From VIOOH's perspective as a programmatic DOOH platform, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for advertisers and media owners in programmatic over the next 12 months, and why?

The biggest opportunity right now is audience-led buying through curated marketplaces and multi-channel integration. Our State of the Nation 2026 research shows that programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) advertising already features in 34% of campaigns among recent buyers, and respondents expect that to rise to 48% within 18 months, with an anticipated average investment uplift of 44%. That's a significant signal.

What's driving it is simplicity and ease of access. Solutions like VIOOH Select, a curated marketplace, allows campaigns to run with a single deal ID across multiple media owners. This removes the friction and challenges with an increasingly fragmented ecosystem that has historically held advertisers and agencies back.

Buyers can now plan pDOOH exactly as they would any other digital channel, using their existing DSPs and audience data, across borders and environments. With over 35% of our H1 2025 revenue already coming from multi-market campaigns, we're seeing that global scale is no longer the preserve of large, complex buys - it's becoming routine.

For media owners, this means access to incremental international demand they simply couldn't reach before. That's a genuinely transformative opportunity for the whole ecosystem.

What aspects of the Programmatic Pioneers Summit would be most valuable for you and your team at VIOOH?

The conversations that happen between sessions are often as valuable as the sessions themselves. Particularly when they bring together buyers, media owners and technology partners who are all navigating the same shift toward audience-led, omnichannel buying.

For our team, the most valuable aspects will be the opportunity to put programmatic DOOH in the spotlight for the brand/agency focused audience and demonstrate what it can deliver for their campaigns (being a channel they might not have considered), discuss how curated marketplaces are evolving, how AI is being applied at different stages of the campaign process, and where attribution is heading.

Our research shows 90% of pDOOH buyers are already using AI at some point during their campaigns, so the industry is clearly moving fast. A forum where we can stress-test ideas, share what's working and learn from peers across the programmatic ecosystem is genuinely useful; not just for VIOOH, but for shaping where the broader market goes next.

My session on Day 1 at 3:20pm on Case Study: Programmatic Powerhouse - pDOOH fuelling smarter UK Advertising - is obviously going to be a highlight too!

What has been one of VIOOH's most impactful achievements or milestones over the past year, and why was it significant for the programmatic ecosystem?

Our continued expansion of media owner partnerships beyond the JCDecaux family has been a defining milestone. In 2025 alone we announced partnerships with RZK Digital, ECN, Big Outdoor, BackLite UK, iCo Medios and the Outernet, among others, and we've already added Dolphin OOH, Atmosphere TV, Outfront, Open Media and Orange Barrel Media in 2026. We now trade programmatically in 37 markets globally including Europe, US, Australia, the Middle East and US and have over 300,000 screens across the platform. The significance goes beyond scale. When buyers can access genuinely diverse, premium inventory across multiple media owners through a single platform, with consistent data and targeting capabilities, pDOOH becomes a far more compelling proposition for omnichannel planning. It reduces fragmentation, which has been one of the sector's persistent challenges, and signals to the wider programmatic ecosystem that DOOH is a mature, accessible channel, not a niche add-on.

Which advertising or programmatic technologies are you most excited about right now, and how do you see them shaping the future of digital out-of-home?

Artificial Intelligence

AI is the obvious answer, but it's worth being specific about why. We're moving beyond AI as an optimisation tool into AI as a genuine planning intelligence. When a brand wants to reach a particular audience in a particular context, AI can now identify not just the obvious inventory but the semantic connections, including the commuter patterns, the complementary locations, the behavioural signals, that a human planner might miss. That changes the quality of what pDOOH can deliver, not just the speed.

Curated marketplaces

Another exciting development is curated marketplaces which are emerging as a key growth driver in pDOOH, with 58% of marketers likely to use one in the next 18 months. Curation addresses one of the channel's most persistent challenges: fragmentation. By bundling inventory under a single deal ID, curated marketplaces allow buyers to achieve national or multi-market reach while maintaining the targeting precision and brand safety of a traditional private marketplace (PMP).

Solutions like VIOOH Select allow campaigns to run with a single deal ID across multiple media owners, simplifying the buying process and making campaign execution more cohesive both within and across media channels. It's one of the clearest growth drivers in the ecosystem right now.

First-party data integration

First-party data integration is identified as one of the leading improvements that would drive greater pDOOH investment, cited by 34% of respondents in our recent survey.

This rises to 41% among those managing ad spend over £/€/$150m, highlighting the appetite for more data-led strategies for larger advertisers. 68% of respondents plan to make greater use of data to plan pDOOH campaigns in the next 18 months.

The data and programmatic element of pDOOH buying will fast become the norm ensuring everyone in the ecosystem gain more value from the channel, be that selling the inventory or buying in an intelligent and precise manner.

Dynamic creative optimisation

Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) is also maturing in a way that genuinely excites me. Campaigns like Cadbury's Creme Egg 'Hunt the Winning Eggs' UK campaign used real-time data to update messaging on how many eggs had been found nearby.

Another great example which shows what's possible when data, creative and inventory work together fluidly is a Magnum/ Twister ice cream campaign, which aimed to boost sales of the brands during the summer season. Weather targeting was deployed so that the Magnum campaign was only activated if the temperature was <24 degrees.

With 269 screens activated across 22 coastal cities, the campaign delivered a 15% increase in revenue, with a 14% increase in volume sales for the Magnum brand and a 14% uplift in its value market share. It's a testament to the innovative use of pDOOH and data to drive real-world, tangible results for advertisers.

DCO is no longer a novelty, it's becoming central to how brands think about relevance at scale. Combined with machine learning-driven inventory forecasting, dynamic pricing and outcome prediction, we're approaching a genuinely self-optimising ecosystem. For pDOOH, that's the moment it stops being a supporting channel and becomes the amplification engine of the omnichannel plan.

For those of us who've watched this industry transform over recent years, 2026 promises to be the year where DOOH isn't seen to be just another digital channel; it will be the amplification engine that makes everything else work better, powered by AI.

pDOOH has well located screens that are high impact, full viewability and encapsulating audiences at critical times. It works as both a stand-alone channel and a multi-channel amplifier of a message globally and locally. It's the most affordable channel yet still has all the same capabilities of other media channels.

The emergence of curated marketplaces, deeper AI integration, smart use of DCO and greater first-party data activation point to an exciting next chapter. As the industry continues to build on these capabilities, we are confident that pDOOH will capture an even larger share of digital budgets in the years ahead.

Gavin Wilson is Global Chief Commercial Officer at VIOOH. For more information visit: viooh.com Gavin is speaking at Programmatic Pioneers Summit on Day 1 (Tuesday 2 June 2026) at 3:20pm on Case Study: Programmatic Powerhouse - pDOOH fuelling smarter UK Advertising.