Keen Decision Systems and Accretive today published research claiming that 89% of brands investing in out-of-home advertising saw profitable returns, that digital out-of-home adoption among advertisers in their data rose from 1.1% to 3.4% in a year, and that the optimized marginal profit return on the next dollar spent in the channel climbed to $7.97 from $7.58 in 2025.

In Short

Two companies that sell measurement and data tools for advertisers looked at how brands spend on billboards and digital screens, and found that almost nine in ten brands using them made money from it. Far more brands are now buying digital screens than a year ago, though the results vary a lot from one advertiser to the next, and big companies use the channel far more than small ones. The figures come from the vendors themselves, and the release does not say how many brands were studied or over what period, so the numbers describe their own data rather than the whole market.

What the research says

The figures were released today from Cary, North Carolina and Los Angeles. Keen Decision Systems describes itself as a marketing mix SaaS platform; Accretive is an out-of-home data and technology company that sells an audience product called OOH Graph and a patent-pending measurement platform called Accretive Outcomes. Both companies have a commercial interest in advertisers spending more on, and measuring more of, out-of-home media. Every figure in this article comes from the two companies and has not been independently verified.

The headline claim is the profitability rate. According to Keen Decision Systems and Accretive, 89% of brands investing in out-of-home saw profitable returns. The release does not define the threshold for "profitable," state how many brands were analyzed, name the time window, or explain whether the 11% of unprofitable brands were concentrated in a particular industry or company size.

Then there is the return metric. According to the companies, the optimized marginal profit ROI for out-of-home is $7.97, up from $7.58 in 2025. The release defines this as "what the next dollar spent will return in the most optimal week for investment." That last qualifier matters. It is not an average week, nor the week a typical advertiser buys in. It is the best-case week the model identifies, which makes the figure a ceiling for planning purposes rather than a return any given campaign could be expected to achieve.

On a non-marginal basis, the picture is more modest. Out-of-home generated $1.48 in profit ROI, according to the companies, "coming in higher than social, display and partnerships." The release does not give the profit ROI figures for social, display or partnerships, so the size of the gap cannot be checked from the material supplied.

Digital adoption tripled - from a small base

The adoption figures are the most concrete numbers in the release. According to Keen Decision Systems and Accretive, broader out-of-home adoption grew from 21.3% to 25.2% over the past year, an increase of 3.9 percentage points. Digital out-of-home adoption specifically rose from 1.1% to 3.4%.

That is a little more than a threefold increase, so the "tripled" description holds arithmetically. In absolute terms, however, it means that roughly one in thirty advertisers in the companies' data bought digital out-of-home during the period, against roughly one in four buying out-of-home of any kind. The release does not say what population the percentages describe. The most likely reading is the brands in Keen's own modeling dataset, but that is an inference; it is not stated.

The adoption numbers sit uneasily next to the market-level data. Digital already accounted for 38.4% of US out-of-home revenue in the second quarter of 2026, when US out-of-home revenue topped $3 billion for the first time, up 10.7%, according to OAAA figures PPC Land reported on August 30. Guideline data put digital at 20% of US out-of-home spend in 2025, as PPC Land reported in March when US out-of-home ad spend was projected to hit $4 billion in 2026. Revenue share and advertiser adoption measure different things, and a small number of large buyers can carry a large share of revenue. Still, a 3.4% adoption rate suggests that whatever population Keen models skews toward advertisers who have not yet touched digital screens at all.

Similar median, wider spread

On average, according to the companies, digital out-of-home performed in line with the channel as a whole. The median ROI from digital out-of-home was $1.76, compared with $1.78 for out-of-home overall.

The distribution is where the two diverge. Advertisers at the 75th percentile of digital out-of-home saw an ROI of $3.37, according to the release, while those at the 25th percentile saw returns under a dollar - meaning a quarter of digital buyers in the data lost money on a straight return basis. The companies attribute the spread to advertisers still working out how to execute in the channel.

A note on the figures: the release uses $1.48 as out-of-home's profit ROI and $1.78 as its median ROI. Those are presented as different metrics, likely profit-based versus revenue-based or average versus median, but the release does not define either, and the gap between them is not explained.

The buying method argument

Craig Benner, chief executive officer at Accretive, tied the spread directly to how digital screens are bought. "The rapid acceleration of DOOH proves brands recognize the power of real-world exposure, yet the wide range in returns shows that execution strategy largely determines success," he said. "Treating out-of-home as a nice-to-have tacked onto a generic omnichannel DSP strategy, buying it like a cheap impression on the open web, severely diminishes its impact. Proper DOOH execution requires real audience planning, purpose-built data, and rigorous outcomes measurement."

Accretive sells purpose-built out-of-home data and outcomes measurement, so the argument aligns with its product. The release offers no breakdown of returns by buying route, so the claim that omnichannel buying explains the lower quartile is Benner's interpretation rather than a finding the figures demonstrate.

The buying-route question is a live one. When programmatic DOOH hit $1.339bn in 2025, just 7% of digital out-of-home, the WOO Global study found that OOH-specialist demand-side platforms handled 65.5% of programmatic spend, with omnichannel platforms taking 34.5%. Omnichannel platforms have meanwhile been adding screen inventory: DeepIntent added Vistar DOOH and point-of-care inventory to its DSP, and supply consolidation continued when Broadsign acquired Place Exchange in November 2025, bringing its programmatically transactable inventory to 1.8 million screens.

Big brands buy, small ones mostly do not

The size split is the sharpest finding. According to Keen Decision Systems and Accretive, 58% of brands generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue use out-of-home in their media mix. Only 10% of businesses with revenue under $50 million invest in the channel. The release does not give figures for the bands in between.

Out-of-home's share of total media spend rose from 1.3% to 1.6%, according to the companies. That is a 23% relative increase, though the channel remains a small line item. The companies frame the gap between large and small advertisers as "substantial untapped opportunity for mid-market and emerging brands." An equally plausible reading is that the fixed costs of planning, creative production and measurement for physical media are easier for large advertisers to absorb, and the release does not test either explanation.

Justin Jefferson, VP of insights at Keen Decision Systems, made the case for diversification away from digital channels. "Concentrating marketing dollars entirely within saturated digital inventory creates diminishing returns and inflates acquisition costs," he said. "Enterprise leaders already understand that real-world media diversification provides scalable headroom for profit. Expanding the media mix to include channels like out-of-home delivers the balance brands need to drive sustained, incremental growth."

How this compares with last year's edition

PPC Land covered the previous edition of this research on October 24, 2025, when Keen and Accretive reported that out-of-home delivered higher returns than digital channels. That report covered media spending from January 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, and put out-of-home's marginal ROI at $7.58 per incremental dollar against a $5.52 average across media types, with print at $7.18, radio at $6.61 and linear TV at $6.53.

Three differences between the editions stand out.

First, the label on the $7.58 figure has changed. Last year it was reported as marginal ROI; this year's release describes $7.58 as the 2025 value of "optimized marginal profit ROI" for the most optimal week. Whether the 2025 figure was recalculated under a new definition, or the definition was simply stated more precisely this time, is not clear from the release.

Second, the share-of-spend baseline does not match. Last year's edition said out-of-home accounted for less than 1% of media budgets. This year's release puts the prior-year share at 1.3%. A change in the brands included, in the time window, or in the calculation could each explain the difference; the release does not say which.

Third, last year's edition reported an average out-of-home ROI of $1.58 across industries. This year's release reports a profit ROI of $1.48 and a median ROI of $1.78. Because the metrics are named differently, the figures cannot be read as a year-on-year rise or fall.

The new release also omits the cross-channel marginal ROI comparison that anchored last year's report. The only cross-channel claim this year is that out-of-home's $1.48 profit ROI beats social, display and partnerships, without the competing numbers.

Jefferson's title has also shifted. He was described last year as VP of strategy and analytics; today's release names him VP of insights.

Why marketers are watching mix models for OOH

Out-of-home has long been a difficult channel to measure at the user level because there is no click and no cookie. That has made it a natural candidate for marketing mix modelling, which works on aggregated spend and sales data rather than individual exposure. Marginal ROI figures like the ones Keen publishes come from response curves in these models; returns flatten as spend grows, a pattern usually captured with Hill curves. A channel with a small share of budget sits on the steep part of the curve, so a high marginal return for out-of-home is partly a mathematical consequence of how little most brands spend on it. It would not necessarily hold if budgets were moved across at scale.

The channel's measurement plumbing has been changing fast. In September, Clear Channel became the first out-of-home media owner integrated into LiveRamp's cross-media tool, with its RADAR data also feeding TransUnion's mix modeling and multi-touch attribution products. That article cited IAB research finding that 46% of mix model users said traditional media, including out-of-home, was underrepresented in their models. Elsewhere, Ströer reported in May that its digital out-of-home revenue grew 12% in the first quarter of 2026, against 1.8% for German out-of-home overall.

For the marketing community, the Keen and Accretive numbers are one more data point in favor of the channel, produced by two firms whose products depend on it. What the release does not disclose - the number of brands, the measurement period, the definition of profitability, and the competing channel figures - limits how far the headline numbers can be compared with anything else. The adoption gap between billion-dollar brands and smaller ones is the finding most likely to hold up under scrutiny, because it does not depend on modeled returns at all.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Keen Decision Systems, a marketing mix SaaS platform based in Cary, North Carolina, and Accretive, a Los Angeles out-of-home data and technology company. Craig Benner, Accretive's CEO, and Justin Jefferson, Keen's VP of insights, are quoted.

What: Vendor research claiming that 89% of brands investing in out-of-home saw profitable returns, that digital out-of-home adoption rose from 1.1% to 3.4%, that overall out-of-home adoption rose from 21.3% to 25.2%, that optimized marginal profit ROI rose to $7.97 from $7.58, and that 58% of brands above $1 billion in revenue use the channel against 10% below $50 million. The release gives no sample size, period or definition of profitability.

When: Released October 15, 2026, the second annual edition after an October 2025 report.

Where: The research appears to cover US advertisers in Keen's modeling data; the release does not state the geography or the population.

Why: Out-of-home holds a small share of media budgets, 1.6% in the companies' data, and both firms argue that digital channels are saturated. The wide spread in digital out-of-home returns, from under a dollar to $3.37, and the gap between large and small advertisers frame a debate over how screens are bought and measured.