Programmatic DOOH Is Growing Fast. Most Brands Aren’t Ready for It

Forrester’s programmatic DOOH forecast points to a channel that is maturing faster than most marketing plans account for. Spend is shifting from direct-sold placements to automated, data-driven buying, and the gap between brands that understand how to use it and brands that are still treating it like a static poster is widening quickly.

The mechanics are straightforward: programmatic buying brings the targeting logic of digital media to physical screens in airports, retail environments, transit networks, and city streets. What makes it commercially interesting is the combination of contextual relevance, real-world proximity, and the ability to activate against audience signals in near real time.

I spent years managing media budgets across 30 industries, and one pattern repeated itself constantly: brands would chase the channel that was easiest to measure, not the one most likely to drive growth. Performance marketing made that habit worse. When you can see a cost-per-click and a conversion rate in a dashboard, it feels like control. Out-of-home never offered that kind of comfort, which is part of why it was chronically underfunded relative to its actual contribution to brand growth.

What the Forrester Programmatic DOOH Forecast Actually Says

Forrester has been tracking the evolution of programmatic media buying for over a decade, and their work on intelligent growth models is worth understanding as context. Their DOOH forecast is not a prediction about a niche format finding its moment. It is a forecast about the industrialisation of a channel that has historically been sold through relationships, rate cards, and manual negotiation.

The core of the forecast is this: programmatic buying is becoming the default mechanism for trading digital out-of-home inventory, particularly in urban markets and premium environments. The drivers are not mysterious. Media agencies want efficiency. Brands want flexibility. Publishers want yield optimisation. Programmatic satisfies all three, which is why adoption tends to accelerate once it crosses a critical mass of available inventory.

What the forecast also reflects is a change in how DOOH fits into broader media planning. It is no longer being evaluated in isolation as a brand awareness format. It is being connected to audience segments, purchase experience data, and campaign triggers that were previously only available in digital environments. That changes the conversation from “should we buy some billboards?” to “where does DOOH fit in our full-funnel strategy?”

If you are working through how channels like this fit into your broader commercial planning, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks I find most useful for making those decisions without getting distracted by channel hype.

Why Programmatic DOOH Is Growing Faster Than Most Brands Expected

The growth is not happening because DOOH suddenly became a better creative medium. The screens, the formats, the environments, those have been improving steadily for years. The growth is happening because the buying infrastructure finally caught up with the ambition.

When I was running an agency and we were evaluating out-of-home for clients, the process was genuinely painful. You would brief a media owner, wait for availability, negotiate a rate, receive a proposal that was formatted differently from every other proposal you had received that week, then try to reconcile it with a digital plan that operated on completely different logic. The result was that OOH got treated as an afterthought, bolted on at the end of a plan rather than integrated from the start.

Programmatic changes that operational reality. When DOOH inventory sits in a DSP alongside digital display, video, and social, it gets evaluated on the same terms. Planners can apply audience data, set frequency parameters, and adjust based on performance signals without picking up a phone. That friction reduction is not glamorous, but it is commercially significant.

There is also a supply-side story here. Media owners have been building out programmatic capabilities because it expands their addressable buyer base. A regional retailer that would never have negotiated a direct deal with a major OOH operator can now activate DOOH inventory through a platform they already use. That democratisation of access is driving volume from buyers who were previously priced or complexified out of the channel.

The Upper-Funnel Problem That DOOH Actually Solves

Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance channels. It took time, and a lot of client conversations that went badly, to understand that what performance marketing often does is capture demand that was going to convert anyway. It is efficient at the bottom of the funnel, but it does not create the conditions for growth at the top.

Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who walks in and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past. But the performance marketer only sees the transaction at the till. They do not see the role the shop window played in getting the person through the door, or the role the brand played in making the person choose that shop over the one next door. DOOH operates in that shop window territory. It creates familiarity, salience, and consideration in audiences who are not yet in-market but will be.

This is where the Forrester forecast becomes strategically important rather than just commercially interesting. The brands that are moving budget into programmatic DOOH are not doing so because they have abandoned performance marketing. They are doing so because they have recognised that performance marketing alone does not sustain growth. You need to reach new audiences, not just convert the ones who were already looking for you.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy and evolving customer populations makes a related point: the customers you have today are not the customers you will have in five years, and growth requires continuously reaching people who do not yet know they need you. DOOH, used well, does that work.

How Programmatic DOOH Targeting Actually Works

The targeting logic in programmatic DOOH is different from digital display in ways that matter for planning. You are not targeting individuals. You are targeting audiences at locations, based on the aggregate profile of people who are likely to be in a given environment at a given time.

That distinction is important for two reasons. First, it means DOOH remains a broadcast medium at its core, which is a feature not a limitation. It builds reach. Second, it means the audience data being applied is probabilistic rather than deterministic. You are buying against the likelihood that a particular type of person will see a screen, not the certainty that a specific individual will.

The practical implications for planning are significant. Contextual signals, time of day, location type, weather, proximity to retail, those tend to be more reliable targeting levers in DOOH than audience segment overlays that carry the same data quality problems you find in digital programmatic. A coffee brand running ads at transport hubs between 6am and 9am is doing something sensible. The same brand trying to apply third-party audience data to identify “likely coffee drinkers” across a city-wide network is adding complexity without proportionate value.

The smarter approach is to use programmatic DOOH for what it does well: high-quality reach in contextually relevant environments, with the flexibility to adjust creative and scheduling in response to real-world signals. That is a genuine capability improvement over traditional OOH buying.

The Measurement Gap and How to Think About It Honestly

I judged the Effie Awards, and one of the things that experience reinforced was how often the most commercially effective campaigns were the hardest to measure with precision. The work that built brands and moved markets rarely produced a clean attribution path. That does not mean measurement does not matter. It means that the absence of a clean attribution path is not the same as the absence of effect.

DOOH measurement is improving. Footfall attribution, brand lift studies, mobile device matching in proximity to screens, these methodologies give you directional evidence of impact. They are not perfect, and anyone selling you a DOOH measurement solution that claims to be as precise as last-click digital attribution is either confused or being dishonest.

The honest position is that DOOH measurement requires approximation, and that approximation can still be good enough to make sound investment decisions. If your brand lift evidence suggests consistent improvement in aided awareness among audiences exposed to DOOH placements, and that improvement correlates with increased consideration in your brand tracking, you have a reasonable basis for continued investment even without a direct conversion path.

Vidyard’s research on untapped pipeline potential for go-to-market teams points to a broader problem: marketing teams systematically underestimate the value of channels that do not produce immediate, trackable conversions. DOOH sits squarely in that category, which is why it tends to be evaluated unfairly against performance channels that benefit from attribution models that flatter them.

Where Programmatic DOOH Fits in a Connected Media Strategy

The brands getting the most from programmatic DOOH are not treating it as a standalone channel. They are using it as part of a connected sequence: build awareness and salience through DOOH and other upper-funnel formats, then use digital channels to capture the demand that those formats have created.

When I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people and moved it from loss-making to a top-five position in its market, one of the things that changed was how we structured client media plans. We stopped letting performance channels dominate by default and started building plans that allocated budget across the funnel based on where the growth opportunity actually was. For many clients, the upper funnel was chronically underfunded because it was harder to defend in a quarterly review.

Programmatic DOOH makes that upper-funnel investment easier to defend because it comes with more data than traditional OOH. You can show impression delivery, audience composition estimates, environmental context, and brand lift metrics. That is not the same as performance marketing accountability, but it is enough to have a credible conversation with a CFO who wants to understand what the money is doing.

The connection to creator and content strategy is also worth noting. Later’s work on going to market with creators highlights how brands are increasingly thinking about channel integration rather than channel silos. DOOH creative that is consistent with what audiences are seeing from creators in their social feeds creates a coherent brand experience across touchpoints. That coherence has commercial value even when it is difficult to measure precisely.

BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy and long-tail market dynamics is a useful reference for thinking about how channel strategy intersects with pricing and positioning decisions. The brands that use DOOH most effectively tend to have a clear view of where they are in the market and what role awareness-building plays in their growth model.

What Brands Should Actually Do With This Information

The Forrester forecast is useful as a signal, not as a mandate. The fact that programmatic DOOH spend is growing does not mean every brand should immediately reallocate budget to it. What it does mean is that the channel deserves a serious evaluation rather than the reflexive dismissal it often gets from teams that have been conditioned to optimise for last-click metrics.

The evaluation should start with a clear question: where is your growth coming from, and where do you need it to come from? If you are a brand with strong lower-funnel performance but declining organic reach and brand awareness, DOOH is worth serious consideration. If you are a brand with genuine awareness problems in specific geographies or audience segments, programmatic DOOH gives you a tool to address those problems with more precision than traditional OOH buying.

If you are already running OOH through direct deals, the programmatic transition is worth evaluating on operational grounds alone. The flexibility to adjust creative, scheduling, and budget allocation in response to campaign performance is a meaningful capability improvement, even if the strategic rationale for OOH investment does not change.

The brands that will struggle are the ones that activate programmatic DOOH without a clear view of what it is supposed to do in their media mix. Programmatic does not fix a strategy problem. It makes execution more efficient once the strategy is clear. That sequence matters.

Growth strategy questions like these, where to invest, how to sequence channels, how to build a media mix that creates demand rather than just captures it, are what the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is built around. It is worth reading alongside anything you are doing on channel planning.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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