What mobile OOH actually measured
This page exists because the category has a sourcing problem. Below are figures we can point at a published study for, and three widely-quoted numbers that do not survive being checked.
Measured against a control group
A cosmetics brand ran digital tops across Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Miami. LoopMe surveyed audiences exposed to the campaign against a matched control. Firefly published the study; the figures below link to it.
- +85%
- Purchase intent
- +44%
- Brand recall
- 39.9M
- Impressions delivered
- 2.8x
- Unique reach growth
Exposed audience vs control
Same campaign, four markets
Against a 30M target, 33% added value
Moving OOH added to a stationary buy
Reach that stationary out-of-home cannot reproduce
Firefly has published two studies run with the measurement firm Reveal. The first, announced in October 2025, found that combining moving and stationary out-of-home lifted campaign performance by 50% to 100% against stationary alone. The follow-up white paper, The Amplifying Effect Part II, published in May 2026, found that adding the moving layer produced up to 2.8 times greater growth in unique reach relative to impression growth.
The mechanism is not complicated. A fixed board reaches the same commuters repeatedly. A fleet moving through a market keeps meeting people the board never passes, which converts wasted frequency into incremental reach.
Read the study announcementNumbers we will not quote at you
These three appear on most vendor sites in this category, usually without a date. Here is what happens when you follow them back.
97% recall rate for mobile billboards
It is quoted across the industry as current and often credited to the OAAA. It is neither. Twenty-five year old recall research from a pre-smartphone streetscape should be treated as directional at best.
40,000 to 70,000 daily impressions per vehicle
The range is plausible and matches operator modelling, but the number that matters is the one produced for your campaign, in your markets, from GPS logs against traffic counts. Ask any vendor quoting it which market and which model it came from.
Sub-$0.10 CPM for car top advertising
CPMs across this category vary by more than an order of magnitude depending on whether the count is gross opportunity-to-see or a modelled viewed-impression. Comparing two vendors quoting different methods tells you nothing.
The archive this site draws on
- 603
- Brands documented
- 3,783
- Campaign photographs
- 21
- US markets
- 21
- Vehicle formats
Coca-Cola, Adobe, Stripe, Shopify, Target, YSL, FIFA and 596 more
Every frame a live campaign, not a render
New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas and 16 more
Digital tops, wraps, swarms, LED trucks, in-car, hologram