Most DOOH operators don't measure ROI

A benchmark study out this month puts a hard number on the industry’s quietest problem: 76.5% of digital-signage operators don’t formally measure return on investment. Kitcast’s State of Digital Signage 2026 — anonymised telemetry from tens of thousands of screens plus a survey of 515 operators — finds that most run screens on faith, evaluate them by vibe, and still call the deployment a success. For internal comms or a menu board, that’s survivable. For a beauty network trying to sell screen-time to brands, it’s fatal: the thing you’re not measuring is the thing you’re selling. Measurement isn’t a report you bolt on afterward — it’s the product.

The gap is bigger than it looks — and worse for ad networks

“Digital signage” is a broad tent: corporate comms, wayfinding, menu boards, and ad-funded networks all sit under it. For the first three, “no ROI measurement” is defensible — the screen’s job is to inform, not to earn, so success really is softer. But an ad-funded network is a different animal: its entire value proposition is that a brand’s money produces a brand’s outcome. If you can’t measure that, you don’t have a soft-measurement problem — you have no product. A beauty network is squarely in this second camp, which is why the 76% headline should read, for an operator, as a competitive opening: the bar to clear is embarrassingly low, and clearing it is the whole game. We make this the spine of DOOH measurement maturity and why beauty DOOH networks fail.

Vibe-measurement is exactly what brands won’t fund

The study’s most telling finding isn’t the 76% — it’s that most operators call unmeasured deployments successful. That self-satisfaction is the trap. A salon owner who thinks “the screen looks great and clients like it” has measured communication, not return, and a brand buyer can’t put communication in a media plan. The buy-side is moving the opposite direction — toward proof of play, independent verification, and attributable outcomes — so a network that measures by vibe is drifting away from the money, not toward it. The fix isn’t exotic: proof of play plus a footfall or QR-based O2O read is enough to move from “we think it works” to “here’s what it delivered” — the exact upgrade we walk through in how to measure effectiveness and measuring & reporting to clients.

What a beauty operator should take from this

Measurement is the product, not the paperwork. Decide what outcome you sell (plays delivered, footfall, QR conversions) before you sell a single slot — see building a media kit that sells.
Clear the low bar deliberately. Three-quarters of the field reports nothing financial; a network that reports anything verifiable is already differentiated.
Don’t confuse “clients like it” with “it worked.” The first sells the screen to the salon; only the second sells the screen to a brand.

The caveat that keeps us honest

This is a digital-signage-wide survey, not a beauty study and not a DOOH-advertising-only one — its 76% mixes ad networks with corporate comms and menu boards where ROI genuinely isn’t the point, so the figure overstates the gap for ad-funded operators specifically. The numbers are operator self-reports aggregated by a signage-software vendor, not audited spend or outcomes, and none of them is a beauty benchmark. The durable read-across is directional and structural: the industry measures itself poorly, buyers increasingly won’t accept that, and for an ad-funded beauty network measurement is the difference between inventory and décor. Beauty economics stay modelled bottom-up in the Research.