Samsung Turning Commercial Screens Into Ad Inventory
The digital screens already operating inside restaurants, retailers, hotels, gyms, and other commercial properties are increasingly becoming more than signage. They are becoming media inventory. Samsung Electronics America and Smartify Media are accelerating that transition through a partnership connecting Samsung commercial displays to Smartify’s digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising network.
Samsung VXT Ads, Powered by Smartify, allows participating display owners to make screen inventory available to local, direct, and national advertisers without installing additional hardware or changing their existing display infrastructure. The implications extend beyond creating another revenue stream for screen owners.
By making existing commercial displays easier to activate programmatically, Samsung and Smartify could significantly expand the supply of place-based DOOH inventory available to advertisers at a time when spending on the channel is accelerating.
Turning Signage Into Media
Samsung VXT is the company’s cloud-based platform for managing commercial displays across individual locations or large portfolios. Smartify’s advertising infrastructure is being integrated directly into that environment, giving businesses the option to monetize portions of their screen time while maintaining control over their own content and scheduling.
The model removes much of the friction traditionally associated with turning signage into advertising inventory. Smartify manages the advertising marketplace, campaign delivery, monitoring, and operational support, while Samsung supplies the display and content-management infrastructure already operating inside commercial locations. A screen purchased for menus, promotions, wayfinding, or other business content can potentially become a revenue-producing media asset during available portions of its schedule.
DOOH Is Already Gaining Advertising Dollars
The expansion arrives as advertisers are putting significantly more money into out-of-home media. U.S. OOH revenue increased 10.7% year over year during the second quarter of 2026 to $3.16 billion, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), marking the first quarter in which industry revenue surpassed $3 billion. Digital formats are growing considerably faster, with DOOH revenue increasing 18.5% and representing 38.4% of total OOH revenue during the quarter.
The growth is occurring alongside an effort to make OOH more accountable to advertisers. Earlier this year, Street Fight examined how OAAA and Geopath are pushing OOH deeper into performance media through next-generation audience measurement designed to improve attribution, targeting, forecasting, interoperability, and advertiser confidence. OAAA President and CEO Anna Bager told Street Fight that the objective is measurement capable of withstanding the same CMO and CFO scrutiny applied to digital and television investments.
That combination matters for Samsung and Smartify. More physical screens are becoming programmatically available while the industry is simultaneously making those impressions easier to measure and compare with other media. Expanding inventory that can also meet increasingly rigorous performance standards is considerably more valuable than simply adding more screens.
Retail Media Is Becoming More Interoperable
The development also illustrates how the boundaries between digital signage, DOOH, and retail media continue to blur. Retail media has expanded beyond sponsored search and ecommerce placements into connected TV, off-site advertising, and physical stores. Commercial screens are becoming another layer of that infrastructure as technology makes them easier to connect to national advertising demand.
The direction resembles another trend Street Fight has been tracking. Walmart’s partnership with Magnite expanded access to Walmart Connect audience data and measurement capabilities through external advertising platforms. The significance was less about another integration than reducing friction between valuable media assets and the platforms agencies already use to buy advertising.
Samsung and Smartify approach that challenge from the inventory side. Rather than requiring commercial properties to construct their own media networks or sales infrastructure, existing displays can connect into a broader marketplace. In both cases, interoperability can increase the value of media assets by making them easier to access through established buying and measurement workflows.
Local Screens Can Create National Scale
Smartify already operates across more than 40 major U.S. markets, spanning storefronts, shopping centers, lifestyle destinations, and other commercial environments. Integrating its marketplace into Samsung VXT reduces the technical hurdle for additional properties to participate, potentially creating a much larger pool of national and local inventory.
Smartify CEO Joe Kunigonis told Street Fight that connecting Smartify’s advertising platform and infrastructure with Samsung’s commercial display ecosystem gives brands access to “a much broader pool of national and local inventory” while managed services can help standardize advertising operations across participating locations.
“That expanded scale creates new performance opportunities for advertisers while helping accelerate DOOH’s evolution into a high-reach media channel that can deliver audiences at a scale few other platforms can match,” Kunigonis said.
That scale is particularly important. DOOH has often been positioned around location and context, but connecting large numbers of existing commercial displays to programmatic demand creates the potential to combine local precision with aggregate national reach. For agencies, fragmented local inventory becomes easier to assemble into campaigns spanning multiple markets and commercial environments.
Physical Locations Are Becoming Media Infrastructure
For multi-location operators, screens can continue promoting their own products and services while unused inventory potentially generates advertising revenue. Samsung and Smartify expect adoption across retail, commercial real estate, automotive services, hospitality, fitness, and restaurants, categories where large numbers of commercial displays are already deployed.
The larger shift is that the distinction between operating a display and operating a media asset is becoming less clear. Programmatic technology is reaching deeper into physical locations, OOH measurement is becoming more performance-oriented, and retail media is becoming more interoperable with the broader advertising ecosystem.
Samsung and Smartify bring those trends together. The physical spaces where consumers shop, eat, work, exercise, and receive services are not simply places where advertising can appear. Increasingly, the technology already installed inside those locations is becoming part of the media infrastructure itself.
