DOOH is the digital evolution of classic out-of-home advertising (billboards, city lights). Instead of a two-week print campaign, a DOOH spot runs in 6- or 10-second slots in a repeating loop shared by several advertisers. Booking is based on dayparts, geo-zones and increasingly on audience data points (movement heatmaps, demographics from mobile SDK data, weather, traffic flow).
The central lever of DOOH compared to classic OOH is dynamic contextualisation: a beer advert only runs when the outside temperature reaches 28 °C, an umbrella advert only when the probability of rain is > 60%, or a streaming service plays different series trailers depending on the day of the week and location. This logic is maintained in the DSP (Demand-Side Platform) and played out via the screen owner's SSP (Supply-Side Platform).
Programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) is the fully automated version: advertisers bid on individual airtimes in real-time auctions, similar to the online display market. This dramatically lowers the minimum booking volume and opens DOOH to medium-sized businesses that would not have run OOH campaigns in the past.
On the hardware side, DOOH screens are almost always outdoor LED totems (IP65, 5,000–8,000 nits, automatic brightness control) or high-bright LCDs in protective housings. They are connected to the player via LTE/5G and return Proof-of-Play logs (PoP), which advertisers use for billing.