If your venue monetizes its screens with advertising, take a close look at your rate card. Compare the screen positioned where people pause and pay attention with the one they merely walk past.
How far apart are their prices?
That question is beginning to surface across different environments. In retail, screens are increasingly placed to catch shoppers at specific shelves, while shopping centers, airports, and transport hubs work with footfall gathered at arrival gates, concourses, or food courts. Each is, in essence, commercial real estate deciding how to monetize its physical ground.
Walgreens’ rollout[1] illustrates this on the store floor: alongside placing screens near relevant products, the company is looking beyond proof of play to measure campaign outcomes. McDonald’s[2] is testing advertising on drive-through ordering screens in around 450 US restaurants, drawing on a much larger restaurant network and customer relationship as it develops a commerce media business. At Frankfurt’s new Terminal 3 [3], the advertising is sold directly as well as programmatically, and the inventory was designed into the building rather than retrofitted into it. Mall owner Simon [4] has launched a media network across more than 200 destinations, using first-party data to help advertisers measure visits, transactions, and engagement. Together, these examples show venue owners or the screen landlords paying closer attention to what each location offers and how to demonstrate its value.
So, how does a venue owner increase yield?
Two things, in order.
1. Make the screen worth more
A screen running a loop is a one-way communication device. It plays, and nothing happening in front of it changes what comes next. Give it something to respond to—a sensor, a data feed or a link to the point-of-sale system—and the moment can inform what plays. Content that answers the moment may be worth more than a loop that ignores it. The sales stage of the Moments of Truth study[5] (2020) found a 16% sales uplift for dynamic OOH against no OOH. That comparison supports the value of the campaign as tested; it does not isolate how much of the uplift came from making the content dynamic. To earn more for a particular screen, the operator also needs to make its difference visible to a buyer.
2. Make the difference provable
Relevance you can’t demonstrate rarely earns anything extra.
- Start with delivery: proof of play by campaign, media and screen.
- Add evidence that the audience was present, such as footfall or audience estimates.
- Where the experience allows it, capture responses such as scans, selections or redemptions.
In a store, the owner can also compare a screen campaign with what happened nearby: for example, whether sales of a promoted product rose while the campaign ran. That gives the buyer a fuller picture of performance, though the increase cannot be attributed to the screen alone.
The commercial payoff: owning the local order of sale
When an operator gets both steps right—relevance and proof—it unlocks a demand layer that exchanges cannot replicate: the hyperlocal market. The tenant next door in a shopping center, the retailer past security at an airport, or the quick-service restaurant on the ground floor all have an immediate commercial interest in reaching that exact footfall at that exact moment.
Proving that value allows the venue owner to sell directly or through a self-serve portal under its own pricing rules, cutting out intermediary fees and protecting margins. It re-establishes the order of sale outlined earlier in this series: local direct demand claims first priority, and only the unbooked remnant capacity ever needs to reach external SSPs and DSPs.
The market for lemons
A habit I keep in these pieces: take the view from the field and check it against an established idea, principle or a framework—what it explains, and where the mapping stops.
- The claim: better screens often sell at much the same price as average ones when their difference is not visible to buyers.
- The framework: in George Akerlof’s 1970 “market for lemons,”[6] the seller knows the quality of the goods, while the buyer cannot reliably tell. Buyers therefore price for average quality, leaving better goods undervalued. Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz shared the 2001 economics Nobel[7] for their analysis of markets with asymmetric information.
- Where it holds: a buyer who cannot distinguish a proven placement from an unproven one may price both as average inventory. Proof of play, footfall and response can help close that information gap.
- Where it breaks: Akerlof’s seller knows whether he is selling a peach or a lemon. In DOOH, many operators do not know the true commercial value of their own screens until they measure footfall, dwell, and outcomes. The first information gap to close is not between buyer and seller; it is the operator’s own.
Mapping the value: Relevance vs. Evidence
The argument can be placed on two axes: relevance to the moment and evidence that the screen delivered.
The bottom-right quadrant is the real commercial opportunity. A screen may already fit its place and moment yet still earn what an ordinary corridor screen earns because buyers cannot see the difference. It is a hidden asset let at the average. Moving it to premium real estate requires one thing: proof.
Pricing routes and market evidence
That is where the operator’s commercial choices matter. Programmatic can carry demand, but the owner still decides how to describe the inventory, what minimum price to accept and which deals to offer, subject to the capabilities of its selling platform. A relevant screen with credible evidence may support a higher minimum price, or terms negotiated for guaranteed and private deals.
Private marketplaces already account for much of the money spent on programmatic DOOH. In a 2026 study[8], the World Out of Home Organization estimated that 75.7% of global programmatic DOOH spending in 2025 went through private marketplaces. The study drew on data from twelve SSPs, independently aggregated by PwC, with adjustments for gaps in coverage. That tells us how much spending uses this route. It does not tell us why a buyer chooses a particular screen for a private deal, or whether the owner earns a higher price for it. That part depends on the operator providing relevance and proof that justifies the price.
Three actions to move the inventory
Moving a network’s screens from hidden assets into premium screen estate doesn’t require rebuilding the stack. It starts with three practical steps:
- Find the hidden assets. Identify screens whose place and audience already suit a particular message. Pick one and test a relevant experience, with the content rule and its fallback documented.
- Prove why they are different. Match proof of play with suitable audience or response measures. Hold the resulting data so the operator can use it in its own sales discussions.
- Price the proof. Test a higher minimum price where the evidence warrants it or offer those screens in guaranteed and private deals on terms that reflect their specific value.
Back to the two screens from the beginning. One reaches people at a moment when its message matters; the other does not. If both look identical to a buyer, both will be priced the same.
Part 1 called programmatic the pipe, not the water. The water is the value created at the screen: by its location, by what it shows, and by its relevance to the moment. Make that value visible, and you turn your hidden asset into prime screen real estate that commands a premium.
Next, the series closes by examining the four kinds of programmatic deals and how each works.
Sources
- [1] Modern Retail, “Walgreens tries again with digital screens after digital coolers flop” (11 September 2026). https://www.modernretail.co/marketing/walgreens-says-its-focused-on-higher-peforming-ad-placements-as-it-tries-again-with-digital-screens/
- [2] invidis, “QSR: Why McDonald’s Is Becoming a Media Company” (27 September 2026). https://invidis.com/news/2026/09/qsr-why-mcdonalds-is-becoming-a-media-company/
- [3] invidis, “Airports: Frankfurt Opens First DOOH-Native Terminal” (29 April 2026). https://invidis.com/news/2026/04/airports-frankfurt-opens-first-dooh-native-terminal/
- [4] invidis, “Simon: Mall Giant Launches Retail Media Network” (31 August 2026). https://invidis.com/news/2026/08/simon-mall-giant-launches-retail-media-network/
- [5] George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/84/3/488/1896241
- [6] NobelPrize.org, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2001. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2001/summary/
- [7] World Out of Home Organization, “pDOOH Isn’t Digital Programmatic” (September 2026), Report 2 summary. https://www.worldooh.org/news/pdooh-isnt-digital-programmatic-woo-study-report-2
- (Reference Note): JCDecaux, “The Moments of Truth” (16 January 2020). https://www.jcdecaux.com/blog/landmark-three-stage-research-moments-truth-reveals-use-contextually-relevant-messaging