Out-of-home advertising has long been one of the strongest value propositions in the media mix. While programmatic has completely transformed how digital OOH inventory is bought and sold — bringing it on par with other digital channels — direct sales of OOH inventory still require significant manual effort. From developing media plans and evaluating inventory options to negotiating pricing, trafficking creatives, executing buys, and managing reporting and invoicing, the process can be very time-consuming, especially when campaigns involve multiple venue categories, inventory types, and publishers across the highly fragmented OOH landscape.
But that process just got a lot faster.
Broadsign’s sell-side AI agent and digital marketing agency Draft Digital’s buy-side agent recently enabled the first end-to-end OOH media buy, transforming what would otherwise have been a complex operational effort into a seamless, rapid, and efficient experience. The campaign was for Lot of Happiness and ran on Global Netherlands premium inventory. It marked the first time an OOH media buy has been powered by agentic AI from beginning to end, using the brand’s campaign goals to inform audience and venue targeting, media selection, campaign setup, and execution. Together, the buy-side and sell-side agents coordinated complex tasks across parties, with human oversight and guardrails in place to ensure alignment with campaign objectives and compliance with local regulations and restrictions.
Read on to learn more about how the process unfolded — and what it means for the future of OOH.
Meet the campaign that made history
Lot of Happiness is a purpose-driven lottery based in the Netherlands with a straightforward premise: every ticket purchase benefits a cause chosen by the buyer, with roughly 50% of every sale going directly to charities like Make-A-Wish Nederland and the ALS Foundation Netherlands. As a growing organization without the deep media budgets of commercial lottery players, Lot of Happiness has built its growth strategy around operational creativity and innovation rather than outspending competitors. That orientation made them a natural early mover on this kind of experiment.
The campaign ran with a “Win-Win” message — rooted in the idea that every ticket purchase supports a charitable cause while giving participants the chance to win prizes. — delivering more than 830,000 impressions across screens inside supermarkets, shopping malls, gas stations, and on city streets throughout the Netherlands.
But as compelling as their social mission is, it’s not the creative that made this execution notable. It’s how the buy happened.
What typically required days to weeks of email-based coordination moved from brief to booked plan — with human approval — in less than 15 minutes. To understand how this came about, it’s worth taking a closer look at the agentic solutions involved and what they did.
A media plan built in minutes
On our end, we built a new sell-side AI agent layer on top of the existing infrastructure for Broadsign In-Advance — an automated booking capability that allows advertisers to reserve guaranteed DOOH ad space months in advance. The sell-side agent acted as an automated query and negotiation layer: when Draft Digital submitted the Lot of Happiness campaign brief through their buy-side agent, our agent returned available inventory from our In-Advance-enabled ecosystem of media owners that matched the campaign’s targeting criteria.
On the buy side, Draft Digital used Claude.ai to build the campaign brief and drive the planning process, translating campaign goals into targeting criteria, querying Broadsign’s available inventory, and generating a media plan for the buyer to review and approve.
Once the buyer reviewed and approved the plan, the booking was activated through the Broadsign SSP and delivered programmatically on Global Netherlands’ screens.
The Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) — an emerging open standard for enabling AI agents to communicate across the advertising supply chain — served as the connective tissue, providing a standardized way for the two agents to communicate across organizational boundaries.
Human review remained part of the process at key stages. On the agency side, that review followed what Jasmijn Kruis, Digital Marketing Consultant at Draft Digital, calls the “four-eye principle”: the buyer checks the plan, and then a second person checks the buyer’s work. “You don’t want an extra zero showing up where it’s not supposed to,” she explains. Creative was submitted through the standard approval workflow, ensuring compliance requirements remained fully intact throughout.
Crucially, agentic AI in media buying isn’t about removing human judgment; it’s about drastically reducing the manual labour surrounding it.
Why OOH is a natural fit for agentic AI
The case for agentic AI in OOH is, in many ways, even stronger than in other channels. As a context-driven medium, OOH is rich in data that goes beyond the audience, the creative, and the screen. Success depends on understanding how a brand’s message connects to a particular audience in a particular place at a particular time. With hundreds of thousands of campaigns to learn from, AI can help surface those patterns and apply them at scale.
“Overlaying AI atop our global static and digital OOH supply, together with advanced data and execution capabilities — such as screen-level audience indexes, dynamic creative, and guaranteed in-advance buying — opens the door to new possibilities for OOH planning and activation,” explains Broadsign CTO Bryan Mongeau. “This innovative collaboration is only the beginning.”
For Global Netherlands, what stood out about the collaboration was the sum of its parts: no single party could have done this alone. “By combining Broadsign’s infrastructure with buy-side intelligence, Draft Digital’s ambition, and our diverse digital out-of-home offering, we’ve shown how AI-driven planning can enhance the speed, precision, and flexibility of direct buys, mirroring the benefits of programmatic OOH,” says Mink Zwolsman, Business Development Director at Global Netherlands. “For us, this is a meaningful step toward making our inventory even more accessible to buyers who want seamless, omnichannel campaigns.”
The Lot of Happiness buy illustrates what that looks like in practice. Because the campaign ran alongside the client’s first television buy, Draft Digital designed the OOH targeting to synchronize with TV viewership patterns and reinforce the messaging — placing ads in areas with high concentrations of TV-viewing audiences, timed to appear before broadcast slots so viewers would see the OOH ads before seeing them on the living room screen. “We tested different types of pacing to see how the system would react,” explains Kruis, “and because we were also running on TV, we wanted the OOH ads to appear in areas with high concentrations of TV-watching audiences — at times before they would watch — so there would be a connection.”
That kind of multi-variable precision — layering viewership patterns, proximity patterns, and time-based targeting across an entire country — is exactly the kind of planning at which agentic AI excels. What would take a human planner days of data aggregation and analysis was built into the brief and surfaced instantaneously.
Getting ahead of the shift
This campaign was a first, but it won’t be the last. Whether you’re on the buy side or the sell side, agentic AI is going to transform OOH — here’s what to expect and how to embrace that shift.
If you’re an agency or media buyer
- Follow the audience. OOH is traditionally bought by selecting locations, but locations are really just proxies for the audiences that advertisers want to reach. AI-driven plans can select the inventory that indexes highest against a target audience, choosing from all available options — including niche placements and underutilized formats that humans may miss when trying to limit the buy to a few networks to reduce complexity. AI can handle the complexity and surface the best options to reach any desired audience.
- Embrace contextual targeting. Whether it’s a billboard during the morning commute, a screen at the grocery checkout, an office building elevator screen during lunchtime, or a TV behind the bar on gameday, the power of OOH lies in context: delivering a message in a particular place at a particular time. Connecting audiences to locations and times can be a labour-intensive process, but with the right data inputs, AI can make those connections quickly and help ensure the right context for every impression.
- Elevate from task execution to strategic orchestration. AI agents can absorb the burden of low-level tasks, freeing up humans to focus on the end-to-end process — ensuring brief quality, defining campaign objectives, directing creative, designing learning agendas, and gleaning campaign insights.
If you’re a media owner or publisher
- Expect a broader pool of buyers. AI will expose your inventory to a larger pool of demand, creating opportunities for more revenue — but it also means publishers will need to meet that demand with intelligent inventory allocation and yield optimization, as well as capabilities like competitive separation and timely advertiser and creative approvals. AI tools can help with all of the above.
- Improve discoverability. Buy-side agents evaluate inventory against a wide variety of criteria — including location, screen characteristics, supported ad formats, venue type, and screen-level audience indexing. The more comprehensive and accurate your screen-level data, the more likely your inventory is to be surfaced as a potential match when those criteria align.
- Maintain human oversight and control. AI will make buying and selling media smarter, faster, and more effective, but publishers remain in control. Identify the key decision points in your sales engine — pricing, approvals, restrictions — and define the processes, guardrails, monitoring, and reporting that ensure everything operates within your business parameters.
Whether you’re on the buy side or the sell side, success will depend on choosing the right partners who understand your goals and can help design and implement solutions that fit your needs.
What comes next
Broadsign powers close to three million static and digital signs globally — including the largest single source of programmatically enabled OOH supply in the world. While this pilot focused on Broadsign In-Advance-enabled inventory, the next phase will extend to all programmatically enabled screens. Our mission is to bring innovative technology to media owners to help them power their business — and agentic AI is the next chapter in that story.
Global OOH ad spend reached $37.18 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $56.1 billion by 2030, driven in large part by digitization, programmatic maturation, and a growing appetite for real-world presence amid continued screen fatigue. As buying workflows continue to evolve, AI will give OOH media owners the opportunity to ensure their inventory is positioned for the next evolution of media planning and activation.
The question is no longer whether agentic workflows will play a role in media buying, but how quickly the industry will adapt to capitalize on the opportunity. Here at Broadsign, we’re already working with OOH media owners to help them prepare for what comes next.
