Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising has expanded rapidly across the UAE. Screens are now embedded across transport hubs, office towers, and residential areas. Formats have improved, and the medium has become a permanent fixture in the urban landscape. However, one area remains underdeveloped: how campaigns define, segment, and reach audiences in a way that reflects real-world behaviour. For media planners, this gap is both a risk to campaign performance and an opportunity to add strategic value.
Despite investment in infrastructure, many campaigns still rely on outdated assumptions. A location is paired with a rough time slot, and the audience is treated as fixed. A screen in a financial district at midday is assumed to reach professionals. A mall display on a Friday evening is expected to target shoppers. But in reality, audience composition and intent change throughout the day, and if the plan does not account for that, you are paying for reach that is not relevant. This is a strategic gap media planners must urgently address.
Location does not equal context
A high-traffic location does not guarantee engagement. If the message does not align with the viewer’s mindset at that moment, it is likely to be ignored.
A commuter at 8 a.m. is focused and moving with purpose. That same individual at 8 p.m. may be more relaxed and open to influence. If your schedule is based only on where people are, without considering when and why they are there, you are not optimising spend.
A study by Clear Channel, JCDecaux UK and Posterscope found that relevant DOOH content generated an 18 percent stronger brain response, leading to a 17 percent lift in ad recall and a 16 percent boost in sales. The takeaway for planners: context alignment is measurable and should be built into the media brief from day one.
Creative performance depends on targeting
NCSolutions’ 2023 update to their Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness study showed that while creative drives nearly half of incremental sales, targeting now accounts for 11 percent, up from 9 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, the importance of broad reach continued to decline. This means a planner’s role in defining the right audience signals is directly linked to campaign ROI.
To achieve this, planning should begin with behavioural profiling. Ask: Who is likely to be present at each location and time slot? What is their purpose at that moment? How should the creative shift to match their mindset? A single message running across all time blocks is not a strategy.
So planners should integrate location analytics, dwell-time data, and audience mobility trends to build a more accurate view of how each space is actually used. With this input, creative can be versioned by time segment and audience mindset.
A practical segmentation approach for planners
At Elevision, we segment audiences using three main signal groups:
Time-based signals: predictable mindset shifts such as morning commuters, lunchtime browsers, afterwork crowds, and late-evening visitors.
Environmental signals: location type such as residential areas, office buildings, or high-footfall commercial districts.
Conditional signals: real-time factors such as weather changes, live sports scores, or financial market movements.
Combining these signals allows planners to schedule creative that lands when it is most relevant, rather than simply when inventory is available.
Why this matters in the UAE
The UAE is home to more than 200 nationalities, each with different routines and behaviours. A single screen in a central location might reach professionals in the morning, tourists in the afternoon, and families in the evening. Treating all three as the same audience is a wasted opportunity, particularly when programmatic and dynamic creative tools already allow for precision.
According to a 2024 study by the Out of Home Advertising Association, digital formats saw significantly higher engagement, with 76 percent of viewers taking action after exposure and 74 percent of mobile users responding on their devices. In parallel, 73 percent of consumers viewed DOOH ads favourably. For planners, this rising attention means now is the time to adopt more granular targeting before competitors set the benchmark.
Case in point: Stake at DIFC’s Gate Avenue
A recent Stake campaign at DIFC’s Gate Avenue shows how behaviour-led targeting can elevate a plan. The goal was to amplify an on-ground activation by aligning digital touchpoints with the rhythms of the location. Over three days, Stake took over 9 of 12 loop screens and deployed four creative sets tailored to the time of day, trust-building messages for morning professionals, product-focused content for lunchtime browsers, aspirational messages for afterwork crowds, and lifestyle-driven visuals for evening visitors. The result was a campaign that felt native to its environment, guiding attention and reinforcing the live activation rather than competing with it.
The call to action for planners
Until audience targeting reflects the true complexity of real-world behaviour, DOOH will remain underleveraged. For planners, precision is not an optional layer, it is the foundation of performance. As expectations around relevance and ROI continue to rise, the future of DOOH will be defined not by how many people see an ad, but by how meaningfully it connects. In this medium, the screen is only the stage. The real performance is in delivering the right message to the right audience at the right moment, every time.
