Denys Kanel is Founder and CEO of Unique Media, expanding its DOOH network and building enterprise solutions for media owners.
Every operator in out-of-home (OOH) advertising can tell you their CPM, addressable reach and programmatic fill rate. Almost no one can tell you the last time someone stopped and remembered what they saw. That gap, not the media math, will help decide who wins the next decade of digital out-of-home (DOOH). The numbers look healthy: Revenue from OOH advertising reached a record $9.46 billion in 2025, 19 consecutive quarters of growth and a digital segment projected to hit $56.1 billion by 2034.
I have spent the past decade watching the industry move from static real estate to digital screens to biddable, addressable inventory through DSPs (demand-side platforms) and SSPs (supply-side platforms). Each stage was an infrastructure upgrade, not an experience upgrade, and the growth numbers can mask that fact.
Infrastructure was the right fight for the last decade: Owning the poles, permits and addressable pipes was how an operator earned the right to compete. But DOOH infrastructure is a floor, not a differentiator; most serious operators now have some version of it. The real transition is what gets built on top: whether a screen creates a moment worth stopping for or just occupies a location worth renting.
How DOOH Infrastructure Became The Industry Standard
Out-of-home was, for most of its history, a real estate business: Value came down to location and size, and buying was relationship-driven and opaque. LinkNYC, a citywide kiosk network giving New Yorkers free Wi-Fi and city information, funded by advertising on the same screens, offered early proof that this did not have to be true. Many operators saw the ad revenue and missed the model. Then DSPs and SSPs made screens biddable and addressable, and programmatic DOOH shifted buying from which markets to which audiences, verified how.
This is where much legacy OOH thinking stops; the next question is what makes inventory worth permitting, and what advertisers actually want to do with it.
I made this transition firsthand. After years of running a retail media network, not a traditional billboard company, I reached the conclusion that more operators now face. We had built a media company when the market needed one that creates experiences in key urban markets, from immersive installations to show-stopping canvases that brands build entire moments around. It stopped being about eyeballs and started being about impact, giving brands the ability to create something unforgettable at scale, in front of people who choose to stop and look.
Why Brands Are Moving Budget To Physical Media And Experiential DOOH
Digital fatigue and ad fraud are pushing brands toward real-world impressions that cannot be bot-trafficked or served next to harmful content. Large-format digital displays in high-dwell locations deliver concentrated attention that fragmented feeds cannot match, now measurable with more of the rigor buyers expect from digital advertising.
Digitally native brands accounted for 28% of the top 100 OOH spenders last year, bringing their in-app instinct for experience design to the street. They no longer only ask how many people will see a screen, but what people will do when they encounter it.
That shift shows up in campaigns reacting to weather or crowd size, anamorphic 3D creative that turns a screen into a landmark people film and share unprompted, placements beside local artists that inherit relevance the audience already granted the space, and measurement built for experience, where dwell time and retargeting lift now sit alongside impressions. A brand in a designed physical moment inherits a halo effect that paid digital cannot easily replicate, reading as belonging there instead of interrupting.
Why Premium OOH Locations Still Matter
Infrastructure still matters enormously; it’s just not the finish line. Owning premium out-of-home placements in a city’s highest-visibility corridors is its own moat. These locations are finite in a way media budgets are not—one best wall in a neighborhood, one corner every pedestrian walks past. A competitor can outspend a rival on screens, reach and frequency, but not on a location already taken. Once a network holds it, that spot is gone from the market.
A massive, structurally built canvas reads as permanent architecture, not rented space. Networks that program for the neighborhoods they sit in earn different standing than networks treating every screen as interchangeable inventory, and buyers increasingly price against that relevance.
What Wins The Next Decade Of Digital Out-Of-Home
The framing that fails is either/or. Infrastructure without experience is a well-permitted screen nobody remembers. Experience without infrastructure is a stunt with no place to live. Infrastructure earns an operator the right to be in the conversation; experience wins it once you’re in.
For operators, the takeaway is simple: Do not stop at making screens easier to buy. Build media people have a reason to notice, cities have a reason to keep and brands have a reason to build around.
The companies still expanding a decade from now will not be remembered for the infrastructure they built. They will be remembered for the experiences they built on top of it.
Unique Media is a partner with OOH Today.