Digital-out-of-Home enjoyed stable growth over the last years. But now that it is competing with other digital channels on the same level, the demand for precise measurement is growing. In his Year in Review, Bill Evans, CEO of Bluezoo, takes a look at this development, and explains how there could be a turning point for 2026.
Across the global DooH and digital signage industry, 2025 accelerated a major shift in focus. Conversations that once revolved around screen technology, hardware durability, and media player integration have been largely resolved. Today, the industry’s attention has shifted toward artificial intelligence, the growth of retail media networks, standardized audience measurement, and the evolution of long-standing business practices. Transparent measurement is no longer an optional enhancement but is a foundational requirement to demonstrate value, optimize campaigns, and enable confidence in programmatic transactions.
The role of Joint Industry Currencies (JICs) entered into a period of reappraisal in 2025, signaling a broader industry reckoning with measurement policies. Following the enormous success of Move 2.0 in Australia, Charles Parry-Okeden made a compelling case at the WOO conference in Seoul for modernizing and standardizing measurement through JICs. Adoption of a highly accurate national currency dramatically boosted Australia’s OoH market. Now, several countries are evaluating new technologies and moving away from outdated methodologies whose accuracy and relevance have diminished. These developments underscore the increasing role of audience measurement in defining standards that will ensure confidence in advertising transactions.
At the same time, the accelerating adoption of programmatic DooH has intensified pressure to clearly define how impressions are forecast, counted, and audited. Programmatic DooH brings agility, scale, and the potential for real-time optimization, but also exposes the limitations of inconsistent measurement practices, ambiguous impressions multipliers, and inadequate auditing. These gaps reduce comparability across networks and complicate buying decisions. For advertisers, this creates risk; for media owners, it raises the stakes to prove that campaigns deliver what they promise. Precise, auditable audience measurement has therefore become a core driver of trust and a prerequisite for programmatic DooH to reach its full potential.
Consistent measurement is key
Yet the majority of DooH is still traded non-programmatically. Programmatic buying requires real-time, auditable, spatially granular data … something traditional measurement practices cannot provide. To participate fully in digital trading models, media owners will need measurement tools that operate at programmatic speed. OoH will need to rethink business practices to remain competitive as the industry transforms. This reinforces the importance of consistent, trusted measurement and clarifies the roles of JICs and independent measurement providers to support the next era of DooH.
Bluezoo’s growth this past year has been consistent with the industry’s accelerating reliance on accurate, privacy-first measurement. Throughout 2025, Bluezoo connected with a broad set of industries and partners, demonstrating how passive Wifi measurement is becoming integral across both retail-focused and large-scale DooH networks.
In retail media, operators and technology platforms including LDSK, Sensmi, and Nexmosphere integrated Bluezoo audience measurement into digital signage deployments, using real-time insights to optimize content and provide more precise OTS counts. Across the larger DooH ecosystem, manufacturers and platform providers such as Brightsign, Broadsign, and Vistar Media leveraged our technology to support programmatic transactions and deliver transparent, auditable reporting. Together, these collaborations reflect the breadth of Bluezoo’s growth in 2025 across retail spaces, transit hubs, and urban streetscapes.
A unifying theme across these collaborations is that measurement has become critical infrastructure. Media owners have begun sharing analytics with municipalities for smart city initiatives. For example, JC Decaux provides anonymized foot-traffic analytics from Bluezoo to Macau City to support urban planning and public space management. Across sectors, partners rely on Bluezoo not only to validate impressions, but to provide a privacy-safe, auditable foundation for planning, optimization, and strategic decision-making.
If 2025 was the turning point, then 2026 will be the “Year of Audience Measurement”. The year when accurate, privacy-safe, independently auditable data becomes the defining currency of OoH. Bluezoo enters the new year focused on advancing the precision, real-time reliability, and transparency of our measurement platform. We will continue expanding capabilities, broadening integrations, and supporting partners across DooH, retail media, municipal deployments, and the growing programmatic landscape.
Better measurement doesn’t just validate DooH value, it unlocks its potential. Bluezoo is committed to helping lead that future.