How SAIL Amsterdam brought nautical magic to the streets with programmatic DOOH

Turning the city into a digital shore

SAIL Amsterdam is the world’s largest maritime event, occurring only once every five years to celebrate the arrival of some of the world's most spectacular ships into the city’s historic harbours. For 2025’s festival, the Port of Amsterdam sought to extend the event’s reach far beyond the water’s edge.

By partnering with Vistar Media, VIOOH, JCDecaux, Yune and Kinesso, the brand transformed Amsterdam’s network of urban screens into a real-time broadcasting system. This innovative campaign used programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) to stream live harbour cameras directly to digital displays across the city, creating an interactive urban theatre and bringing the joy of the festival to the city’s residents and visitors wherever they might be.

The challenge: bridging the gap between the water front and the street

The primary hurdle for SAIL Amsterdam is physical capacity; while the tall ships on the rivers IJ and Amstel are majestic, only a fraction of the city’s residents and visitors can fit along the waterfront at any given time.

Yune and Kinesso NL approached Vistar Media with a unique challenge: how to bring the grandeur of the maritime parade to the crowds who couldn’t reach the shore, and how to turn ordinary street corners into windows to the nautical wonder happening just streets away.

The response: a real-time window into the harbour

To bridge the gap between the city’s metropolitan energy and its maritime heritage, Vistar Media and its partners deployed a sophisticated programmatic strategy that turned the entire city into an extension of the harbour.

• Real-time streaming: Leveraging Vistar Media’s programmatic technology, the campaign streamed live feeds from harbour cameras to JCDecaux’s high-quality DOOH network with minimal latency.
• Dynamic data integration: The strategy integrated real-time ship tracking data with Vistar Media’s advanced targeting capabilities. This ensured that as majestic vessels sailed into the harbour, their journey unfolded simultaneously across dozens of digital screens.
• Proximity-based prioritisation: Screens in close proximity to the water were prioritised for live feeds through the Vistar Media platform. These "digital magnets" used location-based messaging to guide audiences from the streets directly to the best waterfront viewing positions.
• Contextual relevance: The campaign transformed everyday environments, such as bus stops and shopping districts, into maritime viewing decks, adapting content based on the screen's location and the real-time movement of the ships.
  

The results: redefining the potential of pDOOH with live-streamed content

By breaking the "static barrier" of traditional outdoor advertising, the campaign successfully redefined the potential of programmatic DOOH.

• Spontaneous engagement: The live-streamed content snapped passersby out of their daily routines, creating spontaneous viewing communities around urban screens throughout Amsterdam.
• Increased attendance: The targeted location messaging measurably increased waterfront attendance, successfully transitioning audiences from digital discovery to physical participation.
• Social media amplification: The campaign generated significant organic buzz, with viewers frequently photographing the screens and sharing the live content across social platforms.
• Scalable impact: Through Vistar Media’s technology, the reach of SAIL Amsterdam was extended exponentially beyond the physical limitations of the harbour, making every street a "digital shore."

This partnership demonstrated how Vistar Media can deliver live, location-specific experiences that move beyond simple promotion to become a core part of a city’s cultural fabric.

The campaign was recognised for pushing the boundaries of real-time programmatic DOOH, as a finalist for the Tech Campaign Awards 2026.