12 DOOH advertising examples with results you can check (2026)

You've seen these ads without being told they had a name. The screen over the checkout, the billboard by the motorway, the panel in the station that changes while you wait—that's digital out-of-home, and it has become the rare public-advertising format you can actually measure.

It's also where the money is going. Digital took 36.3% of a record $9.46bn US out-of-home market in 2025, up from 34% the year before, and grew 10.5% while the market as a whole grew 3.6%. The screens are the part of out-of-home that's still climbing.

💡 For the full breakdown of formats, targeting and costs, see our guide to DOOH advertising.

What follows is twelve campaigns. Every one of the first eight carries a published number, and every number names the party that measured it. The last four are classics—landmark campaigns from 2013 to 2023 that set the templates the newer work is still following, which is why they sit at the bottom rather than the top.

TL;DR

Three things DOOH does well, and twelve campaigns that show it:

• Campaigns powered by real-time data
  
  • McDonald's—deals that unlock when the temperature climbs
  • Sprite—billboards that only run when it's hot

• Campaigns that drove measurable foot traffic or conversion 
  
  • vitaminwater—retail media at 80 Costco warehouses
  • Alberta Women Entrepreneurs—a first DOOH buy, tripled sign-up intent 
  • Michael Kors—holiday jewelry across two German cities 
  • Lululemon—leggings ads placed along the marathon route
• Campaigns that used immersive creative to build a brand moment 
  
  • Apple TV+ Severance—a glass office in Grand Central 
  • Calgary Stampede—3D screens that sold tickets
• The classics 
  
  • Netflix—Stranger Things breaks through the billboard 
  • Coca-Cola—your name in lights at Piccadilly 
  • Spotify—Wrapped, on the side of a building 
  • British Airways—the boy who pointed at real planes

Campaigns powered by real-time data

Two campaigns that bought a condition instead of a date. Both set a rule and let the weather decide when the ad ran—only one of them published what happened next.

1) McDonald's: deals that unlock when the temperature climbs

Philippines, 2024. The oldest campaign in this section and still the cleanest, because the trigger, the handoff and the outcome all sit in one piece of reporting.

• The challenge. Sell cold drinks and ice cream in a market where the weather does the selling, and prove the spend moved someone into a restaurant.
• The solution. McDonald's ran DOOH across Philippine cities set to trigger only above 32°C. When the threshold hit, billboards and mall screens served melting popsicles and frosty McFreeze drinks, pointing viewers to the mobile app to claim a weather-linked deal. Below the threshold the creative changed or the ads stopped.
• The result. Close to 1 million impressions in 10 days, delivery 152% above forecast, and a 9% increase in store visits among audiences exposed to the ads, matched from mobile location data to later restaurant visits. (Measured by Moving Walls; reported by MARKETECH APAC.)
• Why it worked. Textbook adapt creatives to time and context—the ad arrived at the exact moment the need did, and handed off to a phone rather than asking a billboard to close the sale.

2) Sprite: billboards that only run when it's hot

Eight markets, summer 2025. The most technically ambitious trigger campaign of the year, and a reminder that ambition and evidence are different things.

• The challenge. Make a global summer campaign feel local in eight markets at once, without shipping eight campaigns.
• The solution. Sprite's "Turn Up Refreshment" ran DOOH that activated only when local heat and humidity crossed a set threshold. The stack: OpenWeather data feeding Clinch, Coca-Cola's dynamic creative partner, bidding through The Trade Desk onto Perion's DOOH inventory. If Rome hit the number, Rome saw the ad. It ran across the EU, UK, Australia, Korea and the Philippines, built by WPP Open X and led by Ogilvy.
• The result. Sprite has not published one. The campaign is here for the mechanic rather than the outcome, and we'd rather say so than imply otherwise.
• Why it worked. The same trigger logic as McDonald's, run at continental scale—and a demonstration that data-driven triggers are now an infrastructure decision as much as a creative one.

Campaigns that drove measurable foot traffic or conversion

Four campaigns where somebody counted what happened after the impression—in a store, on a sign-up form, at a till. This is the hardest thing to prove in out-of-home, which is why these four are worth more than the famous ones further down.

3) vitaminwater: retail media at 80 Costco warehouses

Canada. The shortest distance between a screen and a purchase anywhere on this page.

• The challenge. Reach Canadian shoppers at the point where a beverage decision actually gets made, rather than hours before it.
• The solution. vitaminwater used CostcoTV's retail media network across 80 Costco locations nationally, putting the brand on screens inside the warehouse, feet from the pallet.
• The result. A 44 percentage point lift in product sales. (Reported via IAB Canada, from CostcoTV's own measurement.)
• Why it worked. The shopper had already decided to shop. The screen only had to decide which bottle.

4) Alberta Women Entrepreneurs: a first DOOH buy, tripled sign-up intent

Canada. The only advertiser on this page you've probably never heard of, which is exactly why it earns a place among the Netflixes and Coca-Colas.

• The challenge. Reach women entrepreneurs across Canada on an organization's first-ever out-of-home budget, having never run the channel before.
• The solution. Placements across mixed venue types and multiple cities rather than a single format, spreading a modest budget across contexts instead of concentrating it on one street.
• The result. +178% brand awareness, +266% consideration, +273% sign-up intent. (Reported via IAB Canada.)
• Why it worked. Lift percentages run high off a low base, and that's the useful part—this is what DOOH looks like for an advertiser starting from nothing.

5) Michael Kors: holiday jewelry across two German cities

Hamburg and Berlin, holiday season. A campaign that settled how it would be judged before it launched, which turns out to be most of the trick.

• The challenge. Build jewelry awareness in Hamburg and Berlin during the most contested advertising weeks of the year.
• The solution. Agency MOBSTA ran programmatic DOOH targeted at shoppers across both cities through the holiday period, with brand lift measured against a matched control.
• The result. Over 14 million impressions and brand awareness lift of 13% and 39% across the two measures taken. (Measured with StackAdapt Brand Lift.)
• Why it worked. Ran where the audience already was, at the moment budget was being spent, with the control group already in place.

6) Lululemon: sportswear aimed at the people already sweating

Germany. The clearest case on this page for buying the audience rather than the location—the targeting is the campaign.

• The challenge. Build brand awareness and drive in-store traffic in Germany, across a full year rather than a single burst.
• The solution. Multiple programmatic DOOH campaigns, each built around a custom audience rather than a location. One aimed shorts at women aged 18–34 in gyms and transit stations. Another placed performance-legging creative along the actual marathon routes in Munich and Berlin, catching runners and spectators where they already were.
• The result. The shorts campaign drove a 314% increase in foot traffic and 4,296 modeled incremental walk-ins; the marathon campaign lifted brand image 640% and interest 208%. (Measured by Zenith and Hivestack, now part of Perion, via brand-lift and footfall studies.)
• Why it worked. Both campaigns bought a state of mind, not a postcode. Placing legging ads on a marathon route is data-driven targeting at its most literal—the audience selected itself by showing up to run.

Campaigns that used immersive creative to build a brand moment

Two campaigns built to be photographed. Both put a number behind the spectacle, which is rarer than the format's reputation suggests.

7) Apple TV+ Severance: a glass office in Grand Central

New York, January 2025. The best-evidenced campaign on this page—a billion impressions and two independent juries—and the one whose category is most arguable.

• The challenge. Relaunch a show after a three-year gap, in a market where every streamer is shouting on the same day.
• The solution. A glass cube containing a working replica of Lumon Industries' Macrodata Refinement office, built from actual series props, dropped into the middle of Grand Central Terminal. It ran 18 hours across two days. On day one, the cast turned up unannounced—Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and Patricia Arquette—and performed in character as their "innies" for three hours while Ben Stiller filmed it. DOOH trailers ran alongside on large-format screens including Outernet London.
• The result. 1 billion impressions in 48 hours, 3.5 million engagements and more than 77,000 organic social mentions. Severance season two became Apple TV+'s most-streamed show ever. (Reported by Jellyfish, the lead agency.)
• Awards. Cannes Lions 2025 Silver and an OAAA OOH Media Plan Award 2025—two independent juries on the same campaign.
• Why it worked. Nobody filmed it because it was an ad. They filmed it because five actors were doing spreadsheets in a box at rush hour, and that is motion and dynamic elements taken to its logical end: the campaign became the thing worth looking at.

8) Calgary Stampede: 3D screens that sold tickets

Calgary, July 2025. The rare 3D campaign that published what happened after people stopped filming it.

• The challenge. Be noticed in a city already saturated with Stampede messaging, and turn that attention into ticket sales.
• The solution. 3D digital out-of-home across Calgary, timed to the event and placed against commuter and downtown flows rather than tourist sites.
• The result. More than 1 in 3 Calgary residents recalled the campaign. Of those who did, 69% took an action—bought tickets, searched, followed on social or shared the ad—and 35% purchased event tickets. Recall indexed strongest among downtown office workers and weekly transit riders. (Measured by a PATTISON Outdoor proprietary recall tracker study, July 2025; reported via IAB Canada.)
• Why it worked. Spectacle usually buys attention and stops there. This one is rare in publishing the conversion behind it, which is the case for colour and contrast doing commercial work rather than decorative work.

The classics

These four are older—2013 to 2023—and they're the reference points the newer work above is built on. Two of them, British Airways and Netflix, rank among the most awarded out-of-home campaigns ever made.

9) Netflix: Stranger Things breaks through the billboard

The campaign that turned anamorphic 3D from a novelty into a line item.

For the launch of Stranger Things Season 4, Netflix deployed anamorphic 3D billboards in Tokyo and New York that gave the illusion of the Upside Down breaking through into our world. One Times Square screen appeared to have a giant rift with tendrils and a creature emerging, thrilling passersby. Many stopped to film it. In London, Netflix transformed bus stop posters into an augmented reality experience—people waiting could scan a code and see AR Demogorgons lurking around the shelter.

And the spectacle carried numbers. Netflix's fifteen "rift takeover" installations generated over 190 million organic press impressions and a further 100 million in influencer reach, with more than 110,000 people attending in person; the earlier Stranger Things out-of-home work had already won a Gold OBIE. Season 4 went on to become the most-watched English-language series on Netflix to that point. Ran 2022.

10) Coca-Cola: your name in lights at Piccadilly

Still the clearest proof that personalization can scale inside a mass medium.

Coca-Cola's Share a Coke campaign got a digital twist with DOOH. In Piccadilly Circus, people could tweet a special hashtag with someone's name, and selected names would show up on the giant Coke screen in real time. Seeing your own name on a huge billboard is thrilling—it triggers an emotional response, and people who saw their names would often take photos and share the moment with friends.

The Piccadilly screen was one execution inside a campaign that moved product. The wider Share a Coke push is credited with a 2% lift in US sales that reversed more than a decade of decline, alongside close to a billion Twitter impressions, and it took multiple Creative Effectiveness Lions at Cannes. Twelve years on, brands are still rebuilding the mechanic with better plumbing. The original run was 2014.

11) Spotify: Wrapped, on the side of a building

The annual reminder that first-party data makes better copy than it makes targeting.

Spotify's Wrapped campaign works because it taps into personal and cultural moments. In New York and London, Spotify put up humorous DOOH billboards highlighting fun stats like "3,445 people streamed 'It's Raining Men' during a drought—WTF?" based on aggregated user data. In Atlanta, Spotify floated a real mini yacht in a fountain with a billboard referencing rapper Lil Yachty.

No footfall study was published for the billboards themselves, but the wider Wrapped program has the hardware to prove the idea: the 2022 edition took a Gold Lion at Cannes in the personalized storytelling category, plus two Bronze. Ran 2023.

12) British Airways: the boy who pointed at real planes

The campaign every data-triggered DOOH deck still opens with, thirteen years later.

British Airways' "Magic of Flying" billboard used radar data to detect actual planes overhead. When a BA flight passed above, the digital screen showed a child pointing up at the real plane and displayed the flight number and destination.

The campaign drew 1.36 million video views, 45 million earned social impressions and coverage in 364 news articles across 118 countries, and has been awarded some sixty times over, including the Direct Grand Prix at the 2014 Cannes Lions. Everything in the first section of this page is a variation on it—the trigger has moved from radar to weather APIs; the idea has not. Ran 2013.

DOOH advertising best practices

Creating effective DOOH campaigns requires specific creative strategies. People typically see these ads while moving through physical spaces, so the approach differs from desktop or mobile advertising. Here are six proven best practices, each illustrated by a campaign above.

Use color and contrast to stand out

The first job is being seen at all, and the competition isn't other ads. It's buildings.

DOOH screens compete with busy urban environments filled with other signage, buildings, and distractions. High-contrast, vivid colors help ads pop against those backdrops. What looks bright on a computer monitor can wash out in direct sunlight or blend into a cityscape.

McDonald's "Summer Coolers" digital billboards in the Middle East used bright, refreshing backgrounds with bold text and imagery of icy drinks. In the desert heat, the ad practically felt like a cold breeze visually, standing out against dull city environments.

⚡ Research shows that visually appealing DOOH content made 80% of viewers more likely to take action after seeing the ad (OAAA/Harris Poll, 2024).

Strong color contrast not only grabs attention from a distance but also improves legibility at a glance, crucial when people have only moments to notice your message.

Use dark backgrounds with light text or the reverse. Choose saturated colors. Check that the design holds its contrast in bright daylight and at night, when surrounding lights change how it reads.

Proved by: Calgary Stampede—3D depth is contrast taken to its extreme, and it converted.

Keep messaging short and bold

Once you have the glance, you have about five seconds of it.

In DOOH, you have seconds to communicate your point as people pass by. Effective campaigns prioritize simplicity: minimal text, large fonts, and clear focal points. A good rule is the "5-second test"—if someone can't grasp your message in five seconds or less, it's too complex.

Amazon Echo billboards simply showed "Alexa, add popcorn to my cart" in huge font alongside the product. Just a few words conveyed what the device does in a context people understand immediately.

Spotify's annual Wrapped campaign uses snappy one-liners in big, bold typography: "Dear person who played 5,000 breakup songs, are you okay?" The messaging is instantly readable and engaging through humor.

Avoid long sentences and small print. Bold, easy-to-read sans-serif fonts stay legible from a distance. Limit text so it can be read in a glance, even from a car at 30-40mph.

Proved by: Spotify Wrapped—one line, no explanation, photographed by thousands.

Adapt creatives to time and context

This is where DOOH stops behaving like a poster and starts behaving like a channel.

DOOH excels when you leverage its ability to be contextual and timely. Adjust content to fit the situation: time of day, day of week, local weather, or specific location. Ads that feel relevant to the viewer's moment are far more effective.

A ramen restaurant ran different creatives on a city kiosk depending on the time. During lunch and evening commute hours, it showed steaming bowls with "Next stop: lunch?" messaging. At 6 AM, it didn't waste impressions on ramen when people wanted coffee.

Arla Foods pushed its lactose-free range through the early summer in the UK, and the discipline was in the placement rather than the creative. Working with Carat and Clear Channel, the brand prioritized DOOH units within 500 to 800 metres of a shop that stocked the range; 60% of the sites it used were digital, and DOOH took roughly a third of the total campaign budget. Creative changed by time of day—a breakfast recipe in the morning, evening meals later.

⚡ Context-aware DOOH makes advertising feel useful. That is a rare thing to be able to say about a channel.

Schedule by daypart. Adjust creative by weather. Make the ad feel like it belongs to the moment rather than the quarter.

Proved by: McDonald's—9% more people walked into a restaurant.

Incorporate motion and dynamic elements

The screen can move. Most creative running on it still doesn't use that for anything.

Movement attracts eyes. Our vision is naturally drawn to moving images, making motion graphics, video content, or animated transitions significantly more captivating than static images. Even subtle motion like a moving background or animated product can make people pause and look.

3D anamorphic billboards have become show-stoppers in major cities. Netflix promoted "Stranger Things" with a 3D billboard where a creature appeared to burst out of the screen, startling and delighting onlookers.

When using motion, keep key elements like your logo or main message on screen throughout or frequently. Don't hide the brand until the end because viewers might only see a portion of the loop. Use motion purposefully to guide the eye from product image to tagline to call-to-action.

Dynamic content can also mean real-time updates. Countdown clocks on DOOH ("Only 3 days left for the big game!") or live scores in sports promos make ads feel current and can create urgency.

Proved by: Severance—the moving part was five actors, and it earned a billion impressions in two days.

Sync DOOH with mobile and social campaigns

A screen cannot take a payment. Everything after the glance happens on a phone.

The best DOOH campaigns don't exist in isolation. They're part of larger cross-media strategies that connect outdoor advertising with what people see on personal screens. Use DOOH to drive viewers to mobile experiences or social engagement, extending impact beyond the physical screen.

Brands also use DOOH for retargeting. Many programmatic platforms allow you to serve follow-up ads on mobile devices that were near a DOOH screen. Someone sees a billboard for a new movie, then later gets a trailer video ad on their phone.

⚡ About 74% of mobile users acted on their phone after seeing a DOOH ad (OAAA/Harris Poll, 2024).

Plan DOOH as part of your omnichannel mix. Reuse creatives or themes across DOOH, social, and online video for consistency. Encourage social sharing of DOOH by creating "Instagrammable" moments. Use mobile location data to compare performance across channels and attribute results properly.

Proved by: McDonald's—the billboard made the offer, the app delivered it, the restaurant closed it.

Leverage data-driven triggers and personalization

The rule gets written once, before launch, and then the campaign runs itself.

One of the most advanced uses of DOOH is making ads feel personally relevant by leveraging data triggers. We've discussed context like weather or time, but going further, data-driven DOOH can use audience insights or live triggers to change creative in real time for maximum relevance.

Google used live weather for context. If it was rainy, a Google Search billboard would display "Search for the best raincoats nearby," whereas on sunny days it might show a different query. This real-time relevance made the ads feel helpful rather than pushy.

In programmatic DOOH, advertisers set rules so that when certain conditions are met—a "trigger" such as temperature above X, stock market down Y points, trending hashtag = Z—the corresponding creative plays automatically.

Think about what data sources might sharpen your message: weather, traffic, sports scores, live poll results, social trends. Done well, data-driven DOOH delights audiences, because the ad appears to know what is happening around it.

Proved by: British Airways—twelve years old and still the reference.

What the best DOOH campaigns have in common: 10 things to steal

Ten rules the twelve campaigns above have between them. Each one points back to the campaign that earned it.

1. Trigger on a condition, not a calendar. McDonald's bought 32°C, not July. The saving is in every impression you didn't buy.
2. Hand off to the phone. The billboard makes the offer; the app closes it. McDonald's ran the whole funnel in ninety seconds.
3. Buy proximity, not postcodes. Arla prioritised screens within 500–800 metres of a shop that stocked the product. A radius turns an awareness buy into a destination.
4. Get as close to the shelf as the format allows. vitaminwater ran on screens inside the warehouse, feet from the pallet, and moved sales 44 points.
5. Design the measurement before the flight, not after. Michael Kors had a matched control group in place at launch. Requested afterward, brand lift is an argument.
6. Spectacle should still convert. Calgary Stampede is the rare 3D campaign that published what happened next—69% of the people who remembered it did something.
7. Make the ad the thing worth filming. Severance earned a billion impressions in 48 hours because five actors did spreadsheets in a glass box at rush hour.
8. Keep the brand on screen the whole loop. Viewers catch a fragment, not the film. Front-load the logo.
9. Small budgets show bigger lift. Alberta Women Entrepreneurs tripled sign-up intent on a first-ever OOH buy. Low base, real movement.
10. Name who measured it. Every number above says who produced it—Moving Walls, PATTISON, StackAdapt, CostcoTV, Jellyfish. If a case study won't tell you, that's the finding.

The theory lives elsewhere

This page shows campaigns. Everything that defines, categorizes or benchmarks DOOH has a page built for it, and here are the doors.

• Formats. DOOH splits into large-format (billboards, facades), place-based (gyms, airports, offices) and point-of-purchase (aisles, checkouts). They differ mostly in what the audience is doing when they pass. Full breakdown, with a comparison table: DOOH advertising formats.
• Benefits versus traditional OOH. Motion, live triggers, audience targeting and measurement that print cannot carry—the comparison in full.
• Where DOOH performs best. Urban centers, transit, retail, leisure venues, smart-city placements. Covered in the same DOOH piece.
• Measurement. Four families: delivery (verified plays, impressions, reach and frequency), engagement (QR scans, dwell), attribution (foot-traffic lift against a matched control), and brand lift (survey-based). No clicks. All of it has to be specified before the flight. Full methodology: (D)OOH metrics explained.
• Programmatic. Every campaign above that reacts to a condition—weather, time, live data—exists because programmatic buying let someone set a rule and walk away. It's also why single-day flights and short tests are possible at all. How programmatic DOOH works.

Conclusion

Twelve campaigns, and one lesson underneath all of them. Every one worked, but they prove it in two different currencies. Some deal in attention—Severance turned a train station into a billion impressions in two days, and British Airways made the evening news in more than a hundred countries with a child pointing at the sky. Others deal in outcomes you can bank: a store visit, a jump in sales, a sign-up. Attention is the easier of the two to come by. The campaigns that walked away with a business number all did the same thing first—they decided what they were going to measure before they booked a single screen.

That's where DOOH has actually got to in 2026. The channel can show foot-traffic lift, sales lift and brand lift against a matched control, with a named partner behind the figure. What's missing is the habit. Plenty of campaigns still settle for impressions because impressions arrive on their own.

So if DOOH is going into your 2026 plan, start with the objective, settle the measurement before the media, and treat the screen as the opening of a sequence rather than the whole of it. 

⚡ The brands above that can point to a number are the ones who planned to have a number to point to.

That planning is the part we do. AI Digital's managed services handle DOOH the way this page argues for it—DSP-agnostic execution built around your objective—while Elevate, our marketing intelligence platform, carries the measurement that tells you whether it worked: path to conversion, brand study and mix modeling across your DSPs, without touching the buy itself. Get in touch to talk through a DOOH plan.