Programmatic DOOH runs on PMPs and portrait

On 5 August, Broadsign previewed its 2026 Programmatic DOOH Trends Report — the first edition built on combined Broadsign and Place Exchange transaction data, following Broadsign’s acquisition of the SSP in November 2025. That merger matters before any finding does: the industry’s two most-cited programmatic datasets are now one dataset, and the Place Exchange series we have leaned on for years is now a component of a larger, less independent number.

The preview publishes shares, not prices. Read as shares, three of them are directly actionable for a beauty network.

Key findings

Dataset: aggregated transactions across 1.7 million programmatically-enabled screens and over 1.5 trillion available impressions per month, covering full-year 2025 and Q1 2026 (Broadsign / Place Exchange — primary, two-SSP).
Deal types: custom PMPs 65.8% and always-on PMPs 20.5% of spend — ~86% private marketplace (Broadsign — primary).
Top advertiser categories by spend: Food & Drink 18.5%, Shopping 11.8%, Personal Finance 10.5%, Technology 8.9% (Broadsign — primary).
Venue mix: Outdoor 48.4%, Retail 18.5%, Transit 12.7%, Entertainment 10.4% (Broadsign — primary).
Creative: the two dominant video sizes — 1080×1920 (portrait) and 1920×1080 — together took 77% of programmatic video spend; the top three display sizes took 79% of display spend (Broadsign — primary).
The read: beauty appears in none of the published category or venue rows, and that absence is the most useful finding in the report (BDOOH analysis).

What the numbers say

Private marketplaces are not a stage, they’re the market. At ~86% of spend across custom and always-on PMPs, the open exchange is a rounding error in how programmatic DOOH actually clears. This has been directionally true in every Place Exchange edition; what’s new is that it holds at 1.7 million screens across two merged supply pools. The deal-type mix is not converging on open auction over time — it is settling on curation.

Portrait is a first-class format. A vertical 1080×1920 canvas sharing the top of the video-spend table with landscape is a quietly important fact for anyone selling salon or mirror inventory. Buyers are already producing and trafficking portrait creative at scale for transit and retail; a beauty network asking for it is asking for something the buy side already has on the shelf.

The category table is a demand map with a hole in it. Food and drink, shopping, personal finance, technology. These are the advertisers that have industrialised programmatic DOOH buying. Beauty is not among them — which is exactly what our endemic advertiser map predicts, and exactly why beauty inventory currently sells better by conversation than by auction.

The venue table is where the honest limitation sits. Outdoor, retail, transit and entertainment account for about 90% of spend between them. Health & Beauty venues — category 4 in the OpenOOH taxonomy, with Salon at 402 and Spa at 403 — sit inside whatever residual the report doesn’t break out. Being unlisted is not the same as being unsold, but it does mean no buyer is planning against a published beauty-venue benchmark.

What it means for beauty

Build the PMP first, the open-exchange listing second. If ~86% of money moves through private deals, a beauty network’s entire commercial surface should be curated PMP packages with named audiences and dayparts, not an open-exchange listing hoping to be discovered. The mechanics of getting there are in integrating with SSPs and the trade-offs in PG vs PMP vs open exchange.
Stop treating portrait as an obstacle. Vertical is the mirror’s native geometry and it is already a majority-adjacent format in programmatic video spend. Spec it straight from the DOOH creative spec reference and brief it with creative for salon and mirror screens rather than apologising for it in a media kit.
Expect to import demand, not inherit it. The categories doing the spending are not beauty. That’s the whole argument of endemic vs non-endemic, decided: a beauty network that only chases beauty brands is fishing in the one pool that isn’t programmatically fluent yet, while food, retail and finance buyers are already trading at scale.
Absence from the venue chart is a sales problem, not a product problem. Buyers plan against the rows they can see. Until Health & Beauty is broken out, a beauty network has to supply its own evidence — which is the job of how to measure effectiveness and building a media kit that sells.

The caveat that keeps us honest

This is a vendor preview of a vendor report, and the vendor now owns both SSPs in the sample. That concentration cuts both ways: the dataset is larger and more global than any single-SSP edition, and it is also less independent — a single company’s supply-side view of its own marketplaces, not a market census. The preview publishes no blended CPM, so our programmatic OOH CPM tracker gains no new price point from it. And nothing here is beauty-specific: there is still no reliable public beauty CPM, and every share above is cross-venue.

Sources

Broadsign — “A sneak peek at the data-backed findings in our 2026 Programmatic DOOH Trends Report,” 5 Aug 2026: aggregated transaction data from the Broadsign and Place Exchange SSPs, 1.7m programmatically-enabled screens, 1.5tn+ monthly available impressions, full-year 2025 plus Q1 2026; deal types (custom PMP 65.8%, always-on PMP 20.5%); categories (Food & Drink 18.5%, Shopping 11.8%, Personal Finance 10.5%, Technology 8.9%); venues (Outdoor 48.4%, Retail 18.5%, Transit 12.7%, Entertainment 10.4%); formats (1080×1920 and 1920×1080 = 77% of video spend; top three display sizes = 79% of display spend). Primary but single-vendor, two-SSP — directional as a market-wide read. Broadsign — “Broadsign Announces Acquisition of Place Exchange,” Nov 2025 (context for the merged dataset). No beauty-specific benchmark is asserted; beauty venue, format and pricing work lives in the Research and Guides.