Marketers have been obsessed with digital channels for a decade.
But one of the oldest advertising mediums has quietly become one of the most measurable. Today's billboards are not static signs on the highway. They are digital, data-driven, and capable of changing in real time based on the weather, a live sports score, or a stock market trigger. And most marketers have no idea how to buy them.
In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Sarah Carney, VP of Programmatic Media at Big Outdoor, to break down how digital out of home advertising actually works in 2026, what it costs, how to measure it, and why brands of all sizes are using it to reach the right audience at the right moment without annoying them.
Sarah explains how programmatic DOOH works across formats (highway billboards, transit screens, taxi toppers, ATM screens, Times Square spectaculars), why dynamic creative lets you swap messaging in under two minutes based on real-world triggers, and what attribution in outdoor advertising actually looks like now. She also walks through the Knicks campaign her team ran for Epic Games, where they turned around new Times Square creative in under eight hours the night of game four, and swapped it again live when the Knicks won.
In this episode, we cover:
✔ What programmatic digital out of home advertising actually is, explained in plain language
✔ The difference between static and digital out of home, and what going digital unlocks
✔ Day parting: how brands like Starbucks run DOOH only during morning commute hours
✔ Dynamic creative: how campaigns change in real time based on weather, sports scores, or stock data
✔ Why out of home is the only ad channel that does not annoy people (and what the research says about long-tail performance)
✔ Brand safety in outdoor: why you will never run next to a political article or a weird website
✔ How attribution works in DOOH, including device tracking, ID graphs, and 30-day look-back windows
✔ What DSPs you need to access out of home inventory (and why Meta and Google do not have it)
✔ Minimum budgets, local targeting, and why small brands and three-zip-code campaigns are viable
✔ 3D digital billboards: what they are, how the creative works, and what is currently running in Times Square
✔ The social amplification effect: why influencers post in front of DOOH creative and what that does for reach
If you are a founder, CMO, media buyer, or agency owner who has never bought outdoor advertising because you assumed it was only for legacy brands with massive budgets, or because you thought you could not measure it, this conversation will completely reset how you think about the channel.
Because the smartest place to advertise right now might be the one your competitors have not figured out yet.
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