This article is based on an interview with AdRoll General Manager of Digital Out-of-Home Alex Weinberger and Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Most media organizations are still built around channel owners. Someone owns CTV. Someone owns paid social, someone else owns display, and each of them walks into the quarterly review carrying a number they’re personally accountable for — awareness here, conversions there, reach somewhere else. Journey-based planning has been the stated ambition in most marketing departments for years. The org chart hasn’t caught up.
Alex Weinberger, General Manager of Digital Out-of-Home at AdRoll, thinks we’ve been aiming at the wrong artifact. We keep trying to fix the media plan. He argues the plan is just the receipt for a decision leadership hasn’t actually made — a decision about how many things a campaign is allowed to be judged on at once.
The Media Plan Is the Output, Not the Change
Asked what has to change beyond the plan itself when a brand shifts to journey-based planning, Weinberger pushed back on the premise that the plan is where the work happens.
Obviously, as noted, the media plan has to change, but that’s just the net output. What really needs to change is the mindset, approach, and strategy. Rather than looking at each channel in a silo and setting a KPI for each (e.g., awareness for CTV, conversions for social, reach for display, etc.), approach your campaigns with a single, laser-focused objective and bring in channels that support it.
The examples he gives are deliberately blunt: a 7% sales lift, trials pulled from a competitor, plain recognition. Then work backward to the channels that get you there. What makes this hard isn’t intellectual — no one at a marketing offsite argues in favor of five competing goals. It’s that the KPI structure is usually load-bearing for something else. Channel owners are reviewed on their channel’s number. Agency scopes are written against it. If a display lead’s performance rating depends on reach and the campaign objective is trial, that person now has a rational reason to protect a line item that isn’t serving the goal. Weinberger locates the fix at the top: “That mindset starts at the top, with the CMO, VP or other marketing leadership,” and from there down to the buyers choosing partners and mix. Which makes the first move a CMO’s, and not a planning exercise at all. It’s deciding what people get graded on.
What the Screen Actually Knows
The pitch that physical movement can improve digital performance tends to arrive without mechanics attached. Weinberger supplied them.
DOOH screens can detect mobile devices within a sliding-scale radius of the screen. The sliding scale reflects the distance someone would reasonably need to be to see the ad (e.g., 50 feet for a bus shelter, 300 feet for a billboard, etc.). So in the example of a digital bus shelter, an ad is displayed for 15 seconds. During that ad play, the screen observes all mobile devices moving through that radius and collects them into a bucket of “exposed” device IDs. You can then retarget that bucket of exposed mobile device IDs across a variety of channels (display, mobile, CTV, etc.), or you can use it for measurement.
Worth being precise about the machinery, because the shorthand hides where the judgment calls live. The screen itself isn’t sensing anything. A geofence is drawn around it and matched against anonymized mobile location data, and the size of that polygon is a choice somebody made. The OAAA published a standard for this in 2021, which tells you the industry knew the inputs needed defining. For a marketing leader, that turns into three unglamorous questions to put to a vendor: how big is the radius on my screens, how long is the lookback window for a visit, and how was the control group matched. A generous polygon inflates the exposed pool and makes any foot traffic attribution number that follows look better than it is. The same bucket also feeds DOOH sales lift work in CPG and survey-based brand lift studies — so the answer to “how big is the radius” quietly sets the ceiling on how much of this you can believe.
“That’s OK” Is the Part Most Vendors Skip
Then the hard question. DOOH has no click. A CMO who’s spent a decade being told to prove incrementality is going to treat correlation as a red flag. Weinberger’s opening move was to concede: unless you’re a CPG or ecommerce business that can track incrementality directly, “DOOH might not be the right fit for you, and that’s OK!” That’s a GM of DOOH telling a segment of readers not to buy his channel, which is rarer than it should be. His case for everyone else runs on a different axis.
Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola, P&G, Delta Airlines, and Ford Motor Company keep investing more and more in the channel for a reason: it works. In a digital world where consumer attention spans are shrinking, and skippable ads and ad blockers are prevalent, the unskip-ability of DOOH stands out. It’s similar to what TV was to markets 20-30 years ago: a mass-reach vehicle to get your message and branding out there.
The category-level numbers do support the direction. OAAA put 2025 out-of-home revenue at a record $9.46 billion, with 70% of the top 100 advertisers spending more than the year before, and DOOH growing 10.5% to reach 36.3% of the total. Coca-Cola sits in the top ten. But notice what the argument has actually become: a peer-behavior case, not an incrementality case. That’s a fair trade if a CMO makes it knowingly. It’s a bad one if it gets presented to a CFO as proof. The honest framing for a board deck is that DOOH is being bought for reach that can’t be skipped, measured against lift studies and matched control groups rather than a conversion path — and that “our competitors are increasing spend” is a reason to investigate, not a business case.
Cheetos on the EV Charger
Weinberger’s inventory argument came out of a mistake the industry made in public. EV charging screens arrived, and planners assumed the audience was EV drivers.
But what was missing was the fact that you are really reaching everyone walking by those EV screens. Cheetos and Coke can be just as impactful on those screens as a granola bar because the lion’s share of the people being reached are not charging their car at that station; they’re just walking into the grocery store.
The venue label described an aspiration. The actual audience was grocery shoppers. His guiding principle is to put yourself in the shoes of the person walking past — a shampoo ad makes sense on a salon screen, and so does a Broadway show or a sale on Poland Spring, because what you have there is a captive audience with time. For planners, that reframes how inventory gets evaluated. The question isn’t whether a screen is premium or well-trafficked. It’s who is physically passing it and what state of mind they’re in, which is a question the venue category on a rate card can’t answer. Ask a vendor to describe the foot traffic, not the venue. Contextual fit is also what programmatic buying makes cheap to test — you can be wrong about a screen type in a two-week flight and move.
None of this needs new budget, which is where the argument gets practical. Weinberger’s suggestion is to reallocate from radio and print, where the goals are already awareness and reach, but where you don’t get the targeting, measurement, or screen-level selection. A typical flight runs 30 to 90 days. If you’re not funding a formal measurement study, he sets expectations low and specific: site traffic and social engagement, because the first thing an interested person does after seeing a screen is pull out their phone and search the brand. He calls that a good initial barometer, and it’s the right size of claim for a first test.
That brings the whole thing back to where it started. The screens, the geofences, the device buckets — those are execution details, and they only matter once leadership has done the harder part. Pick the one number the campaign is accountable for. Then look at what the org chart, the agency scope, and the bonus structure are currently rewarding instead, and go change those. The media plan will follow. It always does.
