Premesh Purayil on programmatic advertising
From 2025 DPAA Video Everywhere Summit | A Conversation with OUTFRONT's Premesh Purayil · · Broadsign
“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 think is getting better now.”
On , Premesh Purayil, Chief Technology Officer at OUTFRONT MEDIA INC, spoke about programmatic advertising during 2025 DPAA Video Everywhere Summit | A Conversation with OUTFRONT's Premesh Purayil on Broadsign.
About Premesh Purayil
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.