Your Digital Board Has Two Audiences a Day. Sell Both.
Nobody in this industry will be shocked by the idea
OOH Today’s Stat of the Week – Powered by StreetMetrics
Your Digital Board Has Two Audiences a Day. Sell Both.
The Stat On boards in and around downtown in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, 1 in 4 weekday lunchtime viewers lives in the suburbs. After 8 PM, it’s 1 in 6. That held on all 20 market-days we measured, without exception.
The Insight Nobody in this industry will be shocked by the idea. Suburban commuters come in for the day and go home at night. Every seller has said it on a call. What’s been missing is the number, and proof it’s steady enough to put on a proposal.
So we measured it. We took every viewable board within 10 miles of the city center in four markets, matched the devices that saw them to where those devices spend their evenings, and split viewers into city residents (home within 10 miles) and suburban residents (10 to 50 miles out). Then we cut it by daypart for a full week in September.
Midday beat evening on every day, in every market. Philadelphia swung the most, Los Angeles the least. The board on the corner doesn’t move. The crowd in front of it does.
On a static board, that’s a fact about your audience. On a digital board, it’s a schedule.
The Takeaway The usual daypart pitch is “more eyes at rush hour.” This is a different pitch: different eyes, depending on the hour.
Car dealers, home services, big-box retail and suburban hospital systems want suburban households. At noon, one in four of your downtown viewers is exactly that, and they can own the window without paying for the whole day. Restaurants, venues and city services want city residents. For them the evening loop is the cleaner buy, with less budget spent on people about to drive 30 miles home.
That’s two sales conversations on one unit, and no more discounting the evening because “traffic is lower.” Traffic is lower. The audience is different, and for the right advertiser, better.
What makes it sellable is being able to show it. A buyer won’t take “the crowd changes at night” on faith. Verified home-location data on your own inventory, by daypart, turns a thing everyone assumed into a line on a proposal.
Footnote: “Suburban” means a viewer’s home, based on where they spend their evenings, is 10 to 50 miles from the downtown center. Visitors from farther away are excluded. Weekday shares of resident viewers, September 2026.
StreetMetrics is a partner with OOH Today
- Advertisement -
