Channels and formats
What is digital out-of-home (DOOH)?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
DOOH is where targeting language runs furthest ahead of the media. A screen cannot know who is in front of it; it can only be somewhere a cohort is known to be. In an AdBuyMCP awareness plan, out-of-home is one of four channels inside one monthly price, booked by place and time of day near the business districts, stations and commutes a B2B market uses. AdBuyMCP's catalogue compiles it to venue types, postcode polygons and dayparts and grades it 50 out of 100, geo-cohort: a statistical property of a place and a time. Two limits apply today: the compiler returns an empty movement-indexed screen ranking, and no DOOH rail can be driven end to end from a compiled audience in live mode. Outsmart put UK out-of-home revenue for 2025 at £1.44bn, 67% of it digital (checked 20 October 2026).
How do you plan DOOH without movement data?
Most DOOH audience claims rest on a licensed panel of mobile location signals, used to say which screens over-index on a segment. AdBuyMCP does not hold that licence, so it plans from three aggregate inputs: the venue type of each screen, drawn from the OpenOOH taxonomy; the postcode polygons you want to be seen in, which follow a high street where a radius would cut across it; and the hours you want to be seen at. A business audience is what puts the commute on the plan.
You can also hand-pick screens from your own shortlist. None of these inputs involves personal data, so delivery sits outside UK GDPR scope, and a claim about commuter hours at a rail station is one you can defend in front of a sceptic.
What does a DOOH line cost, and what does it prove?
Sellers' entry points are low: Loud! OOH lists a single site for two weeks from £325, and pay-per-play digital screens publish no minimum at all (checked 20 October 2026). The delivery evidence is a proof-of-play log from the seller: a record that the advert ran on a named screen at a named time. It proves the media ran, and counting those plays as reach overstates by whatever the seller's audience model says.
DOOH suits a geo-lift test better than any other channel, because the buy is already defined by place. That is the compensation for a targeting claim that stops at the postcode.
Sources: Outsmart, Out of Home revenues Q4 and full year 2025, 23 February 2026, checked 20 October 2026; Loud! OOH, Pricing, reviewed 13 October 2026, checked 20 October 2026.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
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.
Contextual targeting
Targeting based on the content an advert appears beside rather than on data about the person seeing it: a show, a genre, a page subject, a venue type. Requires no personal data about the audience.
Frequency
The average number of times the people in an audience see an advert in a period, usually a week or a whole campaign. It is impressions divided by the people reached, so it describes the audience on average and says nothing certain about any one person.
same group
These terms are also in Channels and formats
The channels UK advertisers buy, and the words the sellers use for them.