What the UK's Programmatic OOH market can teach advertisers next

For years, programmatic OOH has been positioned as the future of Out-of-Home advertising. In the UK, that future has largely arrived.

Digital now accounts for 67% of UK OOH spend and is forecast to reach 76% by 2031. Meanwhile, 92% of UK marketers buying programmatic DOOH already plan it alongside wider digital or programmatic activity, with 63% expecting deeper cross-channel integration. That signals a market moving beyond experimentation.

What was once a specialist capability is becoming a standard part of the media plan. That's good news for the industry. But it also creates a new challenge.

When a capability is difficult to access, simply having it can create an advantage. When that same capability becomes widely available, the advantage starts to disappear.

The question is no longer whether advertisers can buy programmatic OOH. The question is whether they're making better decisions because they can.

Globally, the picture remains very different. WOO's first independently aggregated measure of programmatic DOOH found that programmatic accounted for just 7% of global DOOH spend in 2025.

The UK therefore offers an early glimpse of what happens when programmatic OOH moves from adoption to maturity.

And it points to an important shift. As access to inventory and automation becomes more widespread, access itself becomes less distinctive. The competitive advantage moves to what advertisers do with it.

When inventory becomes abundant, planning becomes the differentiator

Digital inventory in the UK has nearly tripled since 2018, giving advertisers more opportunities to reach audiences across the places they live, work, travel and spend their free time.

That scale changes the planning challenge.

Five years ago, many advertisers were focused on gaining access to programmatic inventory. Today, access is becoming easier. The challenge is knowing what deserves investment and what doesn't.

When inventory is scarce, the question is how to find enough of it. When inventory becomes abundant, the harder question is deciding which inventory is actually worth buying.

Access is no longer the scarce resource. Decision quality is.

For advertisers, the value of programmatic OOH is not simply greater access to screens. It is the ability to use audience, location, and contextual data to make better decisions about where, when, and how OOH should play a role.

That is where the next opportunity begins.

Bringing customer intelligence into the OOH plan

Some of the most valuable audience intelligence already exists inside the brand: purchase history, CRM data, loyalty behavior, app engagement and other first-party signals.

"There is a massive opportunity if clients allow access to their first-party data for the best insights to guide campaign planning and activation," Hayden says.

The opportunity is bigger than using that data to target an OOH campaign more precisely. It is about bringing the same customer intelligence that informs other parts of the media strategy into OOH planning.

Consider a retailer that knows its highest-value customers over-index around commuter hubs during the workweek but shift toward shopping districts on weekends. That information can influence not just who an OOH campaign reaches, but where it appears, when it appears, and what role it plays alongside other media.

A retailer may also know where its most valuable customers are concentrated and how their behavior changes throughout the customer journey. Those insights can influence creative strategy, screen selection, timing and channel integration.

The theory is straightforward. Putting it into practice is where it gets interesting.

From audience insight to action 

Read the full case study by clicking on the image above.

For a recent global fashion brand campaign launching a new sunglasses collection, the challenge was not simply reaching fashion-forward consumers.

It was identifying the moments and environments where the product would be most relevant.

The team combined audience-indexing inventory with live weather triggers, prioritizing locations with high concentrations of fashion-forward consumers across Barcelona, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Then came the experiment: activate the creative when the weather made the product more immediately relevant.

The audience signal answered who and where.

The weather signal helped answer when.

That distinction mattered.

The objective wasn't to use dynamic creative.

The objective was to make the message more useful.

A sunglasses message on a sunny day has a different value to a consumer than the same message during poor weather. The creative did not simply change because the technology allowed it to. It changed because the context changed the relevance of the message.

That became the moment of truth for the strategy.

Across all three markets, audience targeting outperformed benchmarks:

• Average: +24% above benchmark

• Barcelona: +35%

• Berlin: +29%

• Amsterdam: +7%

The results demonstrated the commercial potential of combining audience intelligence with contextual relevance.

But the bigger lesson was strategic.

The trigger must change the message's value.

Not every dynamic trigger improves performance. In many cases, brands deploy dynamic creative simply because they can.

Dynamic creative is not valuable because a brand can change an ad in real time. It is valuable when the change makes the message more relevant and, ultimately, more capable of influencing the customer.

The next challenge is proving what better programmatic can deliver

The UK market has moved quickly from adoption to experimentation.

But capability and confidence do not always move at the same pace.

Hayden identifies three barriers: knowledge gaps across agency groups, a lack of standardization across screen types and formats, and a shortage of case studies demonstrating measurable value.

That last point is particularly important.

The industry has largely proven that programmatic OOH can be executed.

The bigger challenge now is proving when it creates incremental value. The industry does not need more proof that programmatic OOH can be targeted, automated, or activated dynamically.

It needs evidence showing when those capabilities actually make a difference to business outcomes. That means more case studies measured against objectives marketers recognize: reaching valuable audiences, improving efficiency, increasing relevance or supporting action.

Capability creates opportunity. Evidence turns capability into confidence and confidence into investment.

Programmatic is not the replacement for OOH

There is also a misconception worth retiring: that programmatic will eventually replace traditional OOH buying.

"I think there is a misconception that programmatic is going to eventually become the be-all and end-all of DOOH in the UK," Hayden says. "On the contrary, we think that the precision and flexibility of programmatic OOH is complemented best by the scale, impact and presence of traditional buying."

The strongest plans will not treat the two approaches as competing.

Traditional OOH can deliver scale, visibility and cultural impact. Programmatic can add precision, flexibility and the ability to respond to audience and context.

The opportunity is to use each deliberately.

From adoption to advantage

The UK's experience suggests that programmatic OOH is entering a new phase.

As access to digital inventory and automation becomes more common, competitive advantage is shifting away from the technology itself and toward the decisions advertisers make with it.

The most successful campaigns will be those that combine audience intelligence, contextual relevance, and clear measurement strategies. They will use first-party data more effectively, apply dynamic capabilities with purpose rather than novelty, and integrate programmatic and traditional OOH as complementary tools rather than competing approaches.

In other words, the question is no longer whether advertisers can use programmatic OOH.

It's whether they can use it more intelligently than everyone else. The UK's experience offers a useful preview of where other markets may be heading.

As programmatic adoption grows, the technology itself becomes less of a differentiator. Access becomes easier. Automation becomes expected.

What remains difficult and therefore valuable is making better decisions.

Knowing which audiences matter and where they are.

Knowing when context changes behavior, a different message is worth delivering, and how to measure whether any of it actually influenced an outcome.

Programmatic OOH has expanded what's possible.

The next competitive advantage won't come from having access to the technology. It will come from knowing how to use it better than everyone else.

At billups, we help brands bring those pieces together, from audience intelligence and strategic planning to programmatic activation, optimization, and measurement. The goal is not simply to use more technology, but to make better decisions about where OOH can create value.

If you're thinking about what programmatic OOH could do differently for your brand, contact the billups team to start the conversation.