How The OAAA Is Guiding DOOH Through Its Next Stage Of Programmatic Evolution

Thursday, October 8th, 2026 – 12:45 am

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is booming, which means programmatic’s share of the out-of-home (OOH) market is also growing.

DOOH campaigns accounted for 38.4% of OOH spend in Q2 this year, according to research by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA). That’s an 18.5% growth rate compared to last year. And it’s a good sign for programmatic activation, since DOOH campaigns rely more on programmatic tech, whereas campaigns that use static OOH inventory like traditional billboards tend to be direct-sold.

The programmatic side of OOH “is a growth story, as it always has been – and I find that really exciting,” Patrick Dolan, the OAAA’s chief operating officer, told AdExchanger.

To help foster the next stage of DOOH’s growth, the OAAA launched its Programmatic & Automation Center of Excellence two weeks ago, with four main pillars of focus: standardization and optimization, workflow automation and agentic AI, understanding reporting and attribution requirements and omnichannel and retail media.

But, as the name implies, the Center of Excellence won’t just be focused on growing programmatic’s share of OOH and laying the groundwork for agentic OOH deals, Dolan said. It’s also tasked with automating the OOH channel’s more manual processes and the sale of static inventory.

Dolan joined the OAAA in February last year, but he’s no stranger to wrangling industry organizations. He was one of the co-founders of the IAB Tech Lab, and he served as the IAB’s COO for 14 years and as the org’s president from 2017 to 2020. He also cut his teeth in the digital ad industry by developing data products for DoubleClick in the late ’90s and early 2000s, before it was acquired by Google.

Dolan spoke with AdExchanger about how his experience will help him guide the OOH channel through programmatic’s agentic era.

AdExchanger: What’s behind the double-digit growth in DOOH and programmatic over the past year?

PATRICK DOLAN: It’s a combination of things. Back when I started, getting programmatic into the marketplace was the challenge. Now it’s how most big marketers are doing most of their advertising campaigns. So it’s that combination of the comfort level with programmatic, the fact that it could sit within advertisers’ dashboards and be part of how they manage their other campaigns, along with the increased number of screens and the conversion of traditional screens into digital screens.

There’s also the taxonomy we recently released, which is helping the channel get more granular. We’re working toward taxonomy 2.0.

How does your background in programmatic inform your perspective on the OOH market?

Having worked at DoubleClick back in the day, on some of those early data products like Boomerang and interest-based targeting, I’m like the hammer that sees everything as a nail. I see things in a programmatic way. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to come to the OAAA, because I saw there was a really exciting wave coming.

But one of the things I realized coming into the out-of-home industry was that static inventory is also very important. That’s the reason we call it the Programmatic & Automation Center of Excellence – we’re looking at how to better automate processes on the static side, too.

What needs more automation for OOH campaigns?

We had this listening session recently where we brought in the buyers, the sellers, and the technology companies to find out where the friction was. We’ve done a lot of work on the taxonomy, but there are other pieces that need refinement. Everything’s already there; it’s just that it can be done better and it needs more adoption. That’s the bane of everyone’s existence – getting everybody to use the same thing is always very challenging.

I like to think, “Where’s the easy button for buyers? How do we get into the omnichannel?” There are multiple ways to look at that: taxonomy, metadata and getting the right structure of our data for media mix modeling systems are all really important.

What’s the Center of Excellence prioritizing when it comes to standardization?

There is a level of granularity that’s not quite there yet. For example, transit means a lot of things in OOH, and if you’re a digital buyer, you want that specificity. But as far as metadata goes, there are inconsistencies across the various platforms and CMSs.

And creative standardization is something that came up in our listening session. For OOH, it’s not just about whether you’re using the right font, but also about the size of the creative file and the type of file. These big digital screens are from a variety of different eras, and each one has its own technical capabilities. So we’re thinking through how to minimize the amount of change needed for ad creative to fit on multiple screens and looking at AI and other responsive design capabilities.

What are the Center of Excellence’s priorities for addressing reporting and attribution?

That’s not our main focus, because you have Geopath and other measurement groups within the industry. Our role in that would be fostering the technological capabilities.

For example, [IAB Tech Lab CEO] Tony Katsur mentioned the IAB Tech Lab SDK at our recent listening session. That could be something we could use to make it easier to integrate into our systems.

Another thing that’s coming to OOH is verification, which we saw happen in digital media: tech that’s embedded in the systems to help with verification, measurement, all these other things. That’s something that the Center of Excellence is going to be focusing on.

There’s so much noise around agentic AI. What are you zeroing in on?

We’re looking at getting the OAAA data into the LLMs in a better way. The way you structure your data is important, and we brought in some consultants to help us through that whole process.

And when you think about AI as a translation layer, if you’ve got a data set over here, and we’ve got a data set over here, AI can translate that and take a lot of friction out. And because you’ve got companies creating seller agents, and then buyer agents coming out of the big agencies, if they’re not connected together with some existing standard, maybe you can have a translation layer to ease that coordination between systems.

Speaking of the lack of one agentic AI standard, we’ve got competing standards from the IAB Tech Lab, AgenticAdvertising.org and others. Is the OAAA going to pick one standard or work with everybody?

At this point, we haven’t even gotten that far. It’s more about evaluation. What’s out there? What can we best use? How do we work together if somebody uses a different standard?

What’s the biggest lingering myth about OOH that needs to be debunked?

That it’s hard to buy. It’s a lot easier than a lot of folks would think. But that’s why we’re here and bringing all these different groups together.

This interview has been edited and condensed.