Broadsign broadend its focus in 2025 by pushing for the programmatic integration of static OoH. In his Year in Review, Sales Director EMEA Jan Reiners says media owners still waste resources on traditional sales – and hints that Broadsign will double down on retail media in 2026.
Year in Review 2025/2026: Jan Reiners | Broadsign
2025 proved another standout year for Broadsign. We delivered innovative technological advancements for sell- and buy-side customers globally while also establishing new industry partnerships, expanding our footprint in verticals like retail media and healthcare, and welcoming the PlaceExchange team to the Broadsign family through an acquisition.
The unification of classic and digital out-of-home workflows and automating processes for customers remained core priorities. We rolled out new tools to support these needs, such as Unified Flow, guaranteed In-Advance buying capabilities, an AI creative assistant, and other platform enhancements.
Unification
In 2025, there was an industry-wide push to better unify static and digital workflows, as managing both remained a bottleneck for many media owners, especially with the volume of digital inventory burgeoning. Broadsign worked to alleviate this pain point by launching several platform enhancements to make it easier to manage static and digital assets from one central location. OoH executions in Europe and abroad from clients like PunaMusta and Infinity Outdoor leveraged these tools to great success.
Automation
Automation was another area of focus. Media buyers continued to express that OoH is still hard to buy compared to digital channels, while media owners reported wasted cycles on back-and-forth communications. In response to this feedback, we rolled out our In-Advance platform capability; it makes OoH ads as intuitive to book as a flight or hotel using programmatic pipes. On the media owner side, this enhancement frees up more time to focus on relationship building and enhancing measurement capabilities.
After its launch, we dove straight into extending our network of In-Advance demand and media owner partnerships to make more inventory available to purchase this way. We teamed up with Branded Cities and StackAdapt in North America to unlock guaranteed in-advance OoH ad buys in the region, and that was just the start. Buyers can expect even more inventory to become available on In-Advance next year, as we continue to grow our network of partners.
Artificial Intelligence
AI proved both a challenge and a milestone for the industry. At Broadsign, we looked at how we could use AI to truly deliver value. One area where we saw potential was OoH creative review, which a lot of our clients noted as a challenge, so we debuted our AI creative assistant. It helps with categorizing OoH content for review and learns from the behavior of the organization to provide recommendations as to which content needs to be reviewed and can be approved or rejected. AI is an area we’ll continue to watch in 2026, especially with all the hype around agentic AI.
Retail Media
2025 was also a successful year for Broadsign in the retail media space, with more major retailers adopting in-store technology across the region. Broadsign onboarded new clients like Cotswold, Douglas, and Sainsbury’s. These deals were a testament to the work we’ve been doing to adapt our platform tools to meet the needs of this rapidly evolving vertical.
Expansion and Growth
To cap off a great year, Broadsign acquired Place Exchange in November. By combining our technologies and teams, we now offer the most comprehensive OoH solution on the market, which means great things to come for media owners and buyers alike. It’s more important than ever for OoH media owners to have new tools and build incremental revenue streams, and the acquisition will allow us to fast-track innovation to deliver that technology to customers faster.
The journey ahead
If 2025 is any indication of what’s to come in 2026, it’s going to be another exciting year for OoH. We anticipate the continued unification of static and digital workflows, and that In-Advance trading will take off. With both, more brands will start to lean on OoH. Retail media will also see steady growth, and more in-store media networks will surface across the world. We’re working on a lot of exciting projects and conversations in this space that will come to life next year.
OoH measurement will just keep evolving and improving, helping to build further trust in the medium. We’ll see a greater focus on proof of play data, real-time targeting, and brand lift studies by companies like Happydemics, which help illustrate the real impact of OoH and in-store media campaigns.
At Broadsign, our aim for 2026 is to continue building technology that will allow media owners to work faster and smarter, and to capitalize on growing media buyer interest in the medium, and that serves the unique needs of verticals like retail media, sports, and healthcare and pharma. We will also continue to strengthen our team, deepen our partnership network and expertise so that we can help customers take advantage of all these emerging trends, and work closely with the PlaceExchange team to drive new innovations.
