• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 6, 2024

Video watched out-of-home (OOH) comprises more than one-third of programmatic OOH spend on video-enabled screens. Place Exchange, an OOH programmatic SSP, expects more investment in video as advertisers increase their use of short-form vertical video content from social campaigns on larger screens.

Lynda Liu, head of marketing at Place Exchange, expects billboards to remain the largest asset category when it comes where advertisers invest in media. She also expects to see significant growth in place-based inventory.

The important shifts so far this year reveal that “advertisers are increasingly leveraging high-dwell time context of different physical environments to reach consumers daily as they journey between home, work, shopping, and entertainment,” Liu said.

While the percentage of overall programmatic OOH remains small, Place Exchange data shows a large increase in Programmatic Guaranteed transactions where buyers take the benefits such as automation and advanced targeting, and put them to good use on direct-sold OOH inventory.

Performance of OOH advertising is measurable at every stage of the sales process, from generating brand awareness to driving online and offline visits and purchases.

The latest follows insights in a recent snapshot of select U.S. programmatic OOH spending patterns in the Place Exchange platform, which analyzes the delivery of billions of programmatic OOH impressions. These results compare data during the first and second halves of 2023.

Food/Drink, Personal Finance, and Health/Fitness remained the top three programmatic OOH advertising categories during that time, and accounted for nearly half of  dollars spent in the media.

Billboards remained the single largest asset category by spend, at 38%. Place-based formats continued to grow, with OOH TV screens accounting for 27%, followed by Display Panels at 15%, and Kiosks at 12%.

Outdoor remained the largest venue category, with 55% of spend, followed by Retail at 15%, Transit at 10%, and Entertainment at 8%.

Overall, the number of programmatic OOH screens increased by 32%, driven mainly by deployments at entertainment, retail, transit, and residential locations.

Video represented a major portion of the spend, with more than one-third of programmatic OOH spend on video-enabled screens.

Programmatic OOH supports a variety of creative formats, but the majority of spend remained in a few formats. Seventy-six percent of programmatic Video OOH ads were 15 seconds in length in H2 2023, up slightly from the prior quarter.

Programmatic OOH continues to transact predominantly via Private Marketplace (PMP) deals, representing 93% of H2 2023 spend, given the high levels of campaign flexibility, price transparency, and media quality offered to buyers.

Custom PMPs represent the majority of spend, Always-on Deals and Programmatic Guaranteed Deals both gained relative share.