Programmatic DOOH Is Exploding — What It Means for Advertisers

There’s a quiet revolution happening in outdoor advertising, and it’s called programmatic DOOH. For most of its history, buying a billboard meant a phone call, a contract, and a fixed commitment. Today, a growing share of digital billboard inventory is being bought the way you’d buy a social ad — automated, targeted, and in real time.

The numbers show this isn’t a fringe experiment anymore.

The growth, in data

The World Out of Home Organisation’s first global study of programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) put global pDOOH spend at $1.34 billion in 2025 — about 7% of all digital out-of-home spend, with the Americas generating $667 million of that.

Other estimates go higher. One widely cited figure places programmatic DOOH at $2.1 billion globally in 2025, roughly 8.4% of DOOH revenue, and eMarketer projects U.S. programmatic DOOH to reach $3.6 billion by 2026 — about 30% of total U.S. outdoor revenue, up from under 10% in 2020.

Most tellingly, 87% of brands and agencies increased their programmatic DOOH investment in the past 12 months, and 90% expect to invest more in the year ahead.

Why advertisers are piling in

Programmatic DOOH solves the two things that always held outdoor back: inflexibility and speed.

• Buy on demand. Instead of long leases, you bid for and book screens on demand, often with daypart targeting.
• Real-time targeting. Creative and inventory can react to time of day, weather, audience density, and foot traffic — the same triggers you’d use online.
• Retargeting across screens. Someone near a DOOH screen can be followed up with a mobile ad — closing the offline-to-online loop.
• Pause and adjust. Automation means you can pause a campaign, move budget, and optimize without months of notice.

This is why a whole generation of performance marketers who never touched outdoor are now buying it. It finally behaves like the channels they already understand.

What the data says about how it’s used

Programmatic outdoor spend clusters in specific environments. In 2025, outdoor inventory captured nearly half (48.4%) of programmatic spend, with retail (18.5%), transit (12.7%), and entertainment (10.4%) following. Notably, transit commanded the highest average CPM at $7.90 — buyers will pay a premium for captive, on-the-move audiences.

There’s also a practical creative note worth stealing: two video formats — 1080×1920 (vertical) and 1920×1080 (landscape) — accounted for 77% of all programmatic video spend in 2025. Design your assets in those sizes and you’re ready for most programmatic inventory.

What this means for your brand

The democratizing effect is huge. Programmatic DOOH lowers the barrier to outdoor: you can start small, target precisely, and scale with confidence. You no longer need a national media budget to appear on a digital billboard — you need a strategy and a daily budget.

But programmatic buying is only as good as the screens and locations behind it. Automation connects you to inventory; the inventory still has to be in the right place, at the right quality, reaching the right people.

Where Globalstars fits

Globalstars pairs the reach of world-class outdoor inventory with the flexibility brands now expect. Our digital screens across landmark locations — Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, major Asian city centers, and beyond — are the kind of high-visibility inventory that performs best whether you buy it programmatically or through a planned campaign.

We also help brands navigate the shift: which screens to programmatically access, how to size creative for the formats that actually trade (that 1080×1920 and 1920×1080), and how to measure the result.

Programmatic DOOH isn’t the future of outdoor advertising — it’s rapidly becoming the present. The brands that understand it early are the ones buying the best inventory before everyone else does.

Data sources: World Out of Home Organisation pDOOH study; Vistar Media DOOH momentum report; eMarketer; programmatic spend analyses.