pay for it. The infrastructure to capture it inside a modern platform just hasn’t existed.
SOV closes that. Programmatic and guaranteed, managed in one place, from one integration. Publishers can offer the full range of what buyers want without rebuilding how they sell or splitting how they operate.
That’s not a feature update. It’s what a complete DOOH platform looks like.
Ready to bring your direct campaigns inside the platform? Talk to your Perion publisher team.
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An article by Daniel E. Aks, Brian Pozesky and Paul H. Van Wert
In conversation with Todd Cohen, Vice President of CTV & Video Strategy & Sales at Perion, at Cannes 2025
Advertising has evolved since the days when buying ad space required a personal meeting between media buyers and publishers. These days, software algorithms simplify the media buying process completing the transaction in seconds.
