In-store screens will drive most of DOOH's growth

Where does DOOH’s growth actually come from? A forecast now circulating across the trade press gives a blunt answer: in-store retail media is set to drive 55.9% of all DOOH ad-spend growth between 2025 and 2029 — more than half of the category’s expansion, from screens inside physical retail. The same forecast bundle puts DOOH at 42.3% of all OOH by 2029 on a ~7.6% CAGR. Read together, they say the money isn’t just moving to digital out-of-home — it’s moving to a specific corner of it: the retailer-owned screen at the shelf.

What happened

This is a projection, not a print of transacted spend — treat the exact 55.9% as directional. But the direction squares with everything else on the board: the retail-media-versus-place-based collision has been the defining tension of the year, and forecasts now put over half of DOOH’s new money inside retail environments. It’s the same signal as retailers moving to own their in-store media stack and place-based being the fastest-growing DOOH segment — the growth is indoors, contextual and close to purchase.

What it means for beauty

It sharpens where the independent network’s ground is. If retailer-owned in-store screens capture the bulk of DOOH growth, an independent beauty network doesn’t win by competing for the Sephora shelf — the retailer owns that. Its territory is the venues retail media doesn’t reach: salons, clinics, spas, barbershops. The retail-media-vs-place-based guide draws that line, and this forecast is why the line matters.
Beauty retail is squarely in the growth zone. Drugstores, department-store beauty halls and Sephora-type chains are exactly the “in-store retail media” this number describes — which is why beauty brands buying DOOH at the store is not an outlier but the leading edge of the trend.
Own the non-retail moment. A salon or clinic reaches the beauty consumer in a captive, high-dwell moment the retail screen never gets — the seated appointment, not the checkout queue. That’s the structural edge an independent network sells while the retail money floods the shelf.

The caveat that keeps us honest

These are forecast figures aggregated across trade coverage — a projection of where growth goes, not measured spend, and “in-store retail media” means retailer-owned store screens, not beauty salons. No beauty-specific number is asserted here. The transferable point is directional and structural: DOOH growth is concentrating inside retail, which pushes independent beauty DOOH toward the non-retail venues that are its real territory. Category sizing stays modelled bottom-up in the Research.