By Karan Singh, VP Revenue EMEA at Vistar Media
The out-of-home (OOH) industry has always prided itself on local knowledge. There is a reason specialists have done so well historically: it lives very much in people’s heads. A seasoned planner could tell you, almost without thinking, where a particular billboard or screen was, what it looked like and roughly who was walking past it. That kind of instinctive knowledge is hard to replicate, and for a long time it made buying OOH across markets incredibly complex.
Programmatic digital OOH (prDOOH) has fundamentally changed that equation and, for brands running multi-market campaigns, the implications are significant.
The case for centralisation
One of the most compelling shifts we are seeing is brands and agencies beginning to centralise their prDOOH buying. The model is straightforward: rather than managing separate relationships in each market, a centralised hub team handles buying across multiple territories, drawing on a single partner and platform while still benefiting from local expertise on the ground.
In a recent example, electric vehicle company, Lynk & Co partnered with Vistar Media to support the multi-market European launch of the 08 plug-in hybrid SUV model, to position it as a versatile ‘bridge’ to electrification across Germany, Italy, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands. The campaign achieved over 38 million impressions. Results across the five regions included a 450% lift in purchase intent in Germany, the highest awareness uplift in the category (+18%) in the Netherlands, and a 228% increase in store-visit conversion rates in Spain, turning high-level international awareness into tangible local retail action.
The value lies in performance. When you have a centralised function that has been buying programmatically across markets, they develop expertise that individual siloed teams simply cannot deliver. A team that has run extensive campaigns in the Netherlands carries learnings that become enormously valuable when a German market wants to activate for the first time. You are essentially bringing specialist agency knowledge to business units that might not otherwise have access to it.
We are already seeing this work. Our UK cross-market spend is running at around 51% this quarter, against an overall target across our markets of around 30%. That is not an accident. It reflects a genuine shift in the way sophisticated buyers are approaching this medium.
Platform and people
Technology is only part of the story. What makes cross-market prDOOH buying work in practice is the combination of platform capability and local human expertise.
From a platform perspective, the fundamentals need to be right: buying in local currencies, ensuring data partners meet local market regulations, navigating nuances such as Less Healthy Food rules in the UK or the requirement for French-language creative in Paris. These are not trivial details, and a partner who cannot demonstrate this granular understanding will struggle to deliver.
But the ‘people’ side is equally important. Having local teams who understand the landscape in their specific markets – who know the media owners, understand the screen environment and can bring that intelligence to a centralised planning conversation – is what separates a genuinely capable cross-market partner from one that simply claims to be.
When these two things work together, brands can achieve something genuinely powerful: the efficiency and consistency of centralised buying, without sacrificing the local nuance that makes campaigns effective.
Getting started: three things to consider
For brands considering adopting a cross-market prDOOH approach, there are three questions worth asking before you commit.
First, does the platform actually do what it says? It is easy for partners to claim cross-market capability. Dig into the detail. Does the platform handle location data correctly for each country across cities, provinces or postcodes? Is the inventory labelled accurately? The difference between a platform that technically supports cross-market buying and one that genuinely enables it at an operational level is significant.
Second, does the partner have sufficient local resource? One person covering four markets is not enough. Driving campaigns forward, maintaining media owner relationships and ensuring quality execution requires people who are genuinely embedded in each market, not stretched across them.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, is this model right for your business? Cross-market prDOOH works best for brands with consistent multi-market activation. If your footprint is concentrated in one or two geographies, the case is less compelling. But if you are always on across multiple markets, the opportunity to centralise, build expertise and drive more consistent performance is real and worth exploring seriously.
There is a wider theme worth acknowledging. PrDOOH is having a moment. Some of that is creative, some of it is the shift away from channels like display that are increasingly associated with fraud and overcrowding. But a meaningful part of it is the ease and scalability that programmatic buying now offers. Brands are testing in one market, seeing results and scaling to the next. That feedback loop simply did not exist before. It is one of the most powerful things programmatic has done for this medium and, for the brands willing to lean into it, the upside is considerable.
The brands that will get the most from prDOOH in the next few years are the ones willing to rethink how they buy. Centralising cross-market activity, finding the right partner and investing in genuine local expertise is not a radical move. It is simply a smarter way to work. The tools exist, the expertise is available and the results are there to see. For brands still managing markets in silos, the only real question is how much longer they are willing to leave that performance on the table?
