DOOH Advertising

Examining the impact of AI on digital signage, data, DOOH strategies

As AI increases the demand for continuous access to high quality datasets, existing attribution and reporting models across digital signage, retail media and programmatic digital out of home are reaching their limits.

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May 15, 2026 by Judy Mottl — Editor: RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com, Connect Media

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Digital signage is not exempt from the advancement in artificial intelligence, as AI is increasing the demand for continuous, high-quality audience data access. It's playing a bigger role than ever when it comes to data and measurement — critical aspects in digital signage return on investment — across both physical and digital advertising environments.

Some industry watchers are seeing a shift in digital signage and digital out of home, from fragmented measurement systems and siloed network data to infrastructure providing secure cross-organization of data and data collaboration.

To gain deeper insight into how AI is exposing structural limits in DOOH and digital signage data systems, limits in current DOOH attribution models and the shift toward collaboration infrastructure, Digital Signage Today reached out to Juan Baron, who leads international and global accounts at Decentriq, a data collaboration platform. Baron helps brands, publishers, and agencies unlock the value of their data through secure, privacy-compliant collaboration.

Q. Does Decentriq have any specific data points or reports relating to the topic of digital signage/DOOH and data/AI?

Baron: Our focus at Decentriq is on the data infrastructure that makes advertising work, and we're seeing that infrastructure become increasingly central to DOOH. The market numbers reflect real momentum: the global DOOH advertising market reached roughly $19 billion in 2025, and the U.S. OOH industry recorded its 18th consecutive quarter of growth in Q3 2025, with DOOH up 11.6% year-over-year.

What's relevant for us is where data partnerships sit in that growth story. Through our work with companies like NielsenIQ and Datonics (both of whom operate across DOOH and omnichannel environments), we see firsthand how demand for secure, cross-partner data access is accelerating. AI and programmatic buying are raising the bar on what "good data" looks like, and that's changing the conversations happening across the DOOH ecosystem.

Q. What is the shift taking place in digital signage and DOOH and what's driving the shift?

Baron: The fundamental shift is that DOOH is moving from a reach medium to a performance medium. For a long time, out-of-home was about presence: getting a message in front of a large audience in a physical space. That's changing fast.

Three forces are converging: programmatic buying, richer audience data, and AI-driven optimization. Programmatic DOOH is expected to approach $1.23 billion in the U.S. by 2026, reflecting real advertiser appetite. Marketers who are used to attribution and audience-level reporting in digital channels now expect the same from their DOOH buys. Retail media is accelerating this further as retailers extend their media businesses into physical screens, and DOOH is being pulled into closed-loop strategies rather than sitting outside them.

Q. What does that shift mean for signage and retail media?

Baron: For retail media, it means in-store and adjacent screens are becoming established, activated parts of a data and advertising ecosystem. A screen positioned near a relevant product category can be dynamically served to a high-intent audience segment, especially when loyalty data and purchase signals are in the picture. eMarketer forecasts U.S. retail media spending will reach $60 billion in 2025 and $100 billion by 2028, and digital signage is increasingly part of how retailers extend that inventory beyond the website and app.

The practical implication is that signage networks are being asked to build capabilities they've never needed before: audience segmentation, clean room data access, closed-loop measurement, cross-channel reporting. Those have been table stakes in digital advertising for years. But they're arriving in the physical media world now, and quickly.

Q. What role do data and measurement play when it comes to digital signage and DOOH strategies?

Baron: They're increasingly the deciding factor in whether DOOH holds its budget or gets cut. The channels that can show attributable impact get defended; the ones that can't get treated as discretionary.

There are two related challenges. The first is audience data quality: actually understanding who is near a screen, not just estimating foot traffic. The second is outcome measurement: connecting ad exposure to a downstream action like a purchase or store visit. Both require data collaboration, because a DOOH network on its own doesn't know what happened after someone saw an ad. A retailer's loyalty data might. The IAB released a DOOH Measurement Guide in 2025 specifically because inconsistent measurement was holding the channel back: an acknowledgment that without a shared framework, DOOH can't compete for performance budgets on an equal footing with digital.

Q. Why does DOOH and signage measurement remain fragmented across networks?

Baron: It's a structural problem. DOOH is inherently distributed: thousands of screens across hundreds of operators, each with its own systems, methodologies and data partnerships. There's no common identifier or shared data layer connecting the ecosystem the way there is in digital.

IAB research found that 60% of advertisers cite fragmentation as a reason for restricting DOOH spend, and 43% identify the lack of data standardization as a key inhibitor. On the measurement side, different networks measure audience exposure differently (mobile location data, computer vision, modeled foot traffic, etc.), and those methodologies produce numbers that can't be directly compared. Attribution is especially complex because DOOH is a one-to-many medium; the same ad plays in front of multiple people simultaneously, making individual-level attribution essentially impossible without a data bridge. Add a patchwork of privacy laws around biometric and location data, and compliance complexity compounds the problem.

Q. How is AI increasing demand for continuous, high-quality audience data access?

Baron: AI raises the stakes for data quality in a way manual planning never did. When a human plans a campaign, there's tolerance for imprecision. When an AI system is making real-time decisions about which screens to buy, for which audience, at what moment, data quality becomes determinative. Meaning bad data produces bad targeting, which produces bad results.

AI models also require continuous retraining as audience behaviors shift, which creates ongoing demand for fresh, permissioned data instead of one-time access. And as generative AI enables dynamic creative that adapts in real time to audience signals, the quality of those signals directly determines whether the output is relevant or just noise.

Q. What should digital signage networks and DOOH providers be doing given the AI and data trends?

Baron: The most important thing is treating data infrastructure as a strategic priority. Networks that can offer advertisers audience verification, clean room-enabled partnerships, and closed-loop measurement will have a fundamentally different conversation with media buyers than those that can't. And that gap is only widening.

Practically, that means identifying which data partnerships would strengthen the audience offering and building the infrastructure to enable them in a privacy-compliant way. It means aligning with the IAB's measurement standards rather than waiting for a perfect consensus that may not arrive. And it means thinking of screens as data-generating assets: every exposure, if captured and shared appropriately, can feed smarter planning and more defensible attribution.

DOOH now competes for the same performance marketing budgets as digital, CTV and retail media. The medium has the reach and the real-world presence to win that competition, but only if the data and measurement foundations are in place.

About Judy Mottl

Judy Mottl is the editor of RetailCustomerExperience.com and DigitalSignageToday.com at Connect Media. She is an award-winning editor, reporter and blogger who has worked for top media for nearly four decades, including AOL, InformationWeek and Internet News, as well as for leading technology providers including HP. She’s written everything from breaking news to in-depth industry trends and reported on technology long before the internet arrived, including the debut of the first smartphone. When she's not sharing insights on digital signage deployments and trends in retail customer experience she's on the beach or watching the latest live murder trial.

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