OOH's job is the store visit, 98% of marketers say

A study the OAAA published with Winterberry Group — The Power of Proximity: OOH Media and Its Evolving Role in Connected Commerce — quietly validates the entire pitch behind a place-based beauty screen. The headline is that marketers no longer file out-of-home under “brand awareness”; they’re using it as a path-to-purchase channel, near the store, to move people the last few steps. 98% of surveyed marketers now fold OOH into purchase-driven initiatives, and 51% name driving retail traffic as a primary role. For a beauty operator, that’s not a new idea — it’s the idea you sell — but it now comes with third-party marketer-demand numbers attached.

What the study found

98% of marketers incorporate OOH into purchase-driven initiatives (OAAA × Winterberry Group, “Power of Proximity,” Mar 2026 — primary, survey).
68% of adults notice OOH ads on their way to stores; 42% say OOH has a significant impact on in-person purchases (OAAA × Winterberry — directional, attitudinal).
51% cite driving retail traffic and 51% reinforcing consistent brand messaging as OOH’s primary roles; 52% cite cost-effective reach (OAAA × Winterberry — directional).
Digital in-store screens are now standard kit: 63% of marketers deploy them, alongside 65% digital billboards and 57% digital promotional displays (OAAA × Winterberry — primary).
Demand is rising: 86% expect to increase OOH investment over two years; 37% project growth of 15%+ (OAAA × Winterberry — directional).

”Connected commerce” is the frame beauty was waiting for

For years the weakness in the beauty-screen pitch wasn’t the venue — it was the category OOH got filed under. Booked as brand awareness, a salon screen competes with a billboard on reach and loses. Booked as connected commerce — the bridge between seeing a product and buying it, near the point of sale — it competes on proximity and wins, because no billboard sits as close to the purchase as a screen inside the venue where the service or the shelf is. That reframing is the whole reason we separate two beauty-screen archetypes in retail media vs place-based DOOH; both are connected-commerce plays, just with different owners and data.

The “63% deploy digital in-store screens” figure is the one to sit with. In-store digital is no longer exotic — it’s a line item most marketers already run. A beauty venue screen is a flavour of in-store digital, which means the demand and the buying habit already exist; the job is to be buyable as part of it, the argument we made when retail media swallowed the in-store screen.

The number beauty should lean on: proximity to the visit

68% of adults noticing OOH on the way to stores, and half of marketers using it to drive retail traffic, is the demand-side mirror of beauty’s structural edge: the screen is in the venue the visit is for. That compresses the path from impression to action more than almost any other OOH placement — the mechanics of closing that loop are in QR and O2O attribution, and the audience-density case is in place-based: the fastest DOOH segment. The operator translation — turning “marketers want retail traffic” into a sellable media kit — is in how to add beauty DOOH to your media mix and selling to endemic beauty brands.

What an operator should take from this

Reposition the pitch as connected commerce, not awareness. The demand sits in the purchase-driven budget; sell to where the money is.
Lead with retail-traffic outcomes. “Drives the store visit” is what half of marketers say they want from OOH — say it back to them with venue proximity as the proof.
Anchor to in-store digital. 63% already buy it; position a beauty venue screen as a sharper, in-category instance of a line they fund, not a new experiment.

The caveat that keeps us honest

This is a general-OOH marketer survey (fielded March 2026) measuring attitudes and intentions, not beauty-specific performance — the 98% and 68% are about OOH broadly, and no beauty CPM, lift or footfall figure is asserted. Survey demand is also not delivered revenue; “86% expect to increase investment” is intent, not a booked budget. The read-across for beauty is positional: marketers are buying OOH as a path-to-purchase, in-store digital is already standard, and a beauty venue screen sits squarely in that slot. The segment’s economics stay modelled bottom-up in the Research, not extrapolated from a sentiment study.