Formats and where they fit

• Billboards: Large roadside units (bulletins, posters, spectaculars) built for reach and high share of voice on commuter routes.
• Street furniture: Transit shelters, kiosks, and newsstands at pedestrian level for proximity and neighborhood coverage.
• Transit: Ads on buses, rail, subways, airports, and ride-share vehicles to capture riders and bystanders across the city.
• Place‑based screens: Contextual networks in venues like malls, gyms, arenas, offices, and gas stations for dwell time and context.
• Digital OOH (DOOH): Any of the above using digital screens to enable dynamic creative, time/dayparting, and fast swapping.

How buying happens

• Direct: Reserve specific locations or packages from media owners for guaranteed placement and negotiated terms.
• Programmatic DOOH: Buy impressions on digital screens via SSPs/DSPs using triggers like time, weather, audience movement, or supply availability.

Targeting approaches

• Geography: ZIPs, DMAs, corridors, or radii around stores or service areas.
• Audience movement: Use anonymized mobile location data to understand who passes a screen and when; plan for reach and frequency against a profile.
• Context: Align creative and placements to environments and moments, such as commute, lunchtime, or events.
• Retail/proximity: Use path‑to‑purchase mapping to surround key corridors and drive footfall.

Measurement and attribution

• Delivery: Plays for digital, posting dates for static, and impressions/opportunity‑to‑see estimated from audited traffic and validated mobile data.
• Reach and frequency: Modeled at the campaign level to show how many unique people you reached and how often.
• Brand outcomes: Ad recall, awareness, and consideration via lift studies with control vs exposed groups.
• Behavioral outcomes: Footfall, site visits, app installs, and sales lift via privacy‑compliant device or household matching and pre/post or control/exposed design.

Source reference: OAAA's OOH Measurement and Analytics guidance outlines execution types, impression calculation, and attribution best practices.

1) Define the job and the audience

• Clarify the outcome: awareness, consideration, launches, store traffic, website visits, or app growth.
• Build an audience hypothesis: commuters, residents near trade areas, event goers, or high‑index neighborhoods based on first‑party data.

2) Build the plan

• Inventory mix: Combine billboards for scale with street furniture or place‑based screens for context. Add programmatic DOOH for agility.
• Coverage: Map trade areas, key corridors, and points of interest. Set frequency expectations by environment and dwell time.
• Budget split: Allocate a base layer of guaranteed placements, then reserve 15–30% for programmatic opportunistic buys and testing.
• Creative rules: Prioritize contrast, large type, few words, and a single call to action. Enable dynamic elements like daypart, weather, or countdowns on digital screens.

3) Activate and optimize

• Traffic and timing: Launch to align with commute peaks, weekends, or event schedules. Daypart digital screens to match audience flow.
• Signals: Use triggers such as weather, inventory levels, or search trend spikes to adjust programmatic DOOH bids and creative.
• Brand safety and compliance: Vet venues and screen adjacency. Use audited impression data and viewability proxies from trusted sources.

4) Prove impact

• Delivery QA: Verify postings and digital playlogs. Reconcile impressions against audited sources.
• Attribution design: Set up control vs exposed panels before launch. Define windows for footfall, site visits, and sales events.
• Dashboards: Report reach, frequency, cost per incremental visit, and cost per lifted outcome. Tie to business KPIs.

What makes OOH unique among paid media?

It is public, large‑format, and unskippable. It reaches people in shared spaces and builds cultural presence that other channels then amplify.

How does programmatic DOOH differ from online programmatic?

It is still impression‑based and uses familiar DSP/SSP rails, but it trades on screen plays and forecasted audience movement, not individual user IDs. Targeting is contextual and location‑based, with privacy by design.

What should I track if my goal is store traffic?

• Exposed vs control footfall lift to target locations
• Cost per incremental visit
• Visit quality metrics like dwell time or repeat rate, where available

What budgets make sense?

OOH can start with a focused neighborhood flight or scale into multi‑market reach. Anchor the plan to audience coverage and frequency, not just a count of units.