Chief Technology Officer, Outfront Media
Search every verified Premesh Purayil interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Premesh Purayil, Chief Technology Officer at Outfront Media, discussed the state of out-of-home advertising in two interviews in late 2025. At the DPAA Video Everywhere Summit, he said that retail media's value lies in its use of first-party data, which he described as "a little bit less known in the industry," and that it allows advertisers to target audience segments and see purchase actions afterward. He also stated that the difficulty of transacting has been a long-standing problem for the channel, but that programmatic buying is helping, and that the rise of AI and "agentic" tools could help automate manual workflows. On the "Beyond the Billboard" podcast, Purayil argued that the industry needs to shift from selling "time and space" to selling measurable outcomes, and that the biggest gap in out-of-home is education about its measurement capabilities. He said that static billboards will remain relevant but that the real opportunity is converting them to digital to enable programmatic advertising. In a 2018 discussion on header bidding and site speed, Purayil described his earlier experience at a publisher where he discovered ad partners running code on his pages without his knowledge. He said his team prioritized content-first page loading, moving header bidding to post-page-load (sometimes called "footer bidding"), and that switching to lazy-loading ads increased viewable inventory by about 75%. He advocated for a hybrid approach to server-side header bidding, keeping top-tier partners client-side while moving others server-side to improve speed.
“I think broadly it's just the exposure, the excitement around it draws attention to digital out of home, which obviously in our space we've been in for quite some time — but it's the exposure to the marketing side and how well it performs. I think it gives us an opportunity to show our value, certainly in-store or near...”
“The value that retail media brings to the table — and certainly with our inventory what's near-store as well — is first-party data. The fact that that exists is probably something that's a little bit less known in the industry; you can target individuals or audience segments and then see purchase actions afterwards.”
“I still think it's largely just the difficulty in how you transact, right? It's been a problem for years — it's getting better with programmatic, which certainly helps quite a bit. The direct side, which is a large part of the overall business, easing that workflow and making it easier to buy is the challenge that I th...”
“Around the kind of solve for the challenges is the rise of AI and agentic. Their ability to create agents to do transactions and deal with workflows solves very well for the out-of-home piece where traditionally it's been very IO-based, RFP, very manual.”
Filmed at the Broadsign Content Studio during the 2025 DPAA Video Everywhere Summit, OUTFRONT's Premesh Purayil covers ...
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Header bidding done well drives up revenue. Poorly done header bidding drives away users as they give up waiting for content.
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