This article was originally published as a guest post on Digital Signage Pulse.

2025 kicked off with T-Mobile’s ~$600m acquisition of Vistar Media and ended with Broadsign’s acquisition of Place Exchange. Taken together, these moves underline one thing: there’s real conviction in programmatic as a buying model for DOOH—and in the infrastructure that will shape how the medium is bought and sold going forward.

The programmatic DOOH market is growing. However, it’s still at a relatively early stage, and programmatic DOOH platforms can still do a lot more, and a lot better. 

If we want to deliver on the programmatic promise—speed, simplicity, transparency, and scale—we have to address some stubborn shortcomings now, before we drift into a period of product and service stagnation. The aim, on both the supply and demand sides, should be to remove technical friction so buyers can plan and activate DOOH as easily as they do other channels.

Put simply: a buyer shouldn’t need an email thread to get a campaign planned and live. They shouldn’t end up in a long back-and-forth about why bid requests aren’t returning responses. And they definitely shouldn’t have to hunt down a phone number to get a publisher to urgently approve a creative.

To get there, it’s paramount that everyone in the supply chain does their part—improving workflows, tightening standards, and holding partners accountable.

Planning shouldn’t feel like guesswork

Imagine you’re planning an overseas campaign in Italy and you’re starting from scratch. To reach business decision makers, do you focus on Milan or Rome? Which placements in that long XLSX are actually the iconic sites? Where are the images? Why are some screens missing off-the-shelf pricing?

These are the practical questions you will inevitably have—especially when you’re entering a new market for an advertiser.

And while many of these issues can be addressed pre-emptively by different stakeholders, too often they aren’t.

DOOH is a public medium—buyers need to see what they’re buying

The beauty of DOOH (and OOH more broadly) is public visibility. The surroundings of the screen, the size and quality of the display, and the viewing context all influence campaign effectiveness and brand perception.

In most parts of life, you look at something before you buy it. Yet in programmatic DOOH planning, access to basic screen photography and contextual detail is still inconsistent—making it harder for agencies to build confidence and for advertisers to sign off on locations.

In direct OOH buying, brands that invest heavily often do site checks in person. Agencies take clients around the city to assess placements, judge suitability, and hand-pick locations that fit the brief. A prime wall with street clutter blocking sightlines? A “premium” placement that looks tired in reality? You move on.

Programmatic should be able to offer a digital equivalent of that confidence—at speed, at scale, and without requiring manual intervention.

At minimum, buyers need:

• Clear, recent photographs of the screen and the immediate surroundings
• Reliable location and venue context (what the placement actually is, not just coordinates)
• Consistent metadata that supports planning decisions, not just delivery
• Transparent pricing and availability (or clear reasons when something isn’t available)

None of this is glamorous. But it’s foundational.

Post-buy proof shouldn’t stop at reporting

After the campaign goes live, it’s just as important to have a real-world record of it running on screen.

This isn’t only about proof-of-play. “In-the-wild” photos are useful for:

• internal updates and stakeholder confidence
• post-campaign evaluation of context and placement quality
• creative reviews (“did it land the way we expected?”)
• case studies and brand storytelling

Programmatic buying shouldn’t mean you sacrifice the fundamentals that direct buys typically provide. If we want more spend to shift into programmatic DOOH, the experience has to match—or exceed—the confidence of direct buying.

The pipes matter—but the creative is the moment of truth

A person walking down the street isn’t thinking about auction mechanics, bidstream health, or data taxonomies. They’re reacting to what’s on the screen.

The moment of truth is the impact the ad makes when delivered—and that comes down to creative quality.

For programmatic DOOH to grow, we should be pushing harder for broader adoption of dynamic creative, alongside the progress already being made in planning datasets and targeting. DOOH is uniquely capable of delivering messaging that feels timely, local, and context-aware. We should be using that advantage more often.

In audience research we’ve done on ad perceptions, creatives that use real-time information and respond to the context of the screen consistently outperform “standard video” executions. They don’t just draw attention—they make the advertiser feel more modern, more relevant, and more technologically credible.

That’s why we continue to suggest data-driven ideas during planning. It can be as simple as:

• live traffic cues to highlight a vehicle’s efficiency features
• weather changes to trigger relevant health or retail messaging
• localised product popularity to adapt what’s featured by area
• live counters, availability, or time-bound offers to create urgency
• flash sales and promotions that update in real time

And in many cases, the richest data is the brand’s own—if the connective tissue to activate it is there.

This is where tech players can raise the bar

Programmatic tech players—especially DSPs—are well positioned to accelerate dynamic creative adoption by making it easier to ideate, build, QA, and deploy these executions. That doesn’t mean replacing agencies or brand creative teams. It means enabling them with better tools, better templates, better workflows, and fewer points of failure, most often with white-glove service.

At the same time, media owners and SSPs have a critical role to play: consistent specs, dependable approvals, complete metadata, and a buying experience that doesn’t fall back to manual exceptions the moment something becomes slightly complex.

If we want programmatic DOOH to lead, we have to earn it

The path forward is clear:

• reduce planning and activation friction
• improve inventory transparency and context
• strengthen post-buy confidence with real-world proof
• raise creative ambition through dynamic, data-driven execution

If programmatic DOOH is going to capture a bigger share of budgets, it has to match the confidence and service of direct buying—then go further by delivering creative that only programmatic can make possible.

The medium will grow as these principles become standard practice across media owners and tech players.

So let’s get going.

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