Broadsign and Partners Execute Fully Agentic OOH Campaign
Broadsign, Global Netherlands, and Draft Digital have demonstrated what may be the first fully agentic OOH (out-of-home) campaign, with autonomous AI agents handling everything from media planning to campaign execution. The project offers an early glimpse into how AI could reshape media buying, hyperlocal targeting, and the future role of marketers.
Broadsign and Global Netherlands teamed up to use AI agents, which successfully planned, booked, and executed a fully AI-powered agentic OOH campaign for Lot of Happiness on OOH inventory.
In a first for the medium, Broadsign’s sell-side AI agent and digital marketing agency Draft Digital’s buy-side agent worked together. They completed audience and venue targeting, media selection, campaign setup, creative workflow and approvals, and execution based on the campaign goals.
Broadsign’s Chief Technology Officer Bryan Mongeau sat down with StreetFight to go into more detail.
If AI agents can autonomously plan and execute OOH campaigns, how might that change the role of local market expertise in selecting the right neighborhoods, venues, and screens?
Roles will change over time, freeing buyers from having to engage in low-value toil and enabling more strategic steering of campaign plans vs their objectives. Over time, buy-side agents will learn from these inputs and become increasingly sophisticated, eventually incorporating that local market expertise and knowledge that goes into selecting the right assets to meet a campaign’s goal.
How can AI-driven OOH buying better account for hyperlocal context, such as foot traffic patterns, community behavior, or time-of-day nuances, rather than just optimizing for scale and efficiency?
With traditional OOH buying, successfully implementing that hyperlocal context is hard. Foot traffic data needs to be cobbled together across media owners, and booking a lot of time-of-day tranches across many screens and many media owners can be hard to do. AI-driven agentic OOH buying can apply the data overlays upstream and completely automate even the most complicated hyperlocal campaigns.
What does fully automated OOH buying mean for smaller, independent media owners or local operators?
We believe that for smaller operators, agentic OOH buying will help them get their fair share of the media budget when responding to campaign briefs. In particular, the traditional manual buying process entails a lot of back and forth with media owners, which disincentivizes including a few niche screens here and there, even if they index better against the target audience. Automated buying solves that.
How might this kind of agentic workflow impact the way creative is localized, especially when messaging needs to reflect specific communities or cultural moments?
In traditional OOH, dynamic creative execution across media owners is challenging. Multiple video formats, resolutions, regulations, exclusions and varying DCO capabilities create a lot of friction. Buy-side agents can understand all these parameters and take hyper-local input data and serialize it down to each screen’s preferred format, making community and culturally aware creative easier to execute.
With AI agents handling everything from targeting to execution, where should human oversight remain, particularly when campaigns intersect with local sensitivities or public Spaces?
The campaign plan that the agents produce should still be reviewed by agency experts and the advertisers themselves to ensure it meets the campaign objectives. Media owners still need to approve the creative coming through to ensure compliance with local regulations and restrictions. Pacing of spend should also be monitored from time to time to ensure the right adjustments are being made along the way.
Could this technology enable more real-time, event-driven local activations (e.g.,weather, sports wins, neighborhood events), and what infrastructure is still needed to make that viable at scale?
Agentic buying workflows can help get these types of campaigns booked quicker and with less friction. Event-driven local activations often require dynamic creative, which buy-side agents can help create as well.
As OOH becomes as easy to buy as digital media, how should brands rethink the role of physical-world touchpoints in their local marketing mix, especially in bridging online-to-offline engagement?
OOH is a powerful vehicle for brands, especially for bridging that online-to-offline engagement. Clever marketers can now weave narratives that flow from physical to digital touchpoints seamlessly. The right OOH creative in a high-trust public space can drive brand awareness and initiate digital follow through by QR code, short urls, hashtags, or simply by looking it up.
