Clear Channel Outdoor today wired its RADAR data platform into LiveRamp's Cross-Media Intelligence and into TransUnion's marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution products, so that out-of-home exposure can be counted inside the systems advertisers already use to judge connected TV, social, search, digital video and audio. According to Clear Channel, no outdoor media owner had been connected to the LiveRamp product before. The announcement, issued from New York, lands six days before the end of the quarter in which the company's $6.2 billion take-private is targeted to complete.

In Short

Clear Channel Outdoor, a large US seller of billboard and airport advertising, now sends data about who probably passed its ads into measurement products run by LiveRamp and TransUnion. Those products are where many brands compare streaming TV, social, search and audio before deciding where money goes next, and outdoor ads have often been missing from them or lumped into an "other" bucket. Your Clear Channel campaign can now appear in those reports as its own line, although the numbers behind it are estimated from phone location signals rather than recorded ad views.

What Clear Channel put on the table

The expansion has two parts, and they do different work. The first is a partnership with LiveRamp under which RADAR exposure is loaded into Cross-Media Intelligence, the San Francisco company's cross-channel reporting product, and measured against other media exposures with deduplication applied, so that one person reached by both a roadside panel and a streaming spot is counted once. Clear Channel describes it as an "industry-first partnership". The second part consists of connections to TransUnion's Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) solutions, which take two separate RADAR outputs: exposure data, resolved against identity for attribution, and granular delivery data for mix modeling.

According to Clear Channel, the combined effect is that OOH exposure can flow into the same measurement frameworks used to evaluate CTV, social, search, digital video and audio. Dan Levi, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Clear Channel Outdoor, framed the rationale around comparability rather than performance. "OOH has always been a powerful medium, but marketers need to be able to see its contribution within the same measurement frameworks they use across the rest of their media plans," Levi said. "By expanding RADAR through integrations with LiveRamp and TransUnion, we're making it easier for brands and agencies to understand how OOH contributes to campaign performance and make more informed decisions about where to invest their next media dollar."

The company is blunt about the problem it wants to fix. Historically, according to Clear Channel, OOH has not appeared in measurement models with the audience and exposure detail available for other channels, and it is "often excluded, grouped into 'offline/other' categories, or represented primarily through a spend line." That last phrase carries more weight than it appears to. A spend line tells a model how much money left the account, not how many people stood in front of a panel. Two identical invoices can buy very different audiences depending on location, format and week.

Two data streams, two jobs

Exposure data for attribution

Multi-touch attribution distributes credit for a conversion across the individual touchpoints that preceded it. For outdoor advertising to take part, an encounter with a panel has to become an event attached to a person or household. That is the job of the TransUnion connection. According to Clear Channel, RADAR exposure data can be resolved against TransUnion's identity foundation, "enabling OOH to be incorporated as a touchpoint within the customer journey."

The asset doing the resolving is TransUnion's identity graph, which the company has said covers 98% of US adults. It is the same infrastructure that made TransUnion the sole MTA provider for YouTube in a Google partnership disclosed on May 20, 2026, after a pilot involving more than fifteen customers across automotive, retail, financial services, insurance, and media and entertainment. In December 2025 TransUnion had already folded National CineMedia's theatrical exposure data into the same attribution framework. Cinema, another screen that produces no click, is the closest precedent for what Clear Channel is now attempting with the street.

Delivery data for mix modeling

Mix models work the other way round. They estimate each channel's contribution by relating an outcome, such as weekly sales, to time series of media activity, usually split by market, and they never need to know who saw what. What they do need is an input that moves with what was actually delivered. According to Clear Channel, granular OOH delivery data "provides a more meaningful input for evaluating OOH's contribution and informing future media allocation."

Julie Clark, SVP of media and entertainment at TransUnion, described the pairing as covering both levels of analysis. "Marketers need measurement approaches that can connect media investment to business outcomes across the full customer journey," Clark said. "Bringing Clear Channel Outdoor's RADAR data into our MMM and MTA solutions gives marketers more meaningful inputs to assess OOH's contribution at both the portfolio and customer levels, helping inform future media allocation and optimization."

The split between exposure data and delivery data is the most technically consequential part of the announcement. An attribution model is only as reliable as the identity match beneath it; a mix model is only as reliable as the variation in its inputs. The two methods also disagree with each other routinely. Google's John Chen argued on September 2, 2026 that attribution cannot say which of the conversions it counts were incremental, and that following either approach alone leads in materially different directions. Feeding one outdoor campaign into both does not settle that dispute. It puts OOH on both sides of it.

Inside Cross-Media Intelligence

LiveRamp built its product in stages. The company rolled out Media Intelligence Tools on November 18, 2024, adding audience overlap, frequency and last-touch attribution templates across seven media companies including DIRECTV Advertising, Roku and Snap Inc. Newton Research agents were connected to Cross-Media Intelligence on March 3, 2026, allowing marketers to query it in natural language. On August 4, 2026, LiveRamp added Meta as a reporting source, offering de-duplicated attribution and incrementality measurement for Meta alongside CTV, programmatic, social and audio, with Hill's Pet Nutrition the only brand named as a user.

Clear Channel's description of the new connection uses a similar channel list. According to the company, OOH exposure can be incorporated into Cross-Media Intelligence alongside CTV, social, programmatic, audio and other media, "and measured across the full media plan without double-counting exposures across channels." Search is absent from that list, although it appears in the release's broader description of the frameworks both partnerships feed. The omission may matter to advertisers who expect outdoor spend to surface as branded search.

Adam Solomon, VP, Product Management at LiveRamp, kept his comments general. "Cross-media measurement is most valuable when it gives marketers a complete picture of performance across their media mix," Solomon said. "By integrating Clear Channel Outdoor's data into Cross-Media Intelligence, we're helping marketers understand how OOH contributes alongside other channels and make more informed decisions about where to invest."

Removing duplicates across outdoor and digital raises a question the release leaves unanswered. What key decides that a person who passed a panel is the same person who watched a CTV ad? LiveRamp's matching business rests on a pseudonymous people-based identifier, but the announcement does not say how RADAR exposures, which begin as mobile location observations, are converted into it, or at what match rate. Precision is not a detail. Research LiveRamp published with the MMA on July 20, 2026 simulated a campaign with a true return of $1.50 and found that, at 50% identity precision, measured return fell to $0.43. The report labelled that precision level an illustrative lower bound rather than a typical condition, and it was built on synthetic data by a vendor that sells the remedy. The mechanism still holds: a deduplicated report inherits whatever accuracy the identity layer below it delivers.

How an outdoor exposure is produced

A web impression is logged when an ad renders on a device. A roadside panel produces no such record. Digital out-of-home is a broadcast medium in which one screen delivers to whoever happens to be present, so exposure attribution depends on mobile location signals and modelled audience panels rather than device-level delivery logs. Printed panels face the same constraint without even a play log.

According to Clear Channel's listing in LiveRamp's partner directory, the company generates exposures with its own proprietary, OOH-specific methodology, working from third-party mobile location data. The same listing shows that the two companies were connected well before today, for onboarding brand and third-party data into Clear Channel's planning tools and for exposure-based measurement of brand lift, visitation and product lift. What is new is the link into Cross-Media Intelligence specifically.

The method dates to RADAR's debut. According to Clear Channel's announcement of February 29, 2016, RADAR initially overlaid aggregate, anonymous mobile data from AT&T Data Patterns, Placed and PlaceIQ on the company's US inventory, and measured campaign effects by comparing exposed audiences with unexposed control groups. Fortune and Marketing Dive both recorded objections from privacy advocates at the time. In May 2018 the company added RADARView, a planning interface built with location intelligence firm Ubimo, which Clear Channel said drew on consented data from persistent apps running on one in four mobile devices. The suite now also includes RADARProof for attribution studies, RADARConnect and RADARSync, according to the company's website.

RADARSync is the relevant precedent. Clear Channel's own description of it already offers to pass anonymised, aggregated campaign exposure information into a customer's analytics platform for omnichannel and multi-touch measurement, handled as a managed service. Today's announcement moves that capability from bespoke work for individual customers toward named connections with two measurement vendors, although it does not describe the mechanics of either.

Standards have been catching up. Clear Channel was among the contributors to guidelines the OAAA published in July 2021 on capturing mobile users' exposure to DOOH campaigns, which concentrated on retargeting and attribution. The Media Rating Council opened phase two of its out-of-home audience standards to public comment in July 2025. The combined standards, finalised in December 2025, arrange OOH metrics as a ladder. Gross impressions require presence in a display exposure zone while the screen is working. Opportunity-to-see impressions add a viewability condition: 100% of the creative on the asset for one second for static formats and two seconds for video. Likelihood-to-see requires evidence of notice, and the audience rung requires an asset occupying at least 1.5% of the field of view at no more than 55 degrees per axis. Clear Channel's release does not say which rung a RADAR exposure corresponds to. When one report sets an outdoor exposure beside a viewable CTV impression, that answer is hardly academic.

Counting the 'other' line

Research on the gap has been consistent. An IAB study published in February 2026 found that no media channel is fully represented in marketing mix models; 46% of mix model users said traditional media including radio, print, out-of-home and direct mail were underrepresented, against 77% for gaming and 50% for commerce media.

TransUnion's own surveys point the same way. A TransUnion and EMARKETER study from October 2025 found 46.9% of marketers planned to increase investment in mix modeling over the following 12 months, and 34.7% in multi-touch attribution. A TransUnion survey of 100 senior US marketing and technology leaders published in August 2026 found mix modeling in use at 42% of organisations and multi-touch attribution at 31%, while 70% said cross-channel blind spots prevented them from proving full-funnel impact.

Outdoor sellers argue the channel would fare better if it were counted properly. Research from Keen Decision Systems published in October 2025 put OOH's marginal return at $7.58 per incremental dollar against an average of $5.52 across media types, a vendor-produced modelling figure rather than an audited one. Healthcare buying illustrates the other side of the problem. When DeepIntent brought Vistar's DOOH and point-of-care inventory into its platform in August 2026, out-of-home had stayed outside the consolidation that drew streaming television, audio and clinical workflow inventory into healthcare marketers' omnichannel campaigns, with targeting and measurement gaps constraining pharmaceutical buyers.

Why does representation matter so much? Because reallocation follows credit. A channel entered as a spend line is modelled on money rather than audience, so a cheap week in a busy location and an expensive week in a quiet one look alike, and the estimated effect inherits that noise. A channel filed under "other" is barely estimated at all. Neither makes a strong case when budgets are reset.

Owners in transition on both sides

Clear Channel's own ownership is about to change. Mubadala Capital and TWG Global agreed in February to take the company private in a $6.2 billion all-cash deal at $2.43 a share, with roughly $3 billion of committed equity and completion expected by the end of the third quarter of 2026. Shareholders approved the merger at a special meeting on May 12, according to a company disclosure reported by TipRanks. Wade Davis, the media executive set to become executive chairman on completion, said when the deal was agreed that he intended to keep investing in data, measurement and transaction platforms, according to Clear Channel. Today's release still carries the NYSE: CCO ticker.

The company is also narrower than it was. Since Bauer Media completed its $625 million purchase of Clear Channel Europe-North in April 2025, Clear Channel has reported two segments, America and Airports. Digital accounted for 42.1% of consolidated revenue in the third quarter of 2025, up from 39.4% a year earlier, and nine-month revenue to September 30, 2025 reached $1.14 billion. The Airports division won back the Pensacola International Airport concession on September 15, 2026, a role it had last held until 2012.

LiveRamp is changing hands too. Publicis Groupe agreed on May 17, 2026 to acquire LiveRamp for $2.5 billion in cash, at $38.50 a share and a 30% premium. A Schedule 14A filing in June set out that LiveRamp will run as an independent business inside Publicis's Technology segment, with Scott Howe remaining chief executive and closing expected before the end of 2026. Shareholders approved the takeover on August 17, 2026 while rejecting executive merger compensation by roughly six to one, and whether RampID, the pseudonymous identifier at the centre of LiveRamp's matching business, keeps its neutral character inside an agency holding company is a question buyers are weighing as contracts come up for renewal. Once that deal completes, Clear Channel's exposure data will be reconciled inside infrastructure owned by a holding group whose competitors are LiveRamp customers. The release does not address it.

TransUnion's footprint has widened in parallel. Beyond cinema and YouTube, Universal Ads named it an Audience partner on July 30, 2026, alongside Klaviyo and LiveRamp.

Location data and the rules around it

RADAR's inputs are location signals, and the legal ground under that category has shifted in 2026. The Federal Trade Commission closed its Kochava case with a stipulated order on May 4, 2026, barring the data broker from selling sensitive location data without affirmative express consent. Virginia's governor signed SB 338 on April 13, 2026, banning the sale of precise geolocation data within a 1,750-foot radius from July 1, 2026. Nothing in Clear Channel's release suggests a compliance issue. It simply does not describe where RADAR's location data now comes from, whether the 2016 suppliers remain in place, or how consent is verified upstream.

What the release leaves open

Several operational details are missing. The announcement names no clients and does not say what the connections cost, when they go live, whether every advertiser buying Clear Channel inventory can use them or only those who ask, or whether the Airports division's screens are covered. It does not state how quickly exposure data reaches either partner, which identifier carries it into LiveRamp's environment, or what share of exposures TransUnion can resolve. Clear Channel's website names Geopath as the independent audience currency for out-of-home, used alongside RADARView and RADARProof; the release does not say whether RADAR exposures reconcile to Geopath figures.

It also carries no vendor-supplied lift statistics, which is unusual for a measurement release and leaves the value claims to be tested in use. The priority claim, meanwhile, belongs to Clear Channel alone. Neither Solomon's nor Clark's quoted statement repeats it, and neither partner has published a list of OOH sources.

Why the marketing community is paying attention

Outdoor is growing while its measurement remains the recurring objection. United States out-of-home revenue rose 10.7% to $3.16 billion in the second quarter of 2026, the first quarter above $3 billion, with digital formats holding a 38.4% share, according to the OAAA. Guideline, which tracks agency spend on a different base, projected $4 billion for 2026 and put digital's share of US outdoor spend at 20% in 2025. The two datasets disagree on scale but agree on direction.

For agencies that run mix models, a granular delivery series gives OOH a chance to show a response curve rather than a flat cost. For attribution users, a resolved exposure lets outdoor compete for credit that until now could only be assigned to digital touchpoints. The release names no other outdoor media owner in either partner's products.

The harder question is whether a modelled exposure, derived from phone location and reconciled through a probabilistic identity match, deserves the same weight in a model as a logged, viewable ad impression. Clear Channel does not claim that it does. The reports will show how buyers treat it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings (NYSE: CCO), the US out-of-home media company, with LiveRamp and TransUnion as measurement partners. Quoted executives are Dan Levi, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Clear Channel Outdoor; Adam Solomon, VP, Product Management at LiveRamp; and Julie Clark, SVP of media and entertainment at TransUnion.

What: An expansion of the RADAR data platform that loads Clear Channel's OOH exposure data into LiveRamp's Cross-Media Intelligence for deduplicated measurement against CTV, social, programmatic and audio, and connects RADAR to TransUnion's Marketing Mix Modeling and Multi-Touch Attribution solutions, with exposure data resolved against identity for attribution and granular delivery data feeding mix models. Clear Channel says it is the first OOH media company integrated into Cross-Media Intelligence. No pricing, availability date, customer names or performance figures were disclosed.

When: Disclosed today, September 24, 2026, days before the targeted end-of-quarter completion of Clear Channel's $6.2 billion take-private and ahead of the Publicis acquisition of LiveRamp, expected before the end of 2026.

Where: Issued from New York. Clear Channel's remaining business reports two US segments, America and Airports; the release does not say whether Airports division screens are covered.

Why: According to Clear Channel, OOH has often been excluded from measurement models, grouped into offline or other categories, or represented only as a spend line, which makes its contribution difficult to assess as budgets are increasingly guided by measurement. Industry research supports the gap, with 46% of mix model users reporting traditional media including OOH as underrepresented. Whether location-derived exposures carry the same weight as logged digital impressions, and whether LiveRamp's neutrality holds under Publicis ownership, remain open.