Every marketer is balancing two goals: keeping the customers they have and winning new ones. Earlier this year, rising acquisition costs pushed many toward retention and repeat purchases.
Now the pendulum is swinging back. According to IAB’s September 2026 Outlook, 63% of U.S. media buyers now rank acquiring new customers among their top media investment goals, up nine percentage points since January.
And the timing couldn’t be better. Q4 brings holiday shopping, major sports moments and other high-spending occasions that put consumers out in the world. For marketers, the goal shouldn’t be to simply show up on the biggest screens or reach the most people. When customer acquisition is the priority, the goal should be reaching the right people, in the places and moments that matter.
Out-of-home (OOH) has an important role to play. New research from OAAA and The Harris Poll found that 86% of consumers would take action after seeing a retail OOH ad that interests them, including visiting a retailer’s website or app (45%), searching for the retailer online (42%) or visiting a store (33%).
In other words, OOH doesn’t have to stop at awareness. It can be the real-world touchpoint that gets a prospective customer to take their next step.
On many digital channels, finding an audience is relatively straightforward. Identify the right person or device, and you have an opportunity to reach them directly.
Out-of-home doesn’t work that way. Your audience is moving throughout the physical world — commuting to work, stopping for coffee, heading to the gym, shopping for groceries, catching a flight, meeting friends for dinner… you get the picture. Reaching them means understanding not only who they are, but where they go, which environments matter and when you’re most likely to find them there.
The opens up new possibilities for customer acquisition. Rather than simply adding more screens to a media plan, marketers can focus their investment on the places and moments that offer the strongest opportunities to reach their audience.
Your next customer won't look the same for every campaign. They might share characteristics with your existing customers, fall within a specific demographic, show interest in your category or already be engaging with a competitor.
Vistar Media's DSP gives buyers access to the largest global data marketplace of audience data, so they can choose the signal that best matches the acquisition strategy — from established data providers with broad reach to specialized partners with niche datasets and proprietary signals from partners like T-Mobile.
For example, a brand focused on conquesting could use app-usage signals to identify an audience of competitor app users. Another might start with demographic characteristics that define its highest-value prospective customers. The point isn't to find the most complicated audience; it's to find the right signal for the customer you're trying to win.
Selecting the right audience is only the beginning. In DOOH, you still have to figure out where to reach them.
Audience Insights helps buyers understand where their audience over-indexes across venue types, uncovering environments they may not have considered and helping inform which inventory belongs in the plan.
From there, Vistar's planning tools help buyers understand available inventory, forecasted impressions, costs and allocation before committing budget.
Once the plan is set, Vistar's intelligence does the heavy lifting. As your audience moves throughout their day, our technology identifies opportunities to reach them across the inventory you've selected and activates accordingly — keeping spend focused on the moments when your audience is most likely to be there.
This is where expertise becomes technology: taking a complex audience and inventory landscape and helping marketers turn it into an actionable DOOH plan. Check it out.
Acquiring a customer rarely happens in a single moment. DOOH doesn't have to work that way either.
Device ID Passback can make devices associated with campaign exposure available for retargeting across channels such as TV, online and social, giving marketers an opportunity to continue the conversation after someone encounters the campaign in the physical world.
And as the campaign runs, delivery insights help buyers understand campaign health, diagnose underdelivery and identify adjustments that could improve delivery.
Customer acquisition doesn't end with reaching the right audience. You need to understand whether that exposure influenced brand perception or consumer action. Throughout the campaign, Vistar’s reporting helps buyers monitor performance and delivery.
Measurement studies go a step further, connecting DOOH exposure to outcomes across the funnel, from brand impact and store visits to online conversions and incremental sales.
Together, those insights help marketers optimize campaign delivery and use measured results to refine future targeting, media allocation and campaign strategies.
As customer acquisition moves back up the priority list, the opportunity for DOOH is bigger than simply reaching more people during a busy quarter. It’s about using better data and smarter technology to find the people who matter, and make every opportunity to reach them count.