Chart: Who Is The Biggest Of Them All In DOOH & Retail Media?

February 17, 2023 by Dave Haynes

Merchant banking firm Solomon Partners – which through partner Mark Boidman is very active in guiding M&A in the DOOH sector – has published an interesting but probably flawed graphic that details what are the biggest place-based digital OOH and retail media networks in the U.S. market.

The list of 16 companies details network size as of January 2023, but the first challenge is how size is assessed. Is it by number of locations, or by number of screens? Or both?

For sheer scale, the Walmart Connect retail media network would be the largest, with 170,000 screens. But there are less than 5,000 Walmarts in the U.S., so if location is the key metric, it’s big but not that big. If the measure is best done by locations, Touchtunes has roughly 60,000 locations, but these are screens on digital jukeboxes in bars and nightclubs. Each of these networks will have their pitch about why their audience is biggest, has the longest dwell times, footfall and so on. I think the characteristics of the audience also matters as much as screen and location counts.

It is likely there are networks missing off this list. The Atmosphere people say they have some 45,000 locations for their DOOH-driven streaming TV services.