Why OOH’s Window of Opportunity Calls for Greater Collaboration
By Burr Smith, CEO, Broadsign
The out-of-home (OOH) industry has many unique strengths, yet we still only represent about 5% of the overall advertising market. We talk about that number a lot, usually in the context of how much room we have to grow. But if we’re serious about changing it, we need to ask ourselves a harder question: are we building an OOH market that makes it easier for new advertising dollars to come in, or are we mostly getting better at competing for the dollars already here?
We spend considerable time at conferences talking about growth, but it’s easy to return to our own businesses and focus on the customers, transactions, and priorities directly in front of us. Much of the work happening across the industry has made OOH better, but collectively, we’re still left with too many disconnected ways to plan, buy, sell, and measure the medium.
Addressing that fragmentation requires greater collaboration across OOH, alongside technology that better connects how the medium is transacted. Today, the global pDOOH market stands at roughly $1.4 billion, accounting for about 7% of total DOOH spend. There’s significant room to turn that into a multi-billion-dollar market, but the bigger opportunity isn’t simply to grow programmatic: it’s to use technology to remove more of the friction that keeps OOH from competing for a larger share of advertising investment.
Build for the dollars we don’t have yet
OOH isn’t short on innovation. We’ve made huge progress across inventory management, audience insights, campaign buying, and measurement. Those efforts have paid off: OOH consistently performs well against other media in areas like ad awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent, without losing the qualities that make the medium valuable.
But innovation only gets us so far if advertisers still have to navigate different paths and processes to access it. We shouldn’t have to choose between existing business models and what new technology makes possible. Static, digital, direct and programmatic all have a role to play; we just need to get better at connecting them.
Connection requires us to look beyond what makes sense for any one company or transaction. Media owners, agencies and technology partners will naturally continue to build solutions that advance their own businesses. The challenge is to balance that progress with greater standardization, interoperability and shared infrastructure that benefits the industry as a whole.
If we want a larger share of advertising spend, we have to build for the advertisers and budgets we don’t have yet. That means looking beyond digital and programmatic when we think about automation. Programmatic has given advertisers new ways to access OOH inventory and brought the medium closer to how they buy other digital channels, but that only gets us partway there.
Making OOH easier to access becomes increasingly important as the medium competes within broader omnichannel strategies. Advertisers shouldn’t need to become experts in our infrastructure to include the medium in a campaign. They need access to inventory, audience information, measurement and transaction processes that make OOH as straightforward to activate as other channels on their media plan.
Get comfortable with change
Technology can give us better ways of working, but it only moves the medium forward if we’re willing to change with it. That means experimenting with automation and AI, understanding where they can make a meaningful difference, and being willing to rethink processes that may have worked the same way for years.
That kind of change doesn’t always happen naturally, which is where leadership matters. OOH leaders have a responsibility to give their teams the freedom to experiment, challenge established processes and try new approaches. Automation and AI shouldn’t replace human judgment, but they can give people more time and better information to make the decisions that matter.
We’re doing a lot of this experimentation at Broadsign, not because we have all the answers, but because the only way to understand where these technologies fit is to actually use them. We’ve spent years talking about the potential of automation in OOH, and AI is adding another dimension to that conversation. The question now is whether we’re willing to put these technologies to work in ways that actually change how we operate. If we don’t, we risk falling behind and watching advertising investment flow elsewhere.
Focus on the bigger picture
Ultimately, technology is only part of the equation. The bigger challenge is how we use it to build a more connected, accessible OOH ecosystem. Getting there will require continued innovation, but also greater collaboration across OOH. We don’t need to agree on every business model or way of working, but we do need to recognize where our interests are shared and where greater alignment can move the medium forward.
We have a window to shape what the next phase of OOH looks like. If we can look beyond our individual businesses and build around what will grow the medium as a whole, we’ll be in a much stronger position to compete for the advertising dollars we’ve been talking about for years.
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