Programmatic out-of-home with Ikaroa
Put your brand on the city.By the hour. By the board.
One and a half million screens across six countries, bought the way you buy paid search. Hand-pick the boards, set the schedule, ship the creative, watch it play. Pause whenever the data says so.
screens worldwide
across our partner network
countries live
AU · US · UK · NZ · EU · CA
contracts required
pause or stop any time
plays in June 2026
network total so far
The thesis
The screens were always there. The way you bought them was the problem.
Outdoor advertising had two reputations until very recently. Either it was the most powerful brand-building channel ever invented, the one Apple, Spotify and Coca-Cola lean on for their best work, or it was an unaccountable money pit that demanded twelve-week commitments and never told you what worked.
Both were true. The screens were the same. The way agencies bought them was the bottleneck.
The new generation of programmatic OOH networks fixed the buying. You select the specific screens you want from a map, schedule the exact hours you want them, upload your creative, and only pay when the ad plays. The infrastructure that used to need a sales call now lives behind an API. Ikaroa is the team that plans, designs and runs the campaigns on top of it.
Sunset & Vine
Los Angeles · play complete
Queen Street Foot Traffic
Auckland · play complete
Bukit Bintang Plaza
Kuala Lumpur · play complete
Bondi Junction Interchange
Sydney · play complete
Old Street Roundabout
London · play complete
Times Square North
New York · play complete
Flinders Street Station
Melbourne · play complete
Sheikh Zayed Rd / DIFC
Dubai · play complete
Sunset & Vine
Los Angeles · play complete
Queen Street Foot Traffic
Auckland · play complete
Bukit Bintang Plaza
Kuala Lumpur · play complete
Bondi Junction Interchange
Sydney · play complete
Old Street Roundabout
London · play complete
Times Square North
New York · play complete
Flinders Street Station
Melbourne · play complete
Sheikh Zayed Rd / DIFC
Dubai · play complete
How a campaign goes live
Three steps and an evening. No sales call.
Pick the boards
We open the map, plot your campaign against your geography, and hand-select the specific screens. Highways, train concourses, gyms, shelters, or every board within a mile of your store. You see the list before you commit.
Schedule the play
Choose the days and dayparts that match the buyer journey. A morning rush burst on the commute, an evening top-up before the store closes, a midnight blackout on creative the brand-safety guidelines do not love. Hour-level granularity.
Ship the creative
You give us the brand. We deliver the master plus every aspect ratio the network supports: 1920x1080 horizontal, 1080x1920 portrait for shelters, the funny vertical strip for phone-booth screens. Live within hours of approval.
Most campaigns we kick off in the morning are running on the boards we picked by the time the team leaves the office.
What you can book
Six surfaces. One console.
Every screen below is bookable the same way. We mix and match across a single campaign so the audience meets your brand at the moments that actually matter, not just the ones the sales rep had inventory for.
Roadside billboards
/play$1.00 – $42.50
Highways, arterials, downtown cores
Train + metro stations
/play$0.60 – $8.00
Concourse screens, platform LEDs
Bus shelters
/play$0.25 – $1.50
Eye-level, 1:1 dwell-time
Street furniture
/play$0.35 – $4.00
Phone booths, kiosks, news columns
Gym + fitness screens
/play$0.25 – $1.50
Captive audience, 45-min average
Fuel stations
/play$0.25 – $1.50
Pump-top + forecourt LEDs
Rates above are the indicative range we charge across our network. Actual price per play depends on the city, the daypart, the board, and competing demand. We confirm the exact rate with you before you commit to the buy.
What changed
What outdoor used to feel like. What it feels like now.
The old way
- Twelve-week minimum booking
- Pay per fortnight, regardless of whether anyone is watching
- Creative locked the day the contract is signed
- Reporting arrives as a PDF, after the fact
- Whole-city buy or nothing
- Sales rep gatekeeps every change
How it runs now
- Live tonight if you ship the creative by 4pm
- Pay per play, only when the ad is on screen
- Swap the file mid-flight, every play after refresh runs the new asset
- Plays, screen time, spend, dayparts streaming live to a dashboard
- Hand-pick the board, the hour, and the budget
- Your team adjusts campaigns from a browser
Who runs it best
Six teams. Six ways the same screens earn their keep.
Brand launches
Burst hard for fourteen days across the three suburbs that matter, then turn it off
E-commerce + DTC
Lift assisted conversions by surrounding the metro a paid-search campaign is already working in
Events + tours
Geo-fence the venue, ramp the week of the show, blackout the morning after
Agencies
Add OOH to the media plan without a six-figure minimum, manage every flight from one console
Local + multi-location
Run different creative on different boards in the same campaign, by neighbourhood
Political + advocacy
Concentrate on the postcodes the strategy actually depends on, refresh daily as the conversation shifts
One play
08:35 in New York. Times Square North. The screen flickers, your ad plays.
Six seconds, the length of the play. Times Square is doing what Times Square does and a thousand pedestrians glance up at the same time because that is what you do when a screen this big changes its image.
The platform records the play and the cost lands in your dashboard before the next light cycle starts. Two dollars ten this time, because demand at this exact intersection is high in the evening rush and the schedule priced accordingly.
Your brand gets fifteen seconds of conversation between four people who are about to sit down for dinner together and discuss what they just saw, which the digital-ad layer will never capture but is half the reason this channel still works.
Forty seconds later it plays again on the screen on the south side of the plaza. We tagged both boards into the same flight at the planning stage because the foot traffic at Times Square almost always sees both within a minute.
The questions we always get
Plain answers, no asterisks.
How is this different from booking a billboard the old way?
Old-way OOH is real estate. You rent a board for a fortnight, the contract goes on file, the artist of record is your designer six weeks ago. Programmatic OOH is media. You buy the play, not the board. The same physical screen now serves dozens of brands an hour, and you only pay for the moments your ad is actually on it.
How quickly can we be live?
If you send creative by mid-afternoon we will usually have your campaign running on the boards you picked the same evening. Setup is hours, not weeks.
What does Ikaroa actually do that we could not do alone?
Three things. First, we plan the media: which boards, in which order, on which dayparts, against the right adjacent inventory. Second, we make the creative: most outdoor work gets ignored because it was a print ad nobody asked for. We design for the format and the speed of glance. Third, we manage the flight: budget pacing, daypart optimisation, creative swaps, and the weekly report you can take to your board.
What is the smallest budget that makes sense?
Useful results from around two thousand pounds for a focused single-city burst. Below that the pacing gets too sparse to read what is working. We will tell you honestly if your budget is better spent elsewhere.
Can we mix this with paid search and social?
Yes, and it is normally where this channel does its best work. We can map OOH coverage onto the postcodes your performance media is already converting in, and report on the lift in branded search and direct traffic week over week.
What creative formats are accepted?
Most boards take a 1920x1080 JPG or MP4 up to ten seconds. Train station and street-furniture screens have their own ratios and lengths. We handle the resizing in-house so one master asset becomes the full set of deliverables.
Start tonight
Your brand on the city by Friday.
Send the brief by lunch. We come back with a board list, a daypart plan, a creative concept, and a budget you can sign off on the same day.
- Live within 28 days
- No 12-week contract
- Pay per play
- Reply within 1 working day
Want to see what we have run for other brands? See the work →
Small print. Per-play rates and board availability shown anywhere on this page are indicative and depend on the supplier network at the time of booking. Final rates, dayparts, and creative specifications are confirmed in writing before any spend is committed. Your enquiry is not a booking and creates no payment obligation. Campaigns run subject to our terms of business and the supplier's standard OOH guidelines.