• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 31, 2023

Programmatic has become much more popular among media owners. Out-of-home (OOH) screens grew 37% in the first half of 2023, compared with the first half in 2022, according to a recent report from Place Exchange.

For the first time, the report also calls out the video sizes with the highest spend. The average CPM for programmatic OOH inventory was $7.17 in H2 2022 and in H1 2023.

Video continued to represent a large portion of spend, comprising one-third of programmatic OOH spend on video-enabled screens, with the majority of programmatic OOH video spend on horizontal video formats. Vertical video formats are expected to grow in share.

Some 70% of programmatic video OOH ads were 15 seconds in length, although other shorter and longer video durations are gaining in share.

Programmatic Video OOH saw a slight decline in share, from 23% of spend across all programmatic OOH screens in H2 2022 to 19% in the first half of 2023. When only including OOH screens that are video-enabled, video accounted for a third of spend in H1 2023.

About 80% of programmatic OOH video spend is attributed to the top four sizes (WxH): 640x360, 1920x1080, 1080x1920, and 360x640.

The Place Exchange Programmatic OOH Trends report provides a snapshot of select U.S. programmatic OOH spending patterns across the company’s platform. It analyzes delivery across billions of programmatic OOH impressions. These results compare data from H1 2023 with data from H2 2022.

The fastest-growing categories were Arts/Entertainment at 170%, Law/Gov’t/Politics at 32%, Travel at 23%, Food/Drink at 15%, and Style/Fashion at 10%.

The top three programmatic OOH advertising categories remained the same in the first half of 2023, as they did in the year-ago first half. Those include Food/Drink, Personal Finance, and Health/Fitness, and accounted for nearly half of the total spend. In both time periods, the other half of spend was balanced across a broad mix of categories.