Key takeaways
- Traditional DOOH bookings typically carry £500–£2,000+ setup fees and £1,000+ campaign minimums; self-serve pay-per-display starts around £8/day.
- A screen's price is driven by four things: footfall, dwell time, audience profile and operating hours.
- On pay-per-display you're only billed for verified plays — unverified spend is automatically credited back.
- Worked example: a two-screen local campaign runs from about £10/day, or roughly £140 for a two-week push.
The honest answer: it depends how you buy it
Digital screen advertising — the industry calls it DOOH, digital out-of-home — is priced in two very different worlds. The traditional route involves media sales teams, rate cards, and campaign minimums. The self-serve route works like social media advertising: you set a budget and pay for what actually runs. The same screen can cost you wildly different amounts depending on which door you walk through.
What traditional DOOH typically costs
Buying through the traditional route, you'll commonly encounter:
- Setup and production fees — often £500–£2,000+ before your ad plays once.
- Campaign minimums — many networks won't take bookings under £1,000, and premium city-centre screens command far more.
- Fixed-term commitments — bookings are typically sold in weekly or monthly blocks, paid up front whether or not every play happens.
- Verification as an extra — independent proof your ad actually ran is often a paid add-on, or simply unavailable.
None of this makes traditional DOOH bad value for a national brand booking hundreds of screens. But for a local business, the pricing structure is the barrier: most of the cost sits in fees and minimums, not in reaching your audience.
What pay-per-display costs
On Admitt, pricing is per verified display — you pay a small amount each time your ad provably appears on a screen, and you control the total with a daily budget:
- From £8 per day for a single screen — that's the minimum daily budget, not a fee.
- Around £2 per day more per additional screen in your campaign's minimum, so a five-screen local campaign starts near £16/day.
- Longer creatives cost proportionally more — a 20-second ad occupies twice the screen time of a 10-second ad, so it prices at roughly twice as much per play.
- £0 setup fees, no contracts — start, pause, or stop whenever you like.
The part most people miss
With pay-per-display, an unplayed ad is not a sunk cost. If a screen goes offline or a display can't be verified, that money is automatically returned to your budget as credit. Traditional block bookings can't do this — you've already paid for the slot. Over a month, the difference between "paid for scheduled" and "paid for verified" is often the biggest real cost gap between the two models.
What actually drives the price of a screen
Whichever way you buy, four factors set what a screen is worth:
- Footfall — how many people pass the screen while your ad plays.
- Dwell time — a gym or waiting room holds attention for minutes; a walkway holds it for seconds.
- Venue and audience — who those people are, and whether they match who you're trying to reach.
- Operating hours — screens in venues open 16 hours a day simply deliver more plays than 8-hour venues.
On Admitt every screen lists its venue, location, and footfall estimates on the live screen map, so you can judge value before committing a penny.
A worked example
A café running a 10-second promotion on two nearby gym screens: minimum daily budget of about £10/day (£8 for the first screen, £2 for the second). Over a two-week push that's roughly £140 — every play independently verified, and anything unverified credited back. The equivalent traditional booking would usually fail on the minimum spend alone before fees were even counted.