Many global forecasts predict digital will lead most of the growth in out-of-home spending for yet another year.

According to PQ Media’s Global DOOH Forecast, after dropping 26% in 2020, global DOOH ad spend grew by 20.4% in 2021 and increased by another 24.9% in 2022. The company expects this resurgence to continue its double-digit growth this year thanks to developments fueling innovation and creativity such as improved programmatic advertising, smart technology marketing and improving ROI measurements.

According to GroupM’s forecast, digital OOH now represents 30% to 40% of revenue at OOH companies, even though DOOH makes up a smaller portion of their inventory.

Amanda Dorenberg, president COMMB, says there are some factors outside of the digital realm that will spur growth. There are more people going into the office more regularly. There are signs well-funded media owners that weathered the pandemic will amp up M&A activity that was beginning to pick up last year as they scooped up smaller, regional companies. Pent-up demand, a new rush of consumerism and a strong job market, Dorenberg says, is also “generating giddy optimism among Canada’s marketers.”

But investment in digital will be a big factor, and Dorenberg says the focus on DOOH will continue both on the media owner and development side. However, one factor that will have more impact this year is interest on the buy side as marketers look for creative ways to communicate with consumers throughout their daily journey. Part of that is because programmatic platforms, integrations and partnerships in OOH matured over the last year, with new offerings – such as COMMB’s own Roadmap – coming to market this year.

But evolving data offerings are also a positive side for non-digital out-of-home.

“Data will continue to play a huge role in programmatic DOOH, but we’ll see growth in the use of similar insight to strategically place ‘traditional’ OOH assets as marketers are demanding a higher understanding of placements and ROI to their target audience,” Dorenberg says.

Jennifer Bidwell, VP of business solutions at Horizon Media, says both OOH and DOOH are an important part of any omnichannel plan for  clients, as they amplify campaign results and provide valuable touchpoints with target audiences.

“We consistently see strong ROI when [DOOH is] used within an omnichannel campaign strategy,” she says. “While our proprietary planning tools don’t specifically support DOOH when recommending OOH in a campaign, we have seen the investment in DOOH grow as the number of faces available has also been increasing, making it more useful when planning across multiple markets.”

The benefits, Bidwell says, are lower production costs, more availability in primary, secondary and indoor markets, ease of access via direct and programmatic and the dynamic capabilities.

Scott Mitchell, managing director for Canada at Vistar Media, expects some key DOOH trends to continue this year, including leveraging its contextual relevance ability and dynamic creative development. “One of the things this year that is going to help impact that is the ability to change the messaging of the DOOH format for contextual relevance of either the placement or the messaging in terms of how its going to reach the audience – an increased focus on innovation through dynamic creative.”

He says data is going to be critical this year, particularly if there’s potentially going to be reductions in ad spend given the economic climate. “I think data is going to continue to be utilized by marketers to leverage OOH’s capabilities, to benefit from the opportunity to be more precise in how they reach audiences and define exactly who they want to reach with DOOH or programmatic DOOH.”