Unlocking agentic AI in OOH media: Why open standards are the key
Week in focus: The Future of OOH
With open standards, OOH’s programmatic benefits would scale effortlessly into fully agentic workflows, where AI agents autonomously optimise across the entire campaign lifecycle.
Buying items on eBay works seamlessly whether you’re on an iPhone, Android, Windows or MacOS device. Plug in any USB charger, and it just works. Your Wi-Fi connects effortlessly across devices, and emails flow without friction between different providers.
These everyday conveniences exist because of ‘open standards’ — shared rules that allow different systems to communicate reliably. Without them, we’d face constant incompatibility and inefficiency.
The same logic applies to Out-of-Home (OOH) media trading. As the industry moves toward agentic AI — autonomous agents that can plan, negotiate, execute, and optimise campaigns with minimal human oversight — open standards are no longer optional; they are the foundation.
The promise of agentic AI in OOH
Agentic AI will transform OOH from a manual, relationship-driven channel into a fast, data-driven ecosystem. Imagine AI agents that:
* Curate inventory across thousands of screens in real-time
* Plan audiences using rich, privacy-compliant data
* Trade and book slots dynamically
* Deliver tailored content to digital screens
* Measure actual playout and performance, then optimise instantly
This level of automation requires seamless connections to first-party resources for inventory, audience, trading, content delivery, and performance.
Proprietary second and third-party systems create barriers that cloud this future.
The hidden cost of proprietary systems
When OOH inventory, audience data, booking, content delivery, and performance reporting rely on proprietary standards, the drawbacks are immediate and costly.
It costs more due to multiple third-party tech fees and stacked margins, as each platform takes its cut. There are more points of failure — when one system breaks, problems cascade across the workflow. The technical infrastructure becomes far more complex and difficult to troubleshoot, making root-cause analysis painfully slow and more reliant on a narrower set of unique skills.
And worst of all, fragmented systems create constant gaps that require manual human intervention, slowing campaigns and introducing errors.
In short, proprietary approaches turn what should be seamless automation into an expensive, brittle, and labour-intensive process.
Programmatic advertising: The bridge to agentic AI
Properly implemented programmatic advertising already delivers major advantages to both printed and digital OOH, and these benefits will become dramatically more powerful with agentic AI.
Programmatic enables faster planning and activation, with real-time campaign adjustments as possible, and precise, context-driven targeting using aggregated data signals.
Measurement improves through centralised, automated reporting of actual playout and performance. This transparency reduces waste, improves ROI, and supports true omnichannel strategies.
Media owners gain better control over inventory yield and broaden access to demand, while buyers escape manual RFPs/RFIs and fragmented processes.
With open standards, these programmatic benefits scale effortlessly into fully agentic workflows — where AI agents autonomously optimise across the entire campaign lifecycle.
IAB Tech Lab standards: The technical foundation
The industry is already building the open standards needed for this future through IAB Tech Lab.
Key initiatives include:
OpenRTB (Buy Now) — Now fully integrated with Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) extensions. This standardises real-time bidding for DOOH inventory, including specific objects for screens, locations, and impression multipliers. It brings OOH into the same open protocol used across display, video, and other digital channels.
OpenDirect (Buy Forward) — Supports direct programmatic guaranteed trading for both digital and printed OOH media. OpenDirect allows buyers to plan, buy, activate, and report across premium publishers using a common, data-driven standard — reducing reliance on multiple third-party ad tech platforms.
These standards, developed and endorsed by global industry associations such as OAAA (USA), OMA (Australia) and Outsmart (UK) for use in OOH, create a common language for inventory, audience data, booking, content delivery, and performance. They make third-party specialist tools truly plug-and-play — exactly what agentic AI requires.
In the UK, the creation of Outsmart’s inventory database, SPACE, and a single display reporting access point, PLAYOUT, support the IAB Tech Lab trading standards for both buy-side and sell-side.
Benefits across the ecosystem
For brands: Faster execution, better targeting, accurate measurement, and genuine omnichannel integration.
For media buyers and agencies: Less manual work, lower costs, fewer points of failure, and freedom from vendor lock-in.
For media owners: Access to greater demand and the ability to focus on innovation rather than maintaining proprietary defences.
For the industry – A universal approach across geographic markets
Time to embrace open standards
To fully realise agentic AI in OOH media trading, the use of open standards is essential.
Failure to work together to achieve this fundamental connectivity will be a failure to own the right path to our AI future
The industry is already moving in the right direction, but accelerating adoption will determine whether OOH realises its true potential as a high-value channel in the AI era.
Let’s build a more interoperable future for OOH media.
Tim Harvey is the founder of Knitting Media