Street level beats billboards, stadium study finds

A measurement firm just put a number on something street-level operators have argued for years. StreetMetrics (published via OOH Today, 14 July 2026) indexed every actively-mapped stationary OOH unit within two miles of five MLB stadiums — Fenway, Wrigley, Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, Citizens Bank Park — against a sports/live-events fan composite. Nearly 1,700 units over a four-week window. The result inverts the price hierarchy: transit shelters indexed 561, kiosks 398, junior posters 395 — and the classic billboard, the format the category is named after, came in at 311. Sidewalk height beat highway scale by 1.8× for the audience actually walking to the game.

What happened

The mechanism is unglamorous and solid: a stadium crowd is a pedestrian audience for the last half-mile. Formats mounted at eye level on the sidewalk — shelters, kiosks, junior posters — sit inside that foot traffic; billboards are angled at cars on arterials the crowd may never drive. Index the same geography against the same audience and the foot-traffic formats win, price lists notwithstanding. One study, one measurement vendor, a proprietary index — treat the specific numbers as directional. But the direction agrees with everything attention research keeps finding: proximity and eye level buy attention, size buys distance.

What it means for beauty

Beauty’s street play has always leaned on exactly this layer — the street-as-demo formats are shelters and urban panels, not highway bulletins. This study is the measurement argument for why: the beauty audience walks to the salon, the counter, the clinic. A screen at pedestrian eye level within the walk is structurally better positioned than a bigger unit a block of traffic away — the same proximity logic that makes place-based the fastest-growing DOOH segment.

It also flatters the venue screen itself. If a shelter near the venue out-indexes a billboard, the screen inside the venue — where dwell is measured in minutes, not glances — is the logical end of the same curve, with the caveat we maintain about long dwell. For operators, the practical use is commercial: an index like this is the kind of third-party frame that belongs in a media kit when a buyer asks why a salon-street network prices the way it does, and it strengthens the impression-quality argument against raw-count comparisons.

The caveat that keeps us honest

This is a single four-week study by one measurement vendor with a proprietary audience index, run around baseball stadiums — not beauty venues, and not a beauty audience. The indices (561 / 398 / 395 / 311) are directional, and nothing here is a salon benchmark. What transfers is the principle — pedestrian-level, destination-proximate formats out-deliver distant scale for on-foot audiences — which is an argument our venue-level Research makes independently.