Programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) has spent years making media buying easier. But its next growth opportunity won’t come from better technology – it will come from an entirely new generation of buyers.
Following conversations at Cannes Lions and the WOO Global Congress, Diederick Ubels, Managing Director EMEA at Vistar Media, argues that creators, DTC brands and AI-powered buying tools are about to reshape who buys outdoor advertising…
Scott Galloway didn’t mince words at Cannes Lions this year. The creator economy, he said, was “hands down” the biggest trend at the festival. He then went on to deliver an observation that stung a little: the advertising industry had gathered in its thousands on the Croisette, but hadn’t fully recognised it was no longer the protagonist of its own story.
He’s right. Advertising continues to evolve, but not everyone networking in the bars, yachts and cabanas wants to recognise they’re not the only ones determining exactly how it’s evolving.
And the implications for programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) advertising are more direct than most people in our industry have yet acknowledged.
The next wave of pDOOH advertisers
I travelled to Cannes from the WOO Global Congress in London, where Jean-François Decaux opened with a framing that stayed with me: DOOH is a force for good. Real audiences, real environments, real attention. Not bot traffic, fraud or the hollow metrics that define too much of digital advertising.
Decaux explained that in a world where Meta recently reported that fraud accounts for roughly 8% of its advertising spend – a figure representing around a third of the total value of the global OOH industry – that trust matters more than ever.
Decaux also gave us the data point that sharpens the challenge: Meta has 10 million advertisers. OOH has 200,000. His prescription to improve ease of buying, effectiveness and leadership is right. But there’s a fourth dimension he didn’t name: who those buyers are.
The next wave of pDOOH advertisers aren’t just media agencies. They’re creator marketers, direct-to-consumer (DTC) founders, content-led brands and influencers with commercial products.
Those people are already buying Meta and TikTok self-serve, and starting to ask why their campaign can’t follow their audience into the physical world. That gap between hundreds of thousands and tens of millions isn’t just a scale problem, it’s a buyer profile problem. Or, rather, we should say it’s an opportunity.
Programmatic pipes and agentic buying
TikTok’s Out of Phone initiative, now running programmatically across DOOH networks, is the first real signal this transition is underway.
When creator content can be adapted for vertical video, which can reach multiple screens across shopping malls worldwide through a single programmatic pipe, the creative barrier for OOH disappears. The format problem is largely solved, the next step is for these new digital native buyers, who traditionally haven’t bought OOH, to understand that programmatic has now made OOH accessible to them.
Agentic buying systems, able to execute media plans with minimal human involvement, aren’t arriving tomorrow. But they’re close enough that the infrastructure decisions media owners are making now, will determine whether they’re accessible to this new generation of buyers when the moment comes.
This growing fusion of programmatic infrastructure, combined with agentic buying, is further closing the gap for this new generation of media buyers.
Inventory that isn’t programmatically available, data that isn’t structured, buying processes that require a phone call: these don’t just slow down today’s agency planners. They make your media channel invisible to the buyers coming next.
The good news is the fundamentals have never been stronger. WOO’s own research puts global pDOOH at approximately $1.4 billion in 2025. Brands that started with £10,000 test campaigns are returning with briefs ten or twenty times that size.
The tools exist to support almost any transaction type. What lags is how organisations are structured to take advantage of them, and whether ad tech companies are ready to step up as genuine commercial partners rather than passive platform providers.
What the OOH industry needs now, is the organisational readiness to welcome a new generation of buyers when they come knocking on the door.
Read the latest ad industry spending report from AA/WARC: