Why DOOH Showed Up With a Knife to the CES 2026 Gunfight

A 12 Month Roadmap to a Minority Report Reality by CES 2027

By Amit Goel, Chief Product Officer at Moving Walls

Pre-CES Buzz vs. a Rain-Soaked Tuesday

Next week, Las Vegas will once again become a neon cathedral to CES 2026. Expect breathless demos of agentic AI that orders groceries autonomously, holograms suspended in mid-air, and transparent OLED displays straight out of Minority Report.

Press releases will shout about “The Future of Connection.”
And then you’ll return home, stand under a digital bus shelter in the rain, and watch a static JPEG of a sunscreen bottle rotate endlessly on a 60-second loop.

This contradiction defines our industry.

We’re running Ferrari-grade hardware on Flintstones-era software.

Picture a Tuesday evening in early December. A sudden downpour hits the city. At a digital bus shelter, twenty people cram together cold, wet, irritated refreshing their phones for delayed bus updates. They’re stuck. They’re uncomfortable. And at that exact moment, they are one of the most captive audiences imaginable.

On the 75-inch, 4K, 5G-connected screen beside them, what appears?

A luxury car spot.
A perfume ad with a model dancing through a sunlit meadow.
A static poster urging them to “Visit Phuket This December.”

No one looks. Worse they resent it. The screen becomes nothing more than glowing mockery. Light pollution sneering at shared misery.

For most people, this is mildly annoying. For me after 25 years building AdTech and streaming infrastructure it looks like a crime scene.

We are watching value evaporate in real time. Twenty high-intent consumers are standing inches from a screen, and because we’re operating on logic frozen in 1998, we deliver irrelevance instead of utility.

If that screen were Uber, prices would surge instantly.
If it were TikTok, the feed would adapt to the mood and moment.
But because it’s DOOH, it obediently plays a playlist uploaded last Tuesday by Dave in Accounting.

This is the Digital Billboard Dilemma.

In an earlier piece, “Why We Are Still Using Floppy Disks in a 5G World,” I ranted about manual updates and operational absurdity. More recently, Premesh Purayil’s article “Introduction to OOH/DOOH from a Web Publisher’s View” hit a nerve. He correctly points out that OOH is a one-to-many medium struggling in a one-to-one digital ecosystem.

He’s right.
But let’s be honest: “one-to-many” has become a convenient excuse for inertia.

We sell occupancy when we should be selling yield.
We treat billion-dollar digital networks like painted drywall.

Here’s why the current model is fundamentally broken and exactly how to fix it before retail media players eat us alive.

The “Uber Test”: Why Static Multipliers Are Financial Self-Harm

In ride-sharing, price responds to demand. Uber doesn’t ask, “What’s the average fare on a Tuesday?” It asks, “How many people need a ride right now?”

DOOH fails this test daily.

Most so-called programmatic DOOH still relies on a static impression multiplier a hard-coded estimate that says, “On average, eight people see this screen at this time.”

That approach is economic suicide.

When the rain hit that bus shelter, the audience didn’t merely double the value of the moment multiplied. These weren’t casual passers-by anymore; they were stranded, attentive, and motivated.

Yet the screen had no idea it was raining.

The media player is a blind box following a playlist. We congratulate ourselves for being “digital,” while operationally behaving exactly like paper posters—only more fragile. We deploy 5G, AI cameras, and edge processors… and then use them to display a static JPEG tied to a contract signed months earlier.

That isn’t technology.
It’s expensive electricity.

The Fix: Dynamic Bid Enrichment

To stop being paper with a plug, we must shift from static averages to real-time census.

• The Tech: Modern screens already use cameras or LiDAR (Quividi, AdMobilize) to count audiences live.
• The Mechanism: Instead of reading a static config, the player injects real-time data into the OpenRTB bid request.

Old:
{ “impmul”: 5 }

New:
{ “impmul”: 22, “situation”: “crowd_surge”, “weather”: “heavy_rain” }

The Upside:
The SSP raises the bid floor instantly. A $10 CPM moment becomes $30. Buyers happily pay because they’re purchasing verified attention, not vague exposure.

As Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, famously put it:

“Walled gardens aren’t incentivized to make the open web effective. They are incentivized to grade their own homework.”

Static multipliers let us grade our own homework. Real-time data forces honesty—and unlocks surge pricing.

The Structural Failure: The “Dumb Loop” vs. The “Smart Pod”

So why haven’t we fixed the pricing? Because our plumbing is broken. We are addicted to the Loop.

In the physical world, a landlord wants 100% occupancy. If you have 10 apartments, you want 10 tenants. In DOOH, this translates to the “Loop”—usually a 60-second rotation with six 10-second slots.

If a Media Owner sells 5 slots, they panic. They fill the 6th slot with a “House Ad” or a generic weather widget just to keep the loop full.

• The Business Failure: This signals Inventory Deflation. You are telling the market, “My screen is always available, and I have no better use for this time.”
• The Opportunity Cost: You are diluting the value of your paying advertisers by sandwiching them next to free filler.

Compare this to Connected TV (CTV). In the streaming world, no one buys a “loop.” In fact, no one even buys a whole “pod” (the commercial break). They buy a specific opportunity within that pod, governed by complex, real-time logic.

• The CTV Ad Pod (The Yield Model):
  • Competitive Separation: The ad server knows not to play a BMW ad right after a Mercedes ad. It protects the brand’s value.
  • Frequency Capping: It knows I’ve already seen that insurance ad 4 times this hour, so it swaps it for a CPG brand to avoid ad fatigue.
  • Yield-Per-Second: The first slot in the pod might cost $30 CPM, while the last slot costs $15. The pod is deconstructed to maximize revenue.
• The DOOH Loop (The Real Estate Model):
  • Zero Separation: I see a McDonald’s ad followed immediately by a Burger King ad because two different DSPs bought “Slot 3” and “Slot 4” blindly. The value of both ads is destroyed instantly.
  • Rigidity: If demand drops, we still play the full 60-second loop with filler. If demand spikes (like the rain example), we can’t extend the loop or insert a premium “break.”

The Fix: Kill the Loop.

We need to adopt Dynamic Ad Pods. If you only have 3 paying ads, play 3 ads and then switch to high-value content (news/sports) that actually engages viewers, rather than “filler.” If demand surges, expand the pod. Treat time as a fluid asset, not a rigid bucket.

As Reed Hastings, Co-Founder of Netflix, understood early on:

“Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define our history by the technology we use.”

The Loop is the Stone Age of AdTech. It’s a blunt instrument in a precision world.

The “Content Carrot”: If You Don’t Have a Show, You Must Be a Service

In CTV, the viewer tolerates the ad because they are waiting for The Office or Yellowstone to come back on. The content is the “Carrot.” They hate the ad, but they love the show, so they stay.

In DOOH, there is no carrot. The ad is the content.

Unless you are in Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, or Shibuya Crossing—places I’ve visited where tourists actually stand still to film the 3D whales—no one is “tuning in” to your screen. To a commuter rushing to a train, a generic brand video is invisible. It is “banner blindness” at physical scale.

The Fix: Contextual Utility (Service-as-an-Ad)

If you can’t entertain them, you must help them. You have to earn the right to be looked at.

• The Mechanism: We need to shift from Video Files to HTML5 Templates. Instead of the DSP sending a flat .mp4, it sends a dynamic template.
• The Logic: The media player (or Edge Server) populates the template fields based on real-time triggers.
  • Trigger: Rain > 5mm/hr → Swap Creative A (Iced Coffee) for Creative B (Hot Chocolate).
  • Trigger: Transit Delay > 10m → Insert a live “Wait Time” ticker inside the ad creative.

If your ad doesn’t react to the environment, it is dead pixels.

Marc Pritchard, CBO of P&G, has been screaming about this for years:

“We have a media supply chain that is murky at best and fraudulent at worst. We need to clean it up.”

Showing a sunscreen ad during a rainstorm isn’t fraud, but it is incompetence. It’s a waste. And in 2026, waste is the one thing no CMO will pay for.

The Business Landscape: Evolve or Be Eaten

The market is consolidating, and the “Landlords” (Media Owners who just rent space) are running out of time.

While traditional OOH companies fight over billboards, Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are eating the world. Walmart Connect, Uber Advertising, and Chase Media Solutions are growing at 20%+ while the general ad market crawls at 4%.

Why? Because they own the Loop and the Data.

• Traditional DOOH says: “We think 500 people saw this ad.”
• Retail Media says: “We know 50 people bought the product after seeing this ad.”

The Consolidation Signal

Look at the recent acquisition of Place Exchange by Broadsign. This is the canary in the coal mine. The pipes are merging. The industry is realizing that you cannot have separate silos for “CMS” (Loop management) and “SSP” (Programmatic sales).

The winners of 2026 will be vertically integrated platforms that control the glass and the transaction. If you are a small media owner using a generic CMS and a third-party SSP, your margins are about to get squeezed by the tech giants who can offer “Programmatic Guaranteed” efficiency at scale.

Brutal Reality for CFOs: Stop looking at Occupancy Rate. Occupancy incentivizes you to fill the loop with cheap filler just to say “we are full.” Start looking at Revenue Per Available Second (RPAS). It is better to have a black screen for 50 seconds and play one $100 ad for 10 seconds, than to play six $5 ads just to “fill the loop.”

Brian O’Kelley, CEO of Scope3, puts it bluntly regarding carbon and waste:

“Programmatic advertising creates massive amounts of carbon emissions… mostly from ads that no one sees or that don’t drive value.”

Every time we download a video file to a player that never plays it, or play an ad to an empty room because the “loop” said so, we are burning cash and carbon.

The Enabler: Why SSAI is the “Plumbing” of the Future

None of the above (Dynamic Multipliers, Ad Pods, Contextual DCO) works if we rely on the current hardware-heavy approach. We cannot trust a $200 Android media player to handle complex logic, API calls, and real-time bidding without crashing.

But we already solved this in Streaming.

I spent years building Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) systems for the US streaming market. We realized early on that smart TVs were actually pretty dumb. So we moved the brain to the cloud.

• The Cloud constructs the stream: It checks the weather, checks the crowd size, calls the Transit API, and stitches the perfect ad into the video stream.
• The Screen is dumb: It just plays the video stream it receives. No logic. No crashing. No black screens.

SSAI allows DOOH to function like a FAST Channel (Free Ad-Supported TV). It is the only way to scale “Smart” ads without replacing millions of hardware units on the street. It turns your billboard into a linear TV channel that just happens to be on a sidewalk.

As Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku, proved:

“The future of TV is streaming.”

Well, the future of Billboards is streaming too. We just haven’t admitted it yet.

Closure: The CES Challenge

Next week at CES 2026, you will see a lot of dazzling screens. You will see an 16K resolution. You will see transparent glass. You will see “AI Agents” that promise to run the world.

Don’t be distracted by the shiny objects.

Ask the hard question: “Is this screen smart enough to know I’m standing here, or is it just playing a loop?”

Because if we don’t fix the plumbing underneath these beautiful screens, we aren’t building the future. We are just building the world’s most expensive digital wallpaper.

Let’s replay that Tuesday evening with a new stack in place.

The rain starts.

1. The Sensor detects the crowd surge (20 people) and the weather (Rain).
2. The SSP updates the bid request: multiplier: 20, context: rain.
3. The Yield Engine (killing the loop) triggers a surge price. A ride-share app wins the bid at $45 CPM (up from $15).
4. The DCO Engine builds a creative on the fly: “Don’t stand in the rain. Your ride is 2 mins away. Use code RAIN20 for 20% off.”
5. The Outcome: The audience looks up. They feel understood. They feel helped. Three people book a ride immediately.

The Media Owner made 3x revenue.
The Advertiser got 3x conversions.
The Consumer got a solution, not pollution.
The bus is leaving. Make sure you’re on it.

Meet Moving Walls at CES 2026

Source: https://www.amitgoel.me/post/why-dooh-brought-a-knife-to-the-ces-2026-gunfight-the-12-month-roadmap-to-a-minority-report-reality-for-ces-2027/