--- title: "Buying UK DOOH without movement data | AdBuyMCP" description: "Most DOOH targeting claims rest on a mobility-data licence. Without one you can still plan venue types, polygons and dayparts, and know what each one claims." url: "https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data" --- [Home](https://adbuymcp.com/) / [Guides](https://adbuymcp.com/guides) / Buying UK DOOH without movement data Guide · buying the awkward channels # Buying UK DOOH without a movement-data licence A billboard reaches whoever passes it, so you plan on the place and the hours. Digital out-of-home is sold with audience language that mostly rests on mobility data: a licensed panel of location signals used to say which screens over-index on a given segment. If you do not hold that licence (and we do not), you can still build a defensible out-of-home plan from three things that are entirely aggregate: the venue type of each screen, the geographic polygons you want to be seen in, and the hours you want to be seen at. That is a claim about a place and a time rather than about a person, which is exactly how it should be described, and it is how an AdBuyMCP awareness plan buys out-of-home: by place and time of day, near the business districts, stations and commutes a B2B market uses. AdBuyMCP's catalogue grades the channel 50 out of 100 at geo-cohort level, fixed regardless of how well a brief matched, and its compiler returns an empty screen-ranking list rather than an invented one, because the ranking is the part that needs the licence. [Get my plan and price](https://adbuymcp.com/start) [Book a 30-minute call with the founder](https://adbuymcp.com/contact#book) Free, with no card. We read your homepage, draft who buys from you and show your monthly price before you join the waitlist. Nothing is bought until you've approved the plan and the ads. By [James Rooney](https://adbuymcp.com/about) Updated 29 October 2026 - **Fidelity**: 50 / geo-cohort, fixed - **Screen ranking**: Empty without movement data - **Copy limit**: 7 words per headline - **Length**: 10 min read Sources 4 linked and dated On this page [What to remember](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#takeaways) [What the audience language in a DOOH pitch is resting on](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#what-the-audience-language-in-a-dooh-pitch-is-re) [What you can plan without a licence](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#what-you-can-plan-without-a-licence) [Dayparts do most of an audience index's job](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#dayparts-do-most-of-an-audience-indexs-job) [Why the screen ranking comes back empty](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#why-the-screen-ranking-comes-back-empty) [What each DOOH rail can do today](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#what-each-dooh-rail-can-do-today) [Creative has to work at walking pace](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#creative-has-to-work-at-walking-pace) [Out-of-home suits a geo-lift test](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#out-of-home-suits-a-geo-lift-test) [Limits that apply](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#limits) [Where this came from](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#sources) [Questions](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/buying-uk-dooh-without-movement-data#questions) Who this is for Anyone reading a DOOH proposal that claims to target a professional audience, and anyone planning out-of-home who wants to know which parts of the pitch survive scrutiny. Key points ## Remember these points if you read nothing else These are the points most likely to change your decision, and the full guide follows below. 1. 01 Venue type, polygon and daypart are aggregate and defensible. Movement-derived audience indices are the part that needs a licence and a lawful basis. 2. 02 A daypart does most of the work an audience index promises. You can support a claim about commuter hours at a rail station, and you cannot support a claim that a billboard reaches "IT decision makers". 3. 03 AdBuyMCP's compiler emits an empty screen ranking rather than a fabricated one, and the fidelity rationale names the ranking as intended design rather than shipped behaviour. 4. 04 No DOOH rail here can be driven end to end from a compiled persona in live mode. Activation needs vendor unit identifiers, and there is no verified translation from venue semantics to them. 5. 05 Out-of-home is the channel a geo-lift design suits best, which is the compensation for a targeting claim that stops at the postcode. 01 ## What the audience language in a DOOH pitch is resting on Programmatic out-of-home is sold, almost universally, with audience segments: business professionals, affluent shoppers, IT decision makers. Underneath those labels sits a mobility dataset: location signals from mobile devices, licensed from a data company, used to build an index of which screens are passed disproportionately often by devices belonging to a given segment. The technique produces genuinely useful rankings, and it requires a commercial licence and a lawful basis, which pitches rarely mention. The licence is expensive enough to be a real barrier. The lawful basis is needed because the UK GDPR counts location data and online identifiers among the things that make data personal, and a business-to-business purpose does not exempt them. AdBuyMCP's policy engine treats person-level targeting on device identifiers as needing consent, and the ICO says that where PECR requires consent, legitimate interests cannot be the lawful basis. So the question to ask of any out-of-home proposal is which of its claims survive without that dataset, and most of the useful ones do. Sources: [Information Commissioner's Office, What is personal information: a guide](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/personal-information-what-is-it/what-is-personal-information-a-guide/) (regulator); [Information Commissioner's Office, When can we rely on legitimate interests?](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/lawful-basis/legitimate-interests/when-can-we-rely-on-legitimate-interests/) (regulator). 02 ## What you can plan without a licence An out-of-home plan is built from the inputs below. Three of them touch no personal data at all; the fourth carries whatever basis its provider attested, and the manifest names that provider. - **Venue types**: The standard OpenOOH classification: rail stations, underground, roadside digital billboards, office buildings and lifts, gyms, shopping malls. A venue type is a fact about a screen's location, published as an open standard. - **Geographic polygons**: The plan uses postcode-district polygons rather than a radius. A polygon is a boundary you drew, and it makes no claim about who is inside it. - **Dayparts**: The hours the screen plays your ad. This is the input doing most of the work an audience index promises, and it is entirely a property of the schedule. - **Aggregate audience layers**: Where an audience layer is used, the manifest records the provider that attested it rather than implying AdBuyMCP verified it. The sharpest of these rest on a consent-attested movement-data licence, which AdBuyMCP does not hold, so no movement data reaches the product at all. Source: [OpenOOH, Venue taxonomy](https://github.com/openooh/venue-taxonomy) (standard). 03 ## Dayparts do most of an audience index's job The claim "this screen reaches business professionals" is, in almost every case, a compressed version of "this screen is in a place business professionals pass through, at hours when they pass through it". Once you say it the long way, you can build it out of a schedule. AdBuyMCP does exactly that, and the rule is visible in the compiler. Where the brief carries firmographics (a sector, a seniority, a business audience of any kind), the plan buys the two commute windows, roughly half past six to ten in the morning and half past four to eight in the evening. Where it does not, the plan buys the long daytime and evening window instead. The rule uses commuting hours and needs no movement panel. The claim you are left with is weaker and true: you have bought a rail station concourse at commuter hours because business professionals are known to be there in numbers, not bought business professionals. That distinction is the difference between a plan you can defend to a data protection officer in one sentence and one that needs a paragraph. 04 ## Why the screen ranking comes back empty AdBuyMCP's out-of-home compiler returns a targeting specification with audience segment identifiers, venue types, geographic polygons and dayparts. Its screen-ranking list comes back empty. That empty list is deliberate: the rationale describes screens ranked by persona over-index using movement data, and the product says plainly that this half of the rationale describes the intended design rather than shipped behaviour. A seeded number between 105 and 168 next to each screen would look exactly like a real index, and nobody reviewing a plan would query it. That is precisely why the list stays empty: a fabricated index is indistinguishable from a measured one at the point of sale and only distinguishable afterwards, when it is too late to matter. The compensating control is that manual selection is a first-class path rather than a fallback. Picking billboards, venues and screens by hand is fully supported in the product. Where a screen list matters more than an algorithmic ranking, which without movement data is most of the time, pick the screens yourself. 05 ## What each DOOH rail can do today Three rails reach out-of-home in AdBuyMCP, and their states differ enough to matter. The Perion (Hivestack) buyer-side API is the one with real published documentation, and the live client is written against it: campaign and line-item creation, availability checks against unit identifiers, pause, and a unit catalogue. Two details from that integration are instructive for anyone building against the same API. Line items target numeric unit identifiers, so a plan expressed in venue types and postcode polygons has to be translated into specific units before it can be activated. And dayparts are a bit field of 168 whole hours, so a daypart of half past six to ten in the morning covers three whole hours rather than three and a half. The adapter includes only fully covered hours rather than widening the range, because widening a daypart silently buys inventory the buyer did not ask for. Vistar Media is a stub. Every live operation (forecast, activate, pause, creative submission, reporting, inventory listing) stops before making any request, and the reasons are specific: no published demand-side campaign endpoint matching the shape this platform sends, a creative endpoint limited to approved third-party bidders needing an offline-issued key, and a reporting response contract that has to be observed against a real seat before it can be normalised. The third is not a dedicated out-of-home integration at all. StackAdapt carries DOOH on the same GraphQL seat as its CTV and audio inventory, which makes it the broadest single rail in the product and the only one where an out-of-home line can sit in the same buy as the video and audio lines. Its grade is client-built, like the rest of that connector: the client is written, and no vendor has accepted a call from it yet. One limit travels with it: the client reports that StackAdapt publishes no inventory-browse API, so any out-of-home catalogue it shows you is a sandbox catalogue rather than a screen list you could buy from. The practical upshot: no DOOH rail can be driven end to end from a compiled persona in live mode today. Activation needs hand-picked unit identifiers, because venue and postcode semantics have no verified translation into vendor identifiers. - [Each connector's evidence grade](https://adbuymcp.com/supply) 06 ## Creative has to work at walking pace Out-of-home creative fails in a way no other channel's does: the reader is moving. The constraint that follows is not aesthetic, it is arithmetic, and AdBuyMCP enforces it in code rather than advising it in a checklist: a headline is capped at seven words. The formats are fixed by the screen rather than by the seller: portrait at 1080 by 1920, landscape at 1920 by 1080, banner at 1400 by 400. The studio renders to the exact screen resolution rather than scaling a stretched asset into it, which matters more on out-of-home than anywhere else because a rescaled asset on a high-resolution portrait screen is visibly soft at the distance people actually read it from. The rule of thumb worth keeping whatever tool you use: one idea, one image, a brand that is legible at a glance, and no telephone number. A headline nobody can read at four miles an hour is not creative, it is spend. - [Creative formats for each channel](https://adbuymcp.com/creative) 07 ## Out-of-home suits a geo-lift test Out-of-home has the weakest targeting claim of the digital channels and the strongest position on causal measurement, and those two facts are related. Because the buy is geographic, it can be held out geographically, and a matched-market test needs nothing from the medium except the ability to buy some places and not others. Proof of play comes from the seller: a record that the creative played on a screen at a time. That is delivery evidence, not exposure evidence, and it should be labelled as delivery. The exposure ledger in AdBuyMCP writes out-of-home exposures at postcode-sector level, which in principle supports frequency deduplication against cinema and connected TV in the same area and a sequential journey view across them. Today that ledger is fed only by the deterministic sandbox: there is no inbound ingest route for viewshed panels, so the journey view is a working mechanism awaiting live input rather than evidence about a campaign. If you want out-of-home to prove something, budget for the holdout at the same time as the media, and run the power calculation before the flight rather than after it. - [Designing a test the spend can power](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/designing-a-geo-lift-test) - [The DOOH channel page](https://adbuymcp.com/channels/dooh) Type your company website or work email to see who we think buys from you, how big your market is and what it costs at 3, 5 or 12 times a week. [Get my plan and price](https://adbuymcp.com/start) Free, with no card. Limits ## These limits apply to everything above AdBuyMCP holds no movement-data licence and no movement data reaches the product. The screen-ranking field in a compiled DOOH plan is empty, and the fidelity rationale's reference to ranking by over-index describes intended design rather than shipped behaviour. Vistar has no live client here: every live operation stops before making a request. Hivestack activation requires hand-picked numeric unit identifiers because there is no verified translation from venue and postcode semantics into vendor identifiers, so no DOOH rail can be driven end to end from a compiled persona in live mode. Nothing here has spent money through a live out-of-home rail. Blindspot and AdQuick both have better screen-level inventory tooling than we do today, and if screen-level selection is your requirement you should know that before you start. A 30-minute call with the founder will tell you whether any of these limits matters for your market. [Book a 30-minute call with the founder](https://adbuymcp.com/contact#book) Where this came from ## Every figure above comes from one of these Outside figures link to the page that published them, with the day each was opened. Product facts name the part of AdBuyMCP they come from. ### Published sources 1. 01 [Loud! OOH, Pricing](https://loudooh.co.uk/pricing/) Vendor claim · reviewed 13 October 2026 · opened 20 October 2026 2. 02 [Information Commissioner's Office, What is personal information: a guide](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/personal-information-what-is-it/what-is-personal-information-a-guide/) Regulator · opened 24 September 2026 3. 03 [Information Commissioner's Office, When can we rely on legitimate interests?](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/lawful-basis/legitimate-interests/when-can-we-rely-on-legitimate-interests/) Regulator · opened 24 September 2026 4. 04 [OpenOOH, Venue taxonomy](https://github.com/openooh/venue-taxonomy) Standard · opened 24 September 2026 ### AdBuyMCP’s own product facts - 01 AdBuyMCP's out-of-home compiler: the fixed score, the venue-type and segment selection, the polygon geography, the two daypart sets and the empty screen-ranking list - 02 AdBuyMCP's segment catalogue: the OpenOOH venue-type list - 03 AdBuyMCP's Perion (Hivestack) connector: the buyer-side API v2 client, the numeric unit identifiers and the 168-bit daypart encoding that refuses to widen a partial hour - 04 AdBuyMCP's Vistar connector: every live operation and the specific reason each one fails closed - 05 AdBuyMCP's policy engine: the rule that person-level targeting on device identifiers needs consent, and that a B2B purpose does not exempt it - 06 This site's channel catalogue and supply ledger: the published band, the creative limits and the connectors' evidence grades Read next ## These pages pick up where this guide stops Each one goes further into a part of this guide. ### [Billboards and screens in an awareness plan](https://adbuymcp.com/channels/dooh) How an awareness plan books billboards and digital screens by place and time, and what the weekly report counts. ### [Designing a geo-lift test](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/designing-a-geo-lift-test) The measurement design out-of-home suits best, and the arithmetic that decides whether yours can be powered. ### [Security and data protection](https://adbuymcp.com/security) What a DPO asks about the targeting data, including the lawful-basis manifest and the 90-day rule on advertising identifiers. The other 19 guides - [Most B2B buyers have vendors in mind before they search](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/uk-media-buying-for-b2b-marketers) - [Why cross-channel frequency capping rarely happens](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/frequency-capping-across-channels) - [How to buy podcast ads in the UK](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/how-to-buy-podcast-ads-in-the-uk) - [The minimum budget for a startup to test TV advertising in the UK](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/minimum-budget-to-test-tv-advertising) - [How to read a media plan](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/how-to-read-a-media-plan) - [What a DSP does and when you need one](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/what-is-a-dsp-and-do-you-need-one) - [How UK addressable TV targeting actually works](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/how-uk-addressable-tv-targeting-works) - [How Sky AdSmart works](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/sky-adsmart-explained) - [How UK cinema advertising is booked](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/how-uk-cinema-advertising-is-booked) - [Choosing between cinema and CTV](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/choosing-between-cinema-and-ctv) - [Designing a geo-lift test that can actually be powered](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/designing-a-geo-lift-test) - [Incrementality testing on a small budget: a worked power table](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/incrementality-testing-on-a-small-budget) - [Why most incrementality tests are invalid](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/why-most-incrementality-tests-are-invalid) - [What a fidelity score measures](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/what-a-fidelity-score-is) - [First-party data in UK media buying](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/first-party-data-in-uk-media-buying) - [What Clearcast and the CAA actually check](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/what-clearcast-and-the-caa-actually-check) - [Running paid media from an AI agent without losing control](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/running-paid-media-from-an-ai-agent) - [MCP for marketers: what the protocol actually changes](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/mcp-for-marketers) - [The ad platforms' own MCP servers, and planning one budget across them](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/ad-platform-mcp-servers-and-cross-channel-planning) Bring your market ## We'll price an awareness plan for your own market. In a 30-minute call with the founder, we work out how big your market is, price 3, 5 and 12 times a week, and talk through how we'd balance the four channels for your market. [Get my plan and price](https://adbuymcp.com/start) [Book a 30-minute call with the founder](https://adbuymcp.com/contact#book) Free, with no card. Talk your market and your plan through with James Rooney, who built AdBuyMCP and wrote its code. ## Questions this guide gets asked ### Can DOOH really target business decision makers? It can buy screens in places where business decision makers are disproportionately present, at hours when they are there. That is a statement about a place and a time, and it is a legitimate way to reach a business audience. It is not targeting a person, and any proposal that describes it as though a screen knows who is in front of it is describing something that does not exist. AdBuyMCP's catalogue grades the whole channel geo-cohort for exactly this reason. ### Do I need a movement-data licence to buy out-of-home? No. You need it to make audience-index claims about specific screens. Without it you can still select by venue type, by polygon and by daypart, which covers most of what a plan actually needs, and you can still buy through the exchanges. What changes is the language on the plan: you describe the place and the hours rather than an audience percentage, and the claim you make afterwards is correspondingly smaller and correspondingly defensible. ### Why can't a compiled persona activate a DOOH campaign end to end? Because the vendor APIs target specific numeric unit identifiers and there is no verified translation from venue types and postcode polygons into those identifiers. Producing one would mean matching a semantic venue class against a vendor's own inventory taxonomy and trusting the result enough to spend money on it. Until that translation is contract-tested against a live catalogue, activation requires hand-picked units, and AdBuyMCP's supply ledger grades the connector as built rather than live.