Digital out-of-home (DOOH)
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
DOOH is where the gap between honest and dishonest targeting language is widest. A screen cannot know who is in front of it; it can only be somewhere a cohort is known to be. AdBuyMCP compiles it to venue types, postcode polygons and dayparts and grades it 50 out of 100, geo-cohort — a statistical property of a place rather than of a person. Two things we will not claim: there is no movement-indexed screen ranking in it, because the compiler returns an empty ranking list, and no DOOH rail can be driven end to end from a compiled audience in live mode. UK DOOH was around £955m in 2025 on IAB and AA/WARC figures.
Goes deeper: How DOOH compiles
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Out-of-home (OOH)
All advertising encountered outside the home: billboards, transport, street furniture and retail environments, printed or digital. Covers both classic printed sites and the digital screens that are steadily replacing them.
Proof of play
A seller-supplied record confirming that a specific advert played on a specific screen at a specific time, with the play logged rather than estimated. The out-of-home equivalent of an impression log, since a screen cannot report who was in front of it.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through