OOH Debates Methodology While Advertising Moves On.
By Drew Jackson, Founder & CEO, StreetMetrics
Every year the industry celebrates record OOH revenue. Every year we lose market share. At some point you have to stop calling it growth and address the elephant in the room.
Measurement methodology gets all the attention. It isn't the whole problem.
Today, a media agency cannot tell a brand how many boards it needs to reach a given percentage of a target market. That data exists for every other channel. Not OOH. And while the industry has spent years debating how to measure impressions more precisely, OOH has continued losing ground to every channel that made itself easier to plan, easier to buy, and easier to defend in a budget conversation.
The answer the industry keeps reaching for is methodological credibility. Panel-calibrated. Visibility-adjusted. Scientifically rigorous. Built to withstand scrutiny from a skeptical CFO.
All great things in a vacuum, but credibility doesn't fix a workflow gap. You cannot credential your way into a planning process you weren't built to fit into. And as agentic AI reshapes how media gets bought... autonomous systems that plan, optimize, and execute buys on behalf of advertisers... the question won't be "is this measurement credible?" It will be "does this data layer give me what I need to make the best decision for this advertiser, right now, at scale?" This is an entirely different level of credibility.
What those systems need is great infrastructure. This includes an inventory truth across all formats, consistent impression logic that makes comparisons meaningful, contextual signals available in real time, and APIs or MCPs that plug directly into the tools where decisions are made. Credibility, in that world, is a byproduct. You don't declare it. You demonstrate it.
Consistent data infrastructure is not the same as one-size-fits-all measurement. That often gets lost when measurement becomes a purely academic exercise. Context still matters.
When you're measuring a static billboard on I-95, the core challenge is viewability and dwell time. Did a person pass it? Were they likely to see it? Did they have enough time for it to register? That's hard, and the industry is right to push for more rigor there.
But when you're measuring an ad on the side of a bus moving through Midtown Manhattan, or the METROrail in downtown Phoenix, the measurement problem is different in kind, not just in degree. The ad is moving with the audience. The exposure isn't a probability estimate from a fixed point. It's a documented trip, a mapped route, a verified interaction with a real person in a real place at a real time.
And airports are a different problem entirely. The display is fixed but the audience is captive, dwelling longer than almost any other OOH environment, in a headspace unlike almost any other OOH environment. A traveler waiting at a gate isn't distracted by traffic. They're present. That's not a billboard problem. That's not a transit problem. It's its own problem, requiring unique logic, but it should still be built on the same underlying data.
Regardless of the format, device signals are the best starting point for that calibration. The real work is understanding the flow of population, where data overstates exposure, where it understates it, and how to build logic that holds whether you're measuring a static board on a rural highway in Mississippi or a high-dwell digital panel in The Loop in Chicago. Most measurement methodologies were built for dense, transit-heavy urban environments. The American market is something different. From large metros to rural highways, suburban corridors and regional cities where coverage gaps aren't edge cases. They are the market. So we built for all of it.
Dynamically updated reach and frequency modeling across every inventory format, all 210 markets. Nearly 30,000 metrics per unit, updated monthly, across roadside, transit, urban panels, airports, retail, and place-based inventory. A working platform measuring 1.5 million units daily.
Technology markets tend to reward the layer that becomes load-bearing. The cookie, the pixel, ACR data... they won because they were consistent, machine-readable, and comprehensive enough that buyers had no rational alternative. That's what OOH needs. A data layer structured, normalized, but interoperable and dynamic enough that any agent, any DSP, any internal planning tool has to touch it when it wants to include OOH in its media mix.
Measurement has to be great, but great measurement alone doesn't grow a category. More dollars need to flow into OOH, full stop. Eight years of declining share didn't happen because OOH is a bad medium. It happened because we haven't advanced to meet the needs of the modern advertiser. The next generation of buyers won't wait for the industry to catch up. The dollars will go to channels that already did.
Drew Jackson is the CEO and Founder, StreetMetrics, the leading measurement and intelligence platform for Out-of-Home advertising.
