Types of DOOH advertising cover more than a giant roadside billboard. Digital out-of-home also means transit screens, street-level panels, and TVs inside bars, gyms, and stores. Knowing the formats helps you pick the right one for your goal. Here's the tour.
Roadside & large-format billboards
The classic. Big digital displays along highways and major roads, built for mass reach and brand awareness. They're seen by huge numbers of people, briefly, at distance and speed.
- Best for: broad awareness, launches, "we exist" presence
- Creative rule: a handful of words, one bold image, it's read in two seconds
- Trade-off: high reach, lower targeting precision
Transit screens
Digital displays in and around public transit, subway platforms, bus shelters, train stations, taxis, and airports. Transit reaches people in a captive, repeated context: commuters see the same screens daily.
- Best for: frequency against urban commuters and travelers
- Strength: dwell time, people wait near these screens, so they actually read them
- Bonus: airport screens reach a higher-income travel audience
Street-level "urban panels"
Sidewalk-level screens on city streets, the digital descendants of bus-shelter posters and kiosks. They sit at eye level in dense, walkable neighborhoods, which makes them the workhorse of hyperlocal campaigns.
- Best for: owning a neighborhood or commercial district
- Strength: pedestrian proximity, you reach people steps from your door
- Pairs well with: geofenced mobile for a one-two punch
In-venue screens
Screens inside the places your customers already spend time: bars, restaurants, gyms, salons, waiting rooms, convenience stores, malls, and office lobbies. This is place-based advertising, and it's powerful because of context.
- Best for: reaching a specific audience in a relevant moment (a protein brand on gym TVs; a local service in a waiting room)
- Strength: long dwell time and a captive, relaxed audience
- Trade-off: smaller per-screen reach, but far higher relevance
Place-based networks
A close cousin of in-venue: curated networks of screens across a category of locations, say, every screen in a chain of fitness studios, or across a mall. They let you buy a whole audience environment at once.
How to choose
A simple way to decide:
- Want maximum reach? Lead with roadside billboards and transit.
- Want to own a local area? Lead with street-level panels and nearby in-venue screens.
- Want relevance and context? Lead with in-venue and place-based networks.
Most strong campaigns mix two or three, broad screens for reach, local and in-venue for relevance and frequency. The good news is you don't buy these one media-owner at a time; programmatic buying assembles the right mix from your budget and geography automatically.
With Glo ads, you don't pick formats by hand. You set your area and goal, and one video runs across the fitting screens (sidewalk, in-venue, transit) plus connected TV, from $17/day. That street, transit, and in-venue mix is Glo OOH. TV at home is Glo commercials, and it is only an add-on. To plan the creative, read what makes a great DOOH ad.