by Aubrey Lundgren, Lime Media | OOH Today
The line between online and offline shopping has effectively disappeared this holiday season. Shoppers research on their phones, compare prices in the aisle, and complete purchases wherever it’s most convenient: often within the same 20 minutes. For advertisers, this isn’t a shift to plan around anymore. It’s the default.
The numbers make the case clearly. According to Salesforce, 38% of holiday retail sales this year will involve a hybrid path to purchase. Forty-two percent of shoppers will visit a store specifically to buy something they researched online first, and 79% will have their phone out while they shop in-store: comparing prices, checking reviews, or browsing social content mid-aisle. Mobile isn’t a side channel anymore; eMarketer projects it will drive nearly 60% of all holiday ecommerce purchases this year.
Put simply: the modern holiday shopper doesn’t experience “online” and “in-store” as separate worlds. They move through both, often in the same trip, and they expect the brands they’re considering to show up in both places too.
Where OOH fits, and where it’s outgrowing the “ad” label
This is where out-of-home has a real advantage most channels don’t. A static digital ad can catch someone mid-scroll. A search result can catch someone mid-research. But almost nothing reaches a shopper as they physically move between those two states: walking from their car into a mall, waiting at a stoplight near a shopping district, standing outside the store they just looked up on their phone. OOH, and mobile OOH in particular, lives in exactly that in-between space.
That’s arguably why the category is responding the way it is. OOH’s year-to-date growth of 9.2% through Q2 isn’t a coincidence, it reflects an industry catching up to how people actually shop now, not just where they click.
Why this requires more than one channel
Here’s the piece that often gets missed: a hybrid shopper’s journey doesn’t stay in one lane, so a brand’s response shouldn’t either. This is where Lime Media’s model is built differently than most OOH companies. Rather than offering mobile billboards alone, Lime Media operates at the intersection of experiential and OOH: a 250+ asset experiential fleet alongside 100 owned digital mobile billboard trucks across 50+ DMAs nationwide. That combination matters because it means a single campaign can do both jobs at once: the physical, hands-on brand moment that experiential delivers, and the broad, repeated visibility that mobile OOH provides: coordinated as one program instead of stitched together across separate vendors.
Campaign planning is part of that model across both product lines, though what that looks like differs by channel. For experiential activations, planning includes rendering and permitting support, helping bring a physical build to life in a specific market based of the brand’s target demographic. For digital mobile billboard trucks, planning centers on strategic route development: determining where and when a truck needs to be to reach their specific shopper at the right moment, without the permitting layer that large footprint experiential activations require.
Rethinking the “ad” framing entirely
The advertisers getting the most out of the holiday season this year aren’t asking “where do we put an ad.” They’re asking “where does our brand need to physically exist in order to matter in this journey.” That’s a different brief, and it’s one OOH is uniquely positioned to answer, because it’s the rare channel that can meet a shopper in motion rather than waiting for them to arrive somewhere static.
The trend data backs up when this matters most, too. Consumers are starting their research earlier; 40% before Black Friday, according to The Trade Desk, but the Cyber Five still anchors the season, with eMarketer projecting Cyber Five ecommerce sales will surpass $50 billion for the first time. That argues for a two-phase approach: build awareness and reinforce consideration in September and October, then shift into urgency-driven visibility as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach.
Measuring what actually moved
None of this matters if brands can’t see what it drove. A growing expectation from advertisers, and one Lime Media builds every campaign around, is visibility into real-time performance, not a report that arrives after the season’s over. Live campaign tracking and measurable results are what turn “we put something out there” into “here’s what it did,” which is increasingly the bar hybrid-journey campaigns are held to.
What this means going forward
As AI-assisted shopping tools and social commerce further fragment how people discover products, the value of a real, physical, repeated brand touchpoint doesn’t shrink, it grows. Digital discovery is only becoming more scattered across more platforms and more moments. Physical presence, done well, is one of the few things that still cuts through cleanly, because it doesn’t compete with an algorithm for attention. It just shows up, exactly where the shopper already is.
For OOH companies and the brands we work with, that’s the opportunity Holiday 2026 presents: not another seasonal media buy, but a chance to be the connective tissue between a shopper’s digital research and their real-world decision. It’s the thesis Lime Media builds every holiday program around, and the reason offering experiential and mobile OOH together, backed by real planning and real measurement, isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s what the hybrid shopper actually requires.
To learn more about Lime Media’s LED billboard truck network and campaign capabilities, visit lime-media.com/services/led-billboard-trucks/
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