Programmatic DOOH (pDOOH)

Programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) is the practice of buying DOOH impressions through real-time auctions rather than through hand-negotiated insertion orders with a media owner. The buy-side runs through the same DSPs that buy CTV and web; the sell-side runs through SSPs that aggregate screen networks. The protocol gluing them together is OpenRTB 2.6, which in 2022 added a first-class "dooh" object so a DSP can bid on a place-based screen the same way it bids on a CTV pod.

In practice, a pDOOH bid request includes a venue category, a screen size and orientation, a time-of-day, an audience estimate (sensor-counted or modeled), and a floor price. The DSP responds with a creative URL (typically a VAST tag) and a bid. The SSP picks the winner, fires a proof-of-play receipt back to the buyer, and bills against a completed impression.

pDOOH ran roughly 30% of US digital OOH spend in 2026 and is on track to cross 50% by 2028 per Magna Intelligence. The growth driver is buyer convenience: a single DSP seat can now run a campaign across web display, CTV pre-roll, and DOOH place-based screens with one creative spec and one frequency cap. The friction point is measurement parity — sensor-counted impressions are still a small minority of pDOOH inventory globally.