Broadsign today announced that its sell-side AI agent and digital marketing agency Draft Digital's buy-side agent have together planned, booked, and executed what the companies describe as the first fully agentic AI-powered out-of-home (OOH) campaign. The media buy was conducted for Dutch charity lottery Lot of Happiness across premium OOH inventory owned by Global Netherlands. The announcement, dated May 27, 2026, originates from Montreal, where Broadsign is headquartered.

The campaign is being positioned as a milestone in agentic advertising - the use of autonomous AI systems capable of completing complex, multi-step tasks across parties without requiring a human to initiate each step. What sets this execution apart from earlier automation experiments is the end-to-end scope: two independent AI agents, one on the sell side and one on the buy side, coordinated the entire lifecycle of the media buy. That includes audience and venue targeting, media selection, campaign setup, creative workflow management, approvals, and final execution.

How the agentic pipeline worked

The technical architecture relied on the AdCP protocol - the Advertising Context Protocol - as the communication standard between the two agents. AdCP launched on October 15, 2025, developed by a coalition including Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic, Swivel, Triton Digital, and Optable, and built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. It provides a unified communication layer allowing AI agents to discover inventory, compare pricing, and activate campaigns across different platforms without requiring custom integration work for each system.

In this deployment, Broadsign's sell-side agent sat on top of the company's OOH sell-side technology and data infrastructure, while Draft Digital's buy-side agent handled planning and procurement decisions on behalf of the advertiser. The two agents coordinated complex tasks across parties rapidly, operating with human oversight and guardrails throughout.

According to Broadsign, the data inputs driving the agents included screen-level audience indexes - a granular form of location-based measurement that estimates audience composition at the level of individual display units rather than broader geographic areas. The system also incorporated dynamic creative capabilities and guaranteed in-advance buying functionality, meaning inventory commitments were made before the campaign launched rather than through real-time bidding. Broadsign had introduced in-advance programmatic DOOH transaction capabilities through a StackAdapt partnership in November 2025.

The distinction between this implementation and earlier OOH automation efforts matters technically. Most existing automation layers digital interfaces onto traditional workflows, essentially giving humans faster tools. An agentic approach removes the human from moment-to-moment decisions, delegating them to the AI within defined boundaries. According to Broadsign, the collaboration "moved beyond chatbots layered over existing tools."

The parties involved

Four organisations participated directly in the campaign. Broadsign, the Montreal-based OOH technology company, provided the sell-side agent and the underlying platform infrastructure. According to Broadsign, more than 2.8 million static and digital signs - along roadways and in airports, shopping malls, grocery and convenience stores, health clinics, transit systems, and other environments - run on Broadsign systems. The company acquired Place Exchange in November 2025, expanding its programmatically transactable inventory to 1.8 million screens globally and bringing the combined workforce to 370 people. Place Exchange operates as the largest independent supply-side platform for digital OOH.

Draft Digital, the buy-side agency, contributed the agent that handled planning and procurement. The agency describes itself as focused on agentic advertising - a model in which AI systems handle operational media-buying tasks so that human teams can concentrate on strategy.

Global Netherlands served as the media owner providing the OOH inventory. The company operates a nationwide digital out-of-home network across high streets, supermarkets, shopping centres, railway stations, petrol stations, and motorways in the Netherlands.

Lot of Happiness is the advertiser. According to Broadsign, the charity lottery has approximately 100,000 participants and has donated over 50 million euros to good causes. The organisation operates without the media budgets typical of larger lottery operators, relying instead on efficiency and targeting precision to compete.

What the participants said

Bryan Mongeau, chief technology officer of Broadsign, described the campaign as the beginning of a broader shift. "Agentic AI allows us to double down on our value proposition of leveraging technology to support media owners in achieving their business goals," Mongeau said. "Overlaying AI atop our global static and digital OOH supply, in concert with advanced data and execution capabilities, such as screen-level audience indexes, dynamic creative, guaranteed in-advance buying, and more, sets the stage for a paradigm shift that will transform the OOH business. This innovative collaboration is only the beginning."

Aliks Röling, Digital Marketing Consultant at Draft Digital, framed it through the lens of the agency's history with the format. "A number of us at Draft Digital were early adopters of programmatic DOOH years ago, so being first to move on this next leap, fully agentic OOH, is genuinely exciting," Röling said. "Agentic advertising lets us build true multichannel experiences for our clients, backed by first-party performance data and a much cleaner ecosystem. It pushes us into tighter collaboration with quality publishers and partners and ultimately delivers sharper strategic impact for brands like Lot of Happiness."

From the advertiser's side, Leo Nijs, Online Marketer at Lot of Happiness, pointed to the scale mismatch that makes efficiency tools especially relevant for smaller organisations. "As a growing organization, we have to be creative and find efficiencies that larger players simply take for granted," Nijs said. "Agentic DOOH is one of those opportunities where we want to be at the forefront, and we're excited to see where it takes us."

Mink Zwolsman, Business Development Director at Global Netherlands, addressed the structural argument for bringing OOH into parity with digital channels. "In today's competitive media landscape, digital out-of-home must be as easy to discover, plan, buy, and measure as any other channel, and this collaboration proves it's possible," Zwolsman said. "What excites us most is that 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 that outdoor can be planned, bought, and activated with the same speed and data-driven precision as any digital channel. For Global Netherlands, this is a meaningful step toward making our inventory more accessible to buyers who want seamless, omnichannel campaigns and we've only just begun to uncover the advantages."

Why agentic matters for OOH specifically

The out-of-home format has historically sat outside the automation frameworks that define programmatic digital advertising. Buying billboard space traditionally involved direct negotiation with media owners, manual insertion orders, and bespoke measurement approaches. The transition to programmatic DOOH has been accelerating - JCDecaux's Q1 2026 results, covered by PPC Land, showed programmatic DOOH reaching 10.5% of total digital revenue in the quarter, with year-on-year growth of 27.2%. US out-of-home ad spend reached 4 billion dollars in 2026, with digital OOH growing at 14.5% while traditional formats grew at just 1.5%.

Against that backdrop, agentic OOH represents a further layer of automation on top of the programmatic infrastructure already being built. VIOOH's 2026 State of the Nation report, covered by PPC Land, projected that programmatic DOOH would feature in 48% of all campaigns within 18 months - up from 34% in the previous period - and that global investment in the format would rise 44%. The same report indicated the US would reach 52% adoption, the highest of any market surveyed.

However, full agentic execution - where neither buyer nor seller manually manages individual campaign steps - requires more than programmatic pipes. It requires protocol standardisation so that agents can communicate, data infrastructure detailed enough to inform autonomous targeting decisions, and governance frameworks that give clients and regulators confidence about what the agents are doing. This campaign used AdCP as that communication standard, while Broadsign's data layer provided the targeting signals.

The broader context for agentic advertising protocols has been contested. When AdCP launched in October 2025, it immediately divided industry opinion, with some practitioners arguing that automating the transaction layer before fixing structural problems in digital advertising risked repeating earlier programmatic mistakes. The IAB Tech Lab subsequently formalised its own umbrella initiative, naming it AAMP - Agentic Advertising Management Protocols - on February 26, 2026, providing a three-tier agent hierarchy for both buyers and sellers and an Agent Registry. In March 2026, Optable and PubMatic demonstrated AdCP operating across live programmatic infrastructure through PubMatic's AgenticOS platform.

The Broadsign-Draft Digital campaign marks the first reported instance of those protocol-level ambitions translating into a completed OOH transaction for a live advertiser.

Implications for smaller advertisers

One dimension of the announcement that carries practical weight is accessibility. OOH advertising has traditionally been dominated by large brands with the budget and internal resources to manage direct media owner relationships. The manual complexity of booking outdoor inventory - negotiating individually with media owners, managing different creative specifications per format, and reconciling measurement data across placements - creates friction that disadvantages smaller or mid-sized advertisers.

Agentic buying, in theory, reduces that friction. If an AI agent can handle the operational complexity of planning and executing an OOH campaign, the overhead per campaign drops regardless of advertiser size. Lot of Happiness - with roughly 100,000 lottery participants and a donated pot exceeding 50 million euros, but without a media budget comparable to national lottery operators - illustrates the potential demand from that bracket of advertiser.

Broadsign holds the largest global OOH media supply, including what it describes as the largest aggregation of video-enabled displays, in-store media, and on-screen cinema inventory. The Broadsign AI creative approval tool, which the company unveiled at its annual customer summit in February 2025 and scheduled for release in early Q2 2025, addressed the earlier operational bottleneck of manual creative review. That system analyses incoming creatives from demand-side platforms, examines technical specifications, detects objects within content, and suggests appropriate categorisation - reducing the manual processing of tens of thousands of unique creatives each month by media owners.

The current agentic campaign builds on top of that infrastructure, extending automation from creative review to the full transaction lifecycle.

What comes next

According to Broadsign, the company's goal with this campaign is to unlock agentic trading for OOH at greater scale. The company has indicated it is committed to bringing greater scale, data, and efficiency to buyers while opening up more demand for sellers. Marketers and media owners interested in Broadsign's sell-side agentic solution are directed to contact the company directly.

The campaign's reported success with a live advertiser on live inventory - rather than as a proof-of-concept or sandbox demonstration - makes it a data point the industry is likely to examine closely. Whether it can be reproduced consistently at scale, and whether the human oversight and guardrails referenced in the announcement translate into reliable campaign controls under normal operating conditions, are questions that subsequent deployments will need to address.

The involvement of the AdCP protocol also means this campaign serves as one of the earliest real-world tests of that standard in an OOH context. AdCP's broader relationship with real-time bidding infrastructure has been described by practitioners as complementary rather than competing - a protocol for portfolio-level media investment decisions rather than millisecond-level bidding.

For the advertising industry, the question is whether agentic OOH advances along the trajectory that programmatic DOOH has followed - starting with a handful of high-profile early cases before infrastructure matures and transaction volumes grow - or whether the additional complexity of coordinating multiple autonomous agents introduces friction of its own kind.

Timeline

  • October 15, 2025 - The Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) launches, founded by Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic, Swivel, Triton Digital, and Optable, built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. Coverage on PPC Land
  • November 13, 2025 - Broadsign announces a collaboration with StackAdapt and Branded Cities enabling automated, in-advance DOOH transactions across North America. Coverage on PPC Land
  • November 25, 2025 - Broadsign acquires Place Exchange, expanding its programmatically transactable inventory to 1.8 million screens globally; combined workforce reaches 370 people. Coverage on PPC Land
  • February 5, 2025 (published) - Broadsign debuts a patent-pending AI tool for OOH creative approvals, integrating directly with its SSP and capable of processing multiple creatives simultaneously. Coverage on PPC Land
  • February 26, 2026 - IAB Tech Lab formally names its umbrella agentic advertising initiative AAMP (Agentic Advertising Management Protocols), publishing a three-tier agent hierarchy for buyers and sellers. Coverage on PPC Land
  • March 9, 2026 - US out-of-home ad spend reaches 4 billion dollars in 2026, with digital OOH growing 14.5% versus 1.5% for traditional formats. Coverage on PPC Land
  • March 12, 2026 - Optable and PubMatic demonstrate AdCP operating across live programmatic infrastructure through PubMatic's AgenticOS platform. Coverage on PPC Land
  • March 21, 2026 - VIOOH's 2026 State of the Nation report projects programmatic DOOH will feature in 48% of all campaigns within 18 months, with global investment rising 44%. Coverage on PPC Land
  • April 22, 2026 - JB Hi-Fi deploys Broadsign to build an in-store retail media network across more than 200 stores in Australia. Coverage on PPC Land
  • May 5, 2026 - JCDecaux Q1 2026 results show programmatic DOOH reaching 10.5% of total digital revenue, with 27.2% year-on-year growth. Coverage on PPC Land
  • May 27, 2026 - Broadsign announces its sell-side AI agent and Draft Digital's buy-side agent have planned, booked, and executed the first fully agentic AI-powered OOH campaign for Lot of Happiness on Global Netherlands inventory.

Summary

Who - Broadsign (OOH technology platform, Montreal), Draft Digital (digital marketing agency), Global Netherlands (media owner), and Lot of Happiness (charity lottery advertiser with approximately 100,000 participants and over 50 million euros donated to good causes).

What - Broadsign's sell-side AI agent and Draft Digital's buy-side agent planned, booked, and executed a complete OOH advertising campaign for Lot of Happiness autonomously, using the AdCP protocol as the communication standard between agents and Broadsign's data infrastructure for screen-level audience targeting. The collaboration is described as the first fully agentic AI-powered OOH campaign on record.

When - The announcement was made on May 27, 2026, from Montreal.

Where - The campaign ran on digital OOH inventory owned by Global Netherlands, covering the company's nationwide network of high streets, supermarkets, shopping centres, railway stations, petrol stations, and motorways across the Netherlands.

Why - The campaign demonstrates that AI agents operating within defined governance structures and human oversight can handle the full lifecycle of an OOH media buy without manual intervention at each step - a capability that could reduce the operational barriers keeping smaller advertisers out of the OOH market, and accelerate the format's convergence with digital advertising workflows.