DOOH Campaign Naming Standards: A Practical Guide

DOOH is not just another digital channel

Programmatic DOOH has matured quickly — but AdOps practices for it haven't always kept pace. Teams that manage display, social, and video campaigns often apply their existing naming conventions to DOOH without thinking through what makes DOOH fundamentally different.

Three things make DOOH naming more complex than most channels:

1. Screens are physical. A placement isn't a URL — it's a venue type, a market, and sometimes a specific screen ID. Your naming convention needs to capture geography and environment in a way display campaigns don't.
2. Creative specs vary wildly. A transit shelter and an airport takeover have completely different aspect ratios, animation limits, and loop durations. The ad size field that works for display isn't sufficient.
3. Measurement is impression-based. Unlike display, there's no click. Attribution relies entirely on exposure data — which means your campaign names need to be exactly right for the data to join correctly in any attribution or measurement study.

The recommended naming structure

Market_VenueType_Format_Duration_FlightDate

Example:

NYC_Airport_Fullscreen_15s_20260401
CHI_Transit_Landscape_10s_20260401
LAX_Retail_Portrait_8s_20260415

Let's break down each segment.

Market

Use a standardised market code, not a full city name. NYC not NewYork or New York City. Agree on your market codes upfront and document them — this is the controlled vocabulary that will save you when you're pulling a cross-market report six months from now.

For regional campaigns, you might use DMA codes or a geographic region label:

DMA501_Transit_Landscape_10s_20260401   (NYC DMA)
NE_Region_Billboard_Fullscreen_20260401

VenueType

This is where DOOH diverges most sharply from display. Common venue types:

• Airport
• Transit (subway, bus shelters)
• Retail (malls, grocery)
• Gym
• OOH (traditional roadside billboard, now digital)
• CinemasLobby

Pick a controlled list and stick to it. Transit and TransitShelter and BusShelter cannot all coexist in the same dataset.

Format

The physical orientation and composition of the screen:

• Fullscreen — single screen, full bleed
• Landscape — horizontal aspect ratio (16:9 is common)
• Portrait — vertical aspect ratio (9:16)
• SplitScreen — multiple content zones on one screen

Duration

Animation or video length, always with a unit suffix:

• 15s — 15 seconds
• 10s, 8s, 6s
• Static — for non-animated creatives

Never write 15 without s. In a dataset containing 15, 15s, and 15sec, you will have three rows where you expected one.

FlightDate

YYYYMMDD of the campaign start date. Same rules as every other channel.

Common DOOH naming mistakes

Using the vendor or DSP name as a segment. I've seen naming like Vistar_NYC_Airport_... and Hivestack_NYC_Airport_... for campaigns running the same creative in the same markets. When you pull cross-DSP reporting, you now have an extra dimension that fragments your data. Keep DSP as a separate reporting dimension, not part of the campaign name.

Omitting duration for animated creatives. "It's just a 15-second loop, everyone knows that." Until a new person joins, or you add a 10-second variation for certain venue types, and now you have no way to distinguish them from the name alone.

Using market names instead of codes. SanFrancisco and SF and SanFran all end up in your dataset. Standardise on codes from day one.

Ignoring sub-market granularity when it matters. If you're running airport campaigns across both JFK and LAX, NYC_Airport versus LAX_Airport is the right level of granularity. But if you're running across ten airports nationwide, you might want an additional segment — or at minimum, a controlled list where ORD means O'Hare and only O'Hare.

Connecting DOOH naming to measurement

Programmatic DOOH measurement studies (lift studies, attribution studies run through providers like Foursquare, Placer.ai, or OAAA partners) typically require you to provide a list of campaign line item names to match against exposure data. If your names are inconsistent, the match rate drops and your study results degrade.

A well-structured campaign name acts as a lookup key. Market, venue type, and flight date encoded in the name mean you can slice measurement results by any of those dimensions without additional data joins. That's powerful for understanding where your DOOH budget is actually working.

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