Reference Library

The complete OOH & DOOH glossary.

Out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising have their own vocabulary, borrowed from broadcast media planning, programmatic ad tech, and physical retail. This glossary explains every major OOH and DOOH term in plain language — from classic formats like billboards and bus shelters to programmatic buying, audience measurement standards like MOVE, and the technology behind dynamic digital creative.

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15 terms

OOH & DOOH fundamentals

The core concepts behind out-of-home media and its digital evolution.

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising: Any advertising that reaches consumers while they are outside their home, including billboards, transit media, street furniture, and retail environments. OOH is one of the oldest advertising formats and remains valuable because it cannot be skipped, blocked, or muted the way digital ads can.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH): The digital evolution of OOH, using LED or LCD screens instead of static printed posters. DOOH allows advertisers to change creative remotely, run multiple advertisers on a single screen through a shared loop, and trigger content based on data such as time of day, weather, or location.
Classic OOH / static OOH: Traditional printed out-of-home advertising, such as vinyl billboards or paper posters, as distinct from digital screens. Classic OOH is typically booked for longer periods and cannot be changed once installed.
Programmatic DOOH (pDOOH): Buying digital out-of-home inventory through automated auctions rather than direct negotiation with a media owner, using the same real-time bidding infrastructure as online display advertising. Programmatic DOOH lets advertisers buy individual screens or audience segments on demand, often alongside other digital channels in the same campaign platform.
Place-based media: Advertising located in a specific physical environment chosen because of who is present there, such as gyms, medical waiting rooms, or shopping centres, rather than because of a location's traffic volume alone.
Retail media network: A media network operated by or within a retail environment, such as a supermarket or shopping centre, that sells advertising space to brands wanting to reach shoppers close to the point of purchase.
Point-of-sale (POS) media: Advertising or signage positioned at or near the checkout or purchase decision point, designed to influence a customer in the final moments before they buy.
Ambient media: Unconventional out-of-home advertising placed in everyday objects or environments people do not expect to see ads on, such as shopping trolleys or building wraps, designed to create a memorable or surprising impression.
Transit advertising: Advertising placed on or around public transport, including bus wraps, train station panels, and taxi signage. Transit media reaches commuters repeatedly along a predictable daily route.
Street furniture: OOH advertising built into public infrastructure such as bus shelters, phone booths, and street-side digital panels, typically located in high-footfall pedestrian areas.
Dwell time: The length of time a person spends within view of an advertising screen or panel. Higher dwell time environments, like shopping centres or waiting rooms, generally allow for longer or more detailed creative messages than roadside sites people pass quickly.
Glance value: How quickly and clearly a piece of creative communicates its message to someone who sees it for only a second or two, most relevant for high-speed roadside and billboard environments where there is no time to read detailed copy.
Line of sight: Whether a screen or panel is physically visible and unobstructed from the angle a target audience is likely to view it from, a key factor in site evaluation.
Catchment area: The geographic zone from which a venue or media site draws its audience, used in media planning to estimate how many people from a target region will realistically see a given placement.
Footfall: The number of people who physically pass through or visit a given location, used as a proxy for how many people could potentially see an advertisement there.

15 terms

Formats & screen environments

The physical and digital placements that make up an OOH network.

Digital billboard: A large-format outdoor digital screen, typically roadside, that displays rotating advertisements from multiple advertisers on a shared loop. Digital billboards offer broad reach and high visual impact for brand awareness campaigns.
Static billboard / bulletin: A traditional large-format printed outdoor advertising panel, booked for a fixed period with a single, unchanging creative execution.
Wallscape / supersite: An oversized advertising format, often covering the side of a building, used for maximum visual impact in high-traffic urban locations.
Landmark site: A premium, highly recognisable out-of-home location, such as a major highway overpass or city-centre intersection, valued for guaranteed high exposure and prestige.
Mega panel: An extra-large-format digital or static billboard, larger than a standard highway bulletin, used for high-impact brand campaigns.
Digital poster: A smaller-format digital screen, often found in shopping centres, street furniture, or retail environments, used for more detailed or frequently updated creative than a roadside billboard.
Sheet sizes (6-sheet, 48-sheet, 96-sheet): Legacy print-era terms describing the physical size of a poster panel, based on the number of standard-sized paper sheets used to print it. The terminology persists in some markets even for digital equivalents of these formats.
Shopping centre advertising: Digital or static advertising placed within shopping centres and malls, reaching shoppers with high dwell time who are actively in a purchase mindset.
Retail display advertising: In-store digital or static advertising placed directly within a retail environment, reaching shoppers at or very close to the actual decision point.
Fuel and service station advertising: Advertising placed at petrol stations and roadhouses, reaching a captive audience during a short but repeated dwell time at the pump or in-store.
Supermarket and community advertising: Advertising on notice boards or screens within supermarkets and community hubs, typically reaching a hyper-local audience on a tight, defined budget.
Bus shelter advertising: Street furniture advertising located at bus stops, historically a print format and increasingly digital, reaching pedestrians and commuters waiting for transport.
Transit media (vehicle wraps): Advertising applied to the exterior or interior of buses, trains, or trams, providing mobile, repeated exposure along a transport route.
Airport advertising: Premium out-of-home advertising within airport terminals, reaching a captive, often business or high-income audience during dwell time before flights.
Cinema OOH: Advertising displayed on screens or signage within cinema complexes, often combining a captive pre-film audience with adjacent digital lobby screens.

16 terms

Audience measurement & metrics

How OOH audiences are counted, compared, and priced.

Impressions: The estimated number of times an advertisement is seen, calculated from traffic, footfall, or audience measurement data for a given site and time period.
Opportunity to see (OTS): An estimate of how many people had the physical opportunity to view an advertisement, based on traffic flow, dwell time, and line of sight, regardless of whether they consciously noticed it.
Reach: The number or percentage of a defined target audience exposed to a campaign at least once during a set period.
Frequency: The average number of times a person within the target audience is exposed to a campaign during a set period. Reach and frequency together describe how a media budget was distributed across breadth versus repetition.
Gross Rating Point (GRP): A measurement of total campaign weight, calculated as reach multiplied by frequency, expressed as a percentage of the total population rather than the target audience specifically.
Target Rating Point (TRP): Similar to a GRP but calculated against a defined target audience rather than the total population, giving a more precise measure of campaign weight against the people a brand actually wants to reach.
Cost per thousand (CPM): The cost of reaching one thousand impressions or people, used to compare the relative efficiency of different media placements or channels.
Circulation: The estimated number of people who pass a given OOH site within a set period, typically derived from traffic count data.
Eyes-on / eyes-on-screen: A measurement standard that estimates how many people actually looked at a screen, as distinct from simply being within range of it, often derived from anonymised sensor or camera-based audience counting.
Dwell-weighted impressions: An impressions calculation that factors in how long a person spent in view of a screen, giving more weight to high-dwell environments like shopping centres than to fast-moving roadside traffic.
MOVE (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure): Australia's industry-standard audience measurement system for out-of-home media, providing a unified currency that allows advertisers to compare audience reach and frequency consistently across different OOH formats and media owners.
Audience measurement: The broader discipline of quantifying who is exposed to a piece of media and how often, using traffic data, panel surveys, or sensor technology, forming the basis for OOH's pricing and planning currency.
Share of voice (SOV): The percentage of total advertising space or airtime on a shared digital screen allocated to one advertiser, relevant on DOOH loops where multiple brands rotate on the same panel.
Loop: The full sequence of advertisements that plays repeatedly on a shared digital out-of-home screen, with each advertiser's creative appearing for one slot within the loop.
Slot / spot: A single advertisement's position and duration within a DOOH loop, typically sold in increments of a few seconds.
Panel: An individual advertising face or screen at a given site; a single billboard structure may have one or more panels facing different directions.

15 terms

Buying, trading & programmatic

How OOH inventory is planned, negotiated, and traded.

Direct buy: Purchasing OOH inventory through direct negotiation with a media owner or their sales team, as opposed to buying it through an automated programmatic auction.
Programmatic buying: Purchasing advertising inventory through automated, software-driven auctions rather than manual negotiation, allowing faster and more targeted media buys.
Supply-side platform (SSP): Technology used by media owners to make their DOOH inventory available for programmatic buying, managing pricing and availability across connected demand platforms.
Demand-side platform (DSP): Technology used by advertisers and agencies to buy DOOH inventory programmatically, often within the same platform used to buy online display or video advertising.
Real-time bidding (RTB): An auction process in which digital ad inventory is bought and sold in real time, with the highest eligible bid winning the impression or slot.
Guaranteed vs non-guaranteed inventory: Guaranteed inventory reserves a specific placement and share of voice for an advertiser in advance; non-guaranteed inventory is sold on a rotational or auction basis without a fixed guarantee of exact timing or exposure.
Rate card: A media owner's published pricing for their advertising inventory, used as a starting point for negotiation before discounts or package deals are applied.
Package buy / campaign package: A bundled purchase combining multiple sites, formats, or environments into a single campaign booking, often at a better rate than buying each individually.
Media owner / media operator: The company that owns or operates the physical OOH or DOOH infrastructure, such as the screens in a shopping centre or the billboards along a highway.
Media planning: The process of deciding which channels, formats, and specific sites will best achieve a campaign's objective within a given budget and timeframe.
Media plan: The documented output of media planning, listing the specific placements, timing, budget allocation, and expected results for a campaign.
Booking lead time: The amount of advance notice a media owner requires before a campaign can go live, which varies significantly by format and demand for a given site.
Inventory: The total available advertising space a media owner has for sale across their network of sites or screens.
Availability (avails): The specific inventory that is currently open and unbooked for a requested time period, checked before a campaign can be confirmed.
Rotation: How advertising creative or advertisers are cycled through a shared digital screen or across a network of static sites over the course of a campaign.

16 terms

Creative, technology & data

The systems and data that put the right creative on the right screen.

Content management system (CMS): Software used to upload, schedule, and remotely update the creative playing on digital out-of-home screens across a network.
Ad server: Technology that delivers the correct creative to the correct screen at the correct time, tracking what played, when, and confirming proof of play for billing and reporting.
Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO): Automatically assembling or swapping elements of a digital advertisement in real time based on live data, such as showing different messaging depending on temperature, time of day, or nearby events.
Triggered / contextual DOOH: Digital creative that automatically changes based on a real-world trigger, such as weather, traffic conditions, sports scores, or the time of day, making the message feel timely and relevant.
Weather-triggered creative: A specific form of triggered DOOH where the advertisement changes based on live weather data, for example promoting umbrellas when it starts raining.
Data-driven creative: Advertising creative informed or automatically adjusted using audience, behavioural, or contextual data, aiming to make the message more relevant to whoever is likely viewing it at that moment.
Sequential storytelling: A creative technique using multiple screens along a single route or journey to tell a connected story or build a message across consecutive exposures.
Anonymised audience measurement: Technology that estimates the number and broad characteristics of people near a screen, such as approximate age range or gender, without identifying or tracking specific individuals, used to comply with privacy standards.
Sensors / people-counting technology: Hardware, such as cameras or Wi-Fi signal counters, used to estimate footfall and dwell time near a screen for audience measurement purposes.
Geofencing: Creating a virtual boundary around a physical location, used either to trigger DOOH creative changes or to retarget mobile devices that were near a screen with a follow-up digital ad.
Mobile retargeting from OOH: Serving a follow-up advertisement on a person's mobile device after they have been in proximity to an out-of-home placement, linking an offline exposure to an online touchpoint.
API integration: A technical connection that allows external data sources, such as weather or traffic feeds, to automatically feed into a DOOH content management system to trigger creative changes.
Playlist: The scheduled sequence of creative assets set to play on a digital screen or network over a defined period.
Resolution / pixel pitch: Technical specifications describing the sharpness and viewing distance requirements of a digital screen; lower pixel pitch means a sharper image intended for closer viewing.
Aspect ratio / screen orientation: The width-to-height ratio and portrait or landscape orientation of a screen, which determines the required dimensions for creative artwork.
Creative specifications (specs): The technical requirements for artwork submitted to a media owner, including file format, resolution, duration, and safe zones, ensuring creative displays correctly on a given screen.

06 terms

Industry bodies, standards & compliance

Who sets the rules OOH campaigns and structures have to follow.

Outdoor Media Association (OMA): The peak industry body representing the out-of-home advertising industry in Australia, responsible for setting standards, advocacy, and overseeing shared measurement initiatives like MOVE.
MOVE: Australia's independent, cross-industry audience measurement currency for out-of-home advertising, developed to give a consistent way to plan and compare OOH campaigns across different media owners and formats. See also: Audience measurement.
IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau): An industry body that, among its broader digital advertising remit, sets technical and measurement standards relevant to programmatic DOOH trading.
Advertising Standards / Ad Standards: The independent body responsible for administering advertising codes of practice and handling public complaints about advertising content, including out-of-home creative, in Australia.
Local council / permit approval: Regulatory approval required from local government before a physical OOH structure can be installed or before certain creative content can be displayed in a given area.
Screen safety and compliance standards: Engineering and electrical standards that digital and static OOH structures must meet, covering structural safety, brightness limits, and driver-distraction guidelines near roadways.

12 terms

Adjacent marketing & measurement terms

Wider marketing language that shows up in OOH briefs and reporting.

Brand lift: The measurable increase in brand awareness, favourability, or purchase intent attributable to a campaign, typically measured through pre- and post-campaign surveys.
Footfall attribution: Measuring whether an advertising campaign led to an actual increase in visits to a physical location, such as a store, often using mobile location data.
Multi-touch attribution: A measurement approach that credits multiple touchpoints across a customer's journey, rather than a single channel, for contributing to a conversion or sale.
Cross-channel campaign: A campaign that runs across multiple advertising channels, such as OOH combined with social or search, designed to reinforce a single message across a customer's day.
Media mix: The combination of different advertising channels and formats used within a single campaign, chosen to balance reach, frequency, and cost efficiency.
Awareness campaign: A campaign objective focused on building recognition of a brand or product among a broad audience, typically prioritising reach over immediate response.
Consideration campaign: A campaign objective focused on moving an audience closer to a purchase decision, typically prioritising frequency and message depth over pure reach.
Call to action (CTA) in OOH: The specific instruction given to an audience in outdoor advertising creative, such as a phone number, QR code, or web address, designed given the very short attention window OOH typically allows.
Creative rotation testing: Running multiple versions of a creative execution across a campaign to compare which performs better against a defined objective.
Share of market (SOM): The percentage of total category advertising spend or exposure held by one brand relative to its competitors.
Frequency capping: Limiting the number of times an individual or household is exposed to the same advertisement within a set period, more relevant to programmatic and digital execution than traditional static OOH.
Campaign flight / window: The specific start and end dates during which a campaign is scheduled to run.

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