Digital Out of Home Advertising

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, after growing 22.6% in 2025 eMarketer (via StackAdapt) 2026 forecast.

The transaction, hop by hop

  1. You set audience, geography, dayparts and budget in a DSP (DOOH-native like Vistar or Hivestack, or general like The Trade Desk and StackAdapt).
  2. The DSP bids into SSPs (Vistar, Place Exchange, Broadsign Reach, VIOOH) that list owners' screens.
  3. Winning bids schedule into the owner's CMS loop; the CMS plays the spot and writes the proof-of-play log.
  4. 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: eMarketer forecasts $1.22B of US pDOOH spend in 2026 eMarketer (via StackAdapt) 2026 forecast, after 22.6% growth in 2025, 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.