Audio & DOOH · also called DOOH, digital out-of-home, digital signage advertising
DOOH (digital out-of-home)
DOOH (digital out-of-home) is advertising on digital screens in public places, such as billboards, transit stations, airports, malls, lifts and taxis, often bought programmatically.
Out-of-home advertising is anything you see outside your own home: billboards, bus shelters, posters. DOOH is the digital version: screens that can rotate many ads, change by time of day, and be bought through software. Big screens in Times Square, airport displays in Dubai and lift screens in Chinese and Indian office blocks are all DOOH.
DOOH is sold by "plays" or "spots" in a loop, but buyers want to know how many people saw each play. Sellers therefore estimate audience with an impression multiplier, based on footfall, traffic counts or mobile location data: one play on a busy station screen might count as dozens of impressions. Programmatic DOOH uses OpenRTB with DOOH-specific fields, and many DSPs now buy it alongside online channels.
DOOH has no clicks and no personal cookies, so measurement relies on audience modelling, proof-of-play logs and lift studies. That makes independent verification important: buyers check that ads actually played on real, powered-on screens where the seller claims.
Think of it like this
DOOH is like a shop's electronic window display that shows different posters at breakfast, lunch and rush hour, and can be rented by the minute.
An example
A food delivery app buys 2,000 plays on mall screens in Sao Paulo at a US$15 CPM; with an impression multiplier of 25 per play, that is 50,000 impressions costing US$750.
Related terms
Programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is buying and selling ad space through automated software, usually one impression at a time, instead of through manual negotiations, phone calls and paper contracts.
Geotargeting
Geotargeting is showing ads to people based on their geographic location, from country and city down to postcode or a small radius around a store, using IP addresses, GPS or declared location.
Reach
Reach is the number (or percentage) of unique people or households who saw an ad at least once during a campaign, as opposed to the total number of impressions.
OpenRTB
OpenRTB is the open technical standard, maintained by IAB Tech Lab, that defines how bid requests and bid responses are formatted and exchanged in real-time bidding.
Lift study
A lift study is an experiment measuring how much a campaign changed an outcome, such as awareness or sales, by comparing exposed people with a similar unexposed group.