What is pDOOH?

The short answer

Programmatic DOOH is buying screen time through software: your DSP bids into an SSP, which fills slots in the screen owner's CMS loop. US pDOOH spend is forecast at $1.22B for 2026, up 22.6%, about 30% of DOOH category revenue eMarketer 2026 forecast. The 65% share quoted in vendor decks is a 2029 projection, not a 2026 actual.

The transaction, hop by hop

You set audience, geography, dayparts and budget in a DSP (DOOH-native like Vistar or Hivestack, or general like The Trade Desk and StackAdapt).
The DSP bids into SSPs (Vistar, Place Exchange, Broadsign Reach, VIOOH) that list owners' screens.
Winning bids schedule into the owner's CMS loop; the CMS plays the spot and writes the proof-of-play log.
Impressions report back as multiplied exposure estimates under OOH measurement rules Geopath Ongoing, not device-level views.

What it adds, what it costs

Adds: audience targeting by location behavior, trigger-based delivery (weather, time, data feeds), no 4-week commitment, mid-flight reallocation, one insertion order across many owners. Costs: a fee at every hop (DSP, SSP, data), none published by any major platform, which is why this site prints no working-media percentage and direct vs programmatic tells you to demand the all-in figure in writing.

Reading the share numbers honestly

Programmatic share depends on the denominator: about 30% of DOOH category revenue in eMarketer's 2026 forecast eMarketer 2026 forecast, growing 22.6% a year, against a digital layer that is 36.3% of the $9.46B US OOH total OAAA FY2025. Vendors quoting bigger shares are usually citing projections or transaction counts. Full stat sheet: statistics; base definition: what is DOOH.