Billboards Don’t Sleep
What OOH taught me at MiQ during COVID, and what the e4m conference confirmed about where outdoor advertising is actually going
When COVID hit, billboards went dark. Literally. The screens were still on. The creatives were still running. But nobody was outside to see them. Footfall dropped to near zero, advertising budgets got slashed, and OOH was one of the first casualties. It was the channel most obviously dependent on human movement, and humans had stopped moving.
That period taught me more about the future of outdoor advertising than any conference or whitepaper could have. Because when your medium disappears overnight, you’re forced to ask a hard question: what was the medium actually doing in the first place?
The answer, it turned out, was less about eyeballs and more about context. And that distinction is everything.
What Working at MiQ During COVID Actually Looked Like
At MiQ, I was inside a programmatic media partner that was built for precisely the kind of chaos COVID created. The company had been running since 2010, connecting data from multiple sources to solve real business problems for marketers. When the pandemic hit, the model had to flex fast.
Traditional advertisers who had never seriously looked at digital started paying attention. Brands that ran OOH campaigns suddenly had no audience on the street, but their potential customers were at home, on connected TVs, on streaming platforms, on apps. The shift happened in weeks, not quarters.
The only way for an advertiser to reach customers was to do so in their homes. That one constraint pushed programmatic to the front of every planning conversation.
What I watched happen inside MiQ during this period was a kind of forced clarity. Channels that had been considered add-ons, like Connected TV and digital audio, became primary. Measurement conversations that had always been deferred became urgent. And DOOH, which was just beginning to mature as a programmatic channel, effectively hit pause.
But here is what was interesting about that pause. The teams didn’t abandon DOOH thinking. They deepened it. Because there was suddenly time to ask: when people do come back outside, what should this channel actually be capable of?
The Connected TV Connection Nobody Was Making Loudly Enough
The CTV story from COVID is the one that runs parallel to DOOH, and they matter together.
Inside MiQ, the analysis being done through ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) was revealing something important: people who watch linear TV also watch BVOD and streaming platforms. There is enormous overlap. Which means, for a large advertiser running a linear TV campaign, buying more linear TV hits the same people again and again. You get diminishing returns, not new reach.
The solution was to connect the data: understand what a household is watching across linear and streaming, find the incremental audience that linear misses, and serve them on CTV instead. MiQ eventually built out TV Intelligence to do exactly this, analysing over six trillion TV viewership signals per month across 90 million TV sets.
Why does this matter for OOH? Because the logic is identical.
A brand running a billboard campaign on NH-48 is hitting commuters. What if you could know which of those commuters are also heavy streamers? What if the DOOH screen near the office complex could serve a different message than the one near the residential area, because the audience composition is genuinely different? That is not fantasy. That is what the data already enables. The question is whether the creative and buying infrastructure catches up.
CTV broke the myth that TV was one audience. DOOH is now breaking the myth that outdoor is one context.
What the e4m OOH Conference Is Actually Asking
The questions at this year’s e4m OOH Conference are the right ones. Where is DOOH going? How do you move from experimentation to measurable results? What does it mean for a brand to reach the right audience, optimise in real-time, and measure impact beyond impressions?
These are not new questions. But for the first time in the industry’s history, the tools to answer them actually exist. That is new.
Programmatic DOOH, or pDOOH, compresses campaign delivery from a day to under an hour. You can trigger a creative based on weather. You can switch off screens in a city where your target event is no longer relevant, the way NBA playoff campaigns ran on screens only in cities where a team was still alive.
You can serve sequentially: catch someone on a DOOH screen near their office, then retarget them on mobile, then follow up on CTV in the evening. The consumer journey doesn’t need to restart every time the channel changes.
The MatCare campaign is a clean example of where this is going. Multilingual creatives capturing the idea of ‘best dekh bhaal’. Contextual placements near hospitals, clinics, and family transit routes. The message isn’t just broadcast. It is placed. The medium becomes part of the meaning.
The Impressions Trap and Why Outcomes Are Different
OOH has always measured itself in impressions. How many people walked past this hoarding? How many cars drove this route? These numbers are real, but they tell you almost nothing about whether the advertising worked.
The shift to outcomes is uncomfortable for the industry because it requires accountability. If a brand can measure whether DOOH exposure drove store visits, or search queries, or app downloads, then every campaign that doesn’t show a result is a failed investment rather than a successful impression. That is a harder conversation to have.
But it is also the only conversation worth having. MiQ’s approach to DOOH measurement has been multi-touch attribution combined with location analytics. You track what happened after the exposure. Did the person move toward the brand? Did their digital behaviour change? Did they convert downstream?
This is not hypothetical. The data partnerships with DSPs and SSPs make it possible. The challenge is that most OOH buyers are still operating on a reach-and-frequency planning model that was designed for static hoardings. pDOOH needs a different planning brain.
Why the MiQ Sigma Launch Changes the Conversation
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In 2025, MiQ launched Sigma. The pitch is simple: connect everything. Over 300 data feeds. 700 trillion consumer signals spanning what people watch, browse, and buy. A single platform that sits above the DSP stack and helps traders make decisions across all of it.
The part that matters for DOOH is the unified consumer view. For the first time, a trader can understand a person’s TV viewing patterns, their browsing behaviour, and their physical movement patterns, and use that understanding to plan a DOOH buy that fits into the full journey rather than sitting outside it.
This is what MiQ’s Global CTO described as being able to ‘execute multi-platform media buys in seconds through a well-written prompt.’ It sounds like adtech marketing language, and it partly is. But the underlying capability is real. AI is not replacing the trader. It is removing the arbitrary choices that traders had to make simply because the data was fragmented.
In the past, marketers had to make arbitrary choices around what ad platforms to use for their campaigns, which caused a trade-off in reach and performance. Sigma removes that trade-off.
Built in Bengaluru by MiQ’s Centre of Excellence, Sigma’s early testing showed a 132% increase in conversion rate and a 57% reduction in cost per action. These are not small numbers.
What the Future of OOH Actually Looks Like
Not more screens. Better-placed ones.
The DOOH market was at $23 billion in 2022 and is projected to cross $48 billion by 2029. That growth is real. But the more interesting number is not the size of the market. It is the percentage of that market that is bought programmatically, which remains small but is accelerating.
What changes when pDOOH becomes mainstream is the entire planning process. You stop thinking about which hoarding to book. You start thinking about which audience you need to reach at which moment in their physical journey, and you let the data tell you where that intersection is.
The weather-triggered creative. The live event tie-in. The airport intercept served to travellers based on their flight destination. The brand safety controls that prevent your message from running next to the wrong context. All of these are already possible. The industry just hasn’t standardised around them yet.
One real structural challenge remains: unlike digital inventory, DOOH screens are finite. There are only so many screens and only so many hours in a day. When demand spikes programmatically, availability becomes a constraint in a way that doesn’t exist in display advertising. This is a supply problem the industry will need to solve through better forecasting and guaranteed deal structures as pDOOH scales.
The Lesson COVID Left Behind for This Channel
When OOH went dark in 2020, the brands that survived the best were not the ones with the most screens. They were the ones who already knew their audience well enough to follow them into their homes. Connected TV. Digital audio. App-based formats. The channel agnostic brands had somewhere to go.
Post-COVID, when footfall came back and DOOH demand surged, the brands who came back strongest were the ones who had used the downtime to build their data infrastructure. They knew who they were reaching. They had retargeting flows set up. They could tie the physical exposure to the digital journey.
That period also proved something else: traditional ad dollars follow audiences. When people stopped being outside, money left OOH fast. When they came back, money returned. But it came back differently. More conditional. More performance-oriented. Brands that had discovered programmatic during COVID weren’t going to settle for impression-only accountability when they returned to outdoor.
That shift has not fully played out yet. The e4m OOH Conference is part of that playing out. The industry is catching up to what the data already enables.
On DOOH vs pDOOH:
DOOH gave outdoor advertising a screen. pDOOH gives it a brain. The difference between showing an ad and placing it in the right context, at the right moment, for the right person is the entire value proposition. Brands still buying programmatic DOOH like traditional OOH are paying for a Ferrari and using it to park.
On the COVID reset:
The pandemic did not disrupt OOH. It accelerated a reckoning that was already coming. The channels that survived were channel-agnostic. The lesson is that audience understanding travels. Your medium doesn’t always.
On Connected TV as a parallel:
CTV and DOOH are not competing channels. They are two nodes on the same consumer journey. The brands that understand this are running sequences: catch someone on a screen outdoors, find them again at home on streaming. The journey is continuous. The advertising should be too.
On measurement:
Impressions are a proxy. Outcomes are the point. Until the OOH industry standardises around location-linked attribution, footfall studies, and cross-channel conversion tracking, it will keep losing budget to digital channels that can prove what they did. MiQ’s approach to multi-touch attribution is the right direction. It needs to become the floor, not the premium offering.
On MiQ Sigma:
The idea of a single platform that connects what people watch, browse, and buy is not new. Actually building it at scale, with 300+ data feeds and 700 trillion signals, is. Sigma is early but the architecture is sound. The real test is whether it narrows the gap between planning intent and campaign execution across DOOH specifically.
The billboard is not going away. But the billboard that just sits there is going away.
Every medium that survived the last decade did so by becoming answerable. Search was always answerable. Social became answerable. Connected TV is becoming answerable. DOOH is next.
What COVID taught the industry, and what I learned working through it at MiQ, is that your channel is not your strategy. Your audience is your strategy. The channel is just where you meet them.
Brands that build their understanding of the audience first, and then decide which screen to use, will always outperform brands that book the screen first and hope the audience shows up. That has been true in digital for twenty years. It is now becoming true in outdoor.
The future of OOH is not more inventory. It is better intelligence about the inventory that already exists. And the brands that get there first will not just win impressions. They will drive outcomes.
That’s a different game. But it’s the only one worth playing.
