Oct 27, 2025
Print vs Digital in Outdoor Advertising
Is Digital Out of Home Advertising Taking Over Print?
Hot potato, hot potato! Ever since the first proper billboards (yes, those colourful circus posters in 1835-or-so New York, for those of you who still remember the good-old-days) large-scale ads have been plastering our eyeballs with colossal visuals. It was all print, baby! Fast-forward to today in 2025, and digital screens have bum-rushed the same prime ad real estate.
While the old reliables, like TV and print, are quietly losing ground, DOOH is on the rise. In fact, DOOH (Digital Out of Home) is well on track to account for a whopping 42 percent of all OOH revenue this year according to WPP’s media investment company GroupM https://www.wppmedia.com/news/tyny-2025
In the Nordics, programmatic DOOH investment is expected to grow by around 37% in the next year; that’s well above the global average of 28% in 2024. Advertisers are following audiences out of their living rooms and into the streets, train stations, and shopping centers. According to an article published in Digital News Today, programmatic DOOH is very widely accepted already in the Nordics:
"Nearly all Nordic marketers, 99%, plan to invest in programmatic DOOH over the next 12 months, and 90% of Nordic marketers believe programmatic DOOH offers some of the most innovative opportunities."
https://www.digitalsignagetoday.com/news/dooh-adoption-in-nordic-region-outpacing-global-average/
So, while a lot of other channels are seeing their budgets trimmed, DOOH seems to be where the action is in the 2020s; the rising star of outdoor media that’s rewriting what “prime time” really means. Let us dig a bit deeper…
Why Is DOOH the Talk of the Town?
Unlike ads you skip over when doom scrolling on your phone, or the ad breaks wedged between streaming shows, outdoor screens live in rare, uncluttered space. A single sign can point to a shop right around the corner, or perhaps a new apartment for sale in the very building it lights up. There’s no noise; no distraction. Just a message perfectly placed in the real world, exactly where action happens. Outdoors is, in that sense, premium media. It is that, not because it shouts the loudest – but because it stands alone. And it can be bought programmatically…
In other words, programmatic buying has hit the streets (pun intended). Brands can now buy outdoor inventory directly from networks or plug into it programmatically, unlocking targeting that was totally unthinkable just a few years ago. Time of day, weather, location, audience movement, all fair game. It’s the meeting point of old-school impact and digital precision; the billboard that knows when to talk, to whom, and even what tone to use!
News speak for it as well. Take as an example T-Mobile’s recent move: they’re taking over Vistar Media for about $600 million US to gain full control of real-time outdoor ad tech across 1.1 million digital screens. Strong move, likely smart as well…
Meanwhile, loosely referencing an article on BM ( https://bmoutdoor.com/info/Transforming-OOH-and-DOOH ) Ann Tarasewicz, CEO at Axis, said 2025 year is all about AI personalization, programmatic buying, and real-time interactivity. The future is ads that change your message based on the weather, traffic..
And on the more traditional side (or should we call it “local news”), JCDecaux just recently signed what’s being called the Nordic region’s biggest ad deal with SL in Stockholm. Even with thousands of new digital screens in the mix, a big part of the ads will remain printed. The logic? Fewer placements, but sharper, more impactful ones. It’s also a reminder that while DOOH is racing ahead with AI and programmatic, print still holds a strong, complementary role — not as a relic, but as part of a smarter, hybrid future.
https://signprint.se/2025/08/06/nordens-storsta-reklamaffar-jattestort-behov-av-tryckt-material/
Ad Layer has been helping clients create dynamic DOOH campaigns for a long time. This one was XXL in Sweden in 2021, read more of the campaign here.
Nordic Cities: We Are Here and We See Clearly that everything is going digital!
We see it in Stockholm and Oslo. Suddenly the daily commute in the Nordic capitals feels like a Times Square mashup. Gigantic screens replacing vinyl prints, scrolling ads for overpriced luxury hand-bags, fatty snacks, and those oh-so-addictive streaming services. Sure, print has that nostalgic charm; but when did nostalgia deliver you metrics like weather-targeted full-motion ads do?
Screens are replacing print in a lot of places. Even in-store, or so called “retail media” has been picking up faster than AI stocks, and the easiest way to notice this, might just be all those new screens in groceries stores. But how many DOOH screens are there today? Hard to say, but a quick walk outside in Central Stockholm confirms that the number must be huge.. Let's look at this locally through a couple of stats: in Stockholm, JCDecaux has more than 225 screens ( https://en.jcdecaux.se/jcdecaux-sweden-launches-programmatic-buying-via-viooh/ ) while in Oslo, just the metro has more than 350 digital screens! And every year, there are more and more new ones. So no shortage of displays!
We at Ad Layer still remember when your printed masterpiece would rule a billboard for two months. Today that's often seen as “costly”. A well-performing digital ad might stay in rotation for 2 weeks,, until something in it gets changed. Today, screens let you rotate ads across hundreds of locations, target specific weekdays, hours, or even the first Nordic subzero snowy days with all that black ice giving asphalt a shiny “icing” (perfect time for reminding commuters that they should already be on grippy winter wheels by then, in case you are a tyre manufacturer looking to expand their share of the cake). All because the tech exists: weather-triggered ads, programmatic swaps, flexible inventory.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly in 2025: Do people on Reddit agree on all of this?
“With DOOH, you can remarket to users who walked past your signage/billboard…”
“Ooh/Dooh when done right, gives your brand a unique focus… luxury brands targeting the more affluent neighbourhoods, etc.”
-Random Reddit users who obviously are the most reliable source of information on any given topic.
The Verdict: Digital Is Now… But Print’s Occasional Groove Still Works
Just like the self-proclaimed experts in Reddit, we at Ad Layer believe (read: know) the future is digital, and it’s not waiting for your RSVP. Still, nostalgia is like an old mixtape you keep in the very back of your top drawer: it probably won’t stream so well, but it’ll always hit hard when you stick it into your Walkman.
Classic print will likely continue to serve as a tactile showpiece, or as a heritage brand’s warm upper class handshake aimed at those who can afford it (or are willing to take a loan). But you're more into throwing ads at real estate that wants toggling, targeting, and tech-savvy swagger, right? If the answer is yes, then digital out of home is most certainly calling your name. While not killing print, digital is definitely taking over.
We have seen this happen before; it is not our first rodeo. Video killed the radiostar. What came in the 90s? Tamagochi? Oh wait, you mean the internet? Correct. And so came the banner ads we see when scrolling. What happened to the printed media? It did not die – but it is way easier to spot teenagers doing dance videos for TikTok than Gen-Z’ers reading newspapers on park benches. Go figure... The world of media and advertising keeps on changing, as the tech progresses, that is a given. Printed ads continue to exist but the hot cake of the 2020s might just be Programmatic DOOH.
Oh, the great outdoors!
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