A beauty campaign that was 222 screens

A case study published on 20 August documents how The Ordinary ran digital out-of-home in Spain and Germany this spring. The interesting number is not the brand lift. It is the screen count: 222 screens across two countries — 205 in Spain, 17 in Germany.

That is not a scale buy. It is a proximity buy. Every screen was selected because a shopping centre contained a Primor store in Spain or a Douglas store in Germany, and the campaign ran for roughly a fortnight around it. For anyone who has been told beauty brands only buy out-of-home at national scale, this is the counter-example — and the shape of the buy is one a small network can actually serve.

What happened

The Ordinary ran programmatic DOOH in Spain (26 Mar – 11 Apr 2026) and Germany (30 Mar – 11 Apr 2026) (Vistar Media case study — vendor-published, directional).
222 screens in total: 205 in Spain across JCDecaux and Clear Channel inventory, 17 in Germany on Ströer inventory (Vistar Media — vendor-published).
Targeting was point-of-interest: shopping centres containing Primor stores in Spain, Douglas stores in Germany (Vistar Media — vendor-published).
Delivery: 6 million-plus impressions and 229,000-plus playouts (Vistar Media — vendor-published, unaudited).
Brand lift, measured by Happydemics: +37% brand consideration in Germany (described as a top-5% result against the vendor’s benchmark set) and +28% brand image in Spain, with brand attribution 3 points above benchmark (Happydemics via Vistar — commissioned third-party survey, directional).
The read: the brand bought the retailer’s catchment, not the beauty moment — because at the time of buying, no beauty-venue inventory existed to buy in those cities (BDOOH analysis).

What a 222-screen campaign tells you

Most beauty out-of-home coverage features the opposite: a landmark 3D build, a full transit takeover, a national poster wave. Those campaigns are real, and they are also useless as a template, because no emerging network can supply them.

This one is supplyable. Two hundred screens, two markets, a two-week flight, targeted by a retail adjacency rule rather than by audience index. The whole media decision reduces to a single sentence: put the ad where our stockist is. That is a planning logic driven by distribution, not demographics — and it is the same logic that would put a screen inside a salon two doors from the same mall, if such a screen were listed.

The 17-screen German leg makes the point sharply. Seventeen screens is not a media plan by any traditional standard; it is a targeted placement. It cleared because programmatic made a buy that small executable, which is the practical argument in programmatic DOOH via DSPs — a small, precise buy is now cheap to run, and small precise buys are what a beauty estate can fill.

The venue gap, stated plainly

The Ordinary targeted malls hosting Primor and Douglas. Douglas is not incidental here: its own retail media arm has been moving 210 in-store screens across 155 stores onto a programmatic platform. So the brand bought screens near the store while the store’s own screens were becoming buyable — two layers of the same journey, sold separately, by different owners.

The layer that is still missing is the third one: the venue where the service happens. A shopper in that mall may be twenty minutes from a salon appointment, and in the appointment they are seated, uninterrupted and thinking about exactly the category being advertised. That gap is what our venue screen-penetration work measures, and why the endemic advertiser map treats skincare brands with retail distribution as the most reachable first customers for a beauty network.

How to use this in a pitch

Match the buy size, don’t apologise for it. A network offering a few hundred screens across a few cities is not sub-scale for this advertiser — it is the same order of magnitude as the campaign they actually ran. The framing to use is in selling to endemic beauty brands.
Lead with proximity to their stockist. The targeting rule here was retail adjacency. A salon estate should be able to answer “how many of your venues sit within a kilometre of a Douglas, Sephora or Primor door?” before the first meeting — see how to plan a campaign.
Bring the measurement they already accept. This brand bought a third-party brand-lift study. That is the proof format beauty advertisers are already commissioning, and it is affordable on a single flight — unlike footfall or sales attribution. Details in how to measure effectiveness.
Expect a fortnight, not a year. Two-week flights around a retail moment are the natural rhythm of this category, which is why seasonal and event planning matters more to a beauty network than always-on rate cards.

The caveats

This is a vendor-published case study, produced by the supply-side platform that carried the campaign, and its selection is not random: successful campaigns become case studies. The impression and playout counts are unaudited. The brand-lift figures come from a commissioned survey by Happydemics; the “top 5%” framing is measured against that vendor’s own benchmark set, which is not published. No CPM, budget or cost-per-lift-point is disclosed, so nothing here supports a rate argument.

And the campaign is not evidence about beauty venues. It ran on mall, street and retail screens in two European markets — there is still no reliable public beauty CPM, and nothing in this case study creates one.

Sources

Vistar Media — case study on The Ordinary in Spain and Germany, published 20 Aug 2026: flights 26 Mar – 11 Apr (Spain) and 30 Mar – 11 Apr (Germany); 222 screens total, 205 in Spain across JCDecaux and Clear Channel inventory and 17 in Germany on Ströer inventory; point-of-interest targeting on shopping centres containing Primor (Spain) and Douglas (Germany) stores; 6 million-plus impressions and 229,000-plus playouts. Vendor-published and unaudited — directional. Brand-lift results attributed to Happydemics, a commissioned third-party survey: +37% brand consideration in Germany (stated as a top-5% result against Happydemics’ benchmark set, benchmark not published), +28% brand image in Spain, brand attribution 3 points above benchmark. No spend, CPM or cost data published. Douglas in-store screen figures (210 screens, 155 stores) are from separate coverage, cited above. No beauty-specific benchmark is asserted beyond what the linked research supports.