DOOH Marketing
DOOH Advertising in Chicago, IL
Nielsen DMA #3 · 3,654,750 TV homes. A live 30-mile plan around downtown Chicago reaches 18,712 active digital screens delivering 7.1B monthly impressions.
New to Out-of-Home?
DOOH Marketing Platform: Plan, Buy & Measure Digital Out-of-Home Campaigns
Chicago is the country's third-largest television market[15], but a media plan built only for the city limits misses most of the market — the 30-mile plan behind this page reaches well past the Loop into Evanston, Oak Park, Cicero, and Skokie, because that's genuinely where Chicagoland's advertising audience lives, works, and drives.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is advertising on the screens that audience passes in the real world — digital billboards along the expressway, screens at the gas pump, the gym, the grocery aisle, bars, and airport terminals. It's the one format a viewer can't skip, block, or mute.
Goldfish Ads makes it easy: plan, buy, and measure DOOH across 100+ US markets and 35+ venue types, and launch in under 24 hours instead of the weeks traditional out-of-home takes. Run it yourself in the self-serve platform or hand it to our team to plan and manage for you — either way you get fast, precise activation across every market, publisher, and inventory source, with built-in measurement so you can prove what your spend delivered.
Plan
Search real inventory by market, venue type, and audience, then build a media plan in seconds.
Buy
Activate programmatically across every screen — run it yourself or let our team manage it, with no insertion-order back-and-forth.
Measure
Foot-traffic attribution, website lift, and brand studies close the loop on every campaign.
This page zooms that platform into one market — here's exactly what's bookable in Chicago right now.
Why Chicago Matters
Few markets pack as many corporate headquarters into a few square miles as downtown Chicago. McDonald's runs its global HQ from a West Loop campus[3], United Airlines has been headquartered at Willis Tower since 2013[4] and just re-signed its lease there through 2033[5], Mondelez International is based in Fulton Market[6], Archer-Daniels-Midland moved its global headquarters to 77 West Wacker Drive in 2014[7], and Exelon runs its utility business out of Chase Tower[8] — five S&P 500 companies within a short walk of each other. (Kraft Heinz splits its headquarters between the Aon Center here and Pittsburgh[9], while Walgreens, Abbott, and Allstate keep their headquarters in the suburbs — Deerfield[10], Abbott Park[11], and Glenview[12] respectively — not the city proper.)
That density shows up in the commute: 44.7% of city workers drive alone, 17.7% ride public transit, and the mean commute runs 33.1 minutes[17] — long enough that expressway bulletins and gas-station screens catch the same commuters day after day on I-90/94, I-290, and I-55.
Two events reshape reach on the calendar: Lollapalooza, which draws an estimated 400,000 people to Grant Park every July and sells out annually[13], and the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, which admits around 50,000 runners through the Loop and 29 neighborhoods each October[14] — both concentrated downtown where bar, casual-dining, and urban-panel screen density is highest.
Live Screen Map
Every dot is a bookable digital screen in the live 30-mile Chicago plan[1]. Pan, zoom, and click any marker for venue type and impressions, or use the filter to isolate a single format. Pulled directly from the Goldfish API — no static screenshot.
See the Actual Boards
Real Google Street View of the roadside bulletins in the Chicago plan[1] — the same corners you drive past on the Kennedy, the Eisenhower, and the Stevenson. Drag inside any panel to look around the intersection. Imagery is Google Street View; screens are live and bookable.
Inventory by Venue Type
Pulled live from the saved 30-mile Chicago plan on 2026-07-04[1], with every screen counted once. The plan carries 18,712 active digital screens delivering 7,128,230,520 monthly impressions across the metro.
| Venue Type | Screens | Monthly Impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Rideshare / Taxi TV | 2,968 | 84,084,962 |
| Bars | 2,038 | 933,184,230 |
| Gas Stations | 1,843 | 82,543,694 |
| Grocery | 1,568 | 1,619,637,058 |
| Casual Dining | 1,474 | 578,492,714 |
| Doctor Offices | 1,372 | 53,631,480 |
| Movie Theaters | 1,334 | 129,388,478 |
| Apartment Buildings | 1,198 | 231,463,214 |
| Office Buildings | 837 | 517,968,043 |
| Urban Panels | 808 | 461,704,076 |
| Convenience Stores | 788 | 91,158,444 |
| Gyms | 492 | 59,519,552 |
| Digital Billboards | 404 | 1,344,844,794 |
| Subway | 230 | 96,596,911 |
| Sports Venues | 200 | 101,028,956 |
| Banks | 173 | 66,780,773 |
| Malls | 141 | 160,208,797 |
| Liquor Stores | 132 | 17,967,748 |
| Rideshare / Taxi Top | 119 | 84,137,760 |
| Recreational | 82 | 119,990,376 |
| Airports | 57 | 210,869,581 |
| Other venue types | 454 | 83,028,879 |
| Total | 18,712 | 7,128,230,520 |
Venue types are mutually exclusive and sum to the plan total. Figures reflect the 30-mile radius around downtown Chicago within the 3,654,750-home DMA.
Chicago Billboard Sizes & Creative Formats
These are the actual creative dimensions accepted across the live Chicago plan[1]. A single screen can accept more than one aspect ratio — a 16:9 landscape master plus a 9:16 portrait crop for gas-pump or elevator units, for example — so the counts below are format instances, not unique screens. The market is dominated by 16:9 landscape, with a large block of 9:16 portrait and a wide-format row built for digital billboards.
| Resolution (px) | Aspect | Orientation | Format Instances |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920×1080 | 16:9 | Landscape | 30,669 |
| 1080×1920 | 9:16 | Portrait | 5,770 |
| 560×160 | 7:2 | Landscape (spectacular) | 5,056 |
| 640×360 | 16:9 | Landscape | 2,018 |
| 1280×720 | 16:9 | Landscape | 1,249 |
| 1400×400 | 7:2 | Landscape (spectacular) | 818 |
47,264 format instances
Accept full-motion video (typically 10 or 15 seconds, silent).
43,491 format instances
Accept a static image — a single high-res JPG or PNG runs everywhere.
20,937 format instances
Support audio, concentrated in bar, gas-station, and point-of-care venues.
Ship a 16:9 and a 9:16 master and you cover the large majority of the Chicago market.
How Much Does DOOH Cost in Chicago?
You don't need a rate card or a seven-figure budget to run out-of-home in the country's third-largest market. Campaigns start for as little as $50 a day with no long-term commitment — launch, pause, and adjust whenever you want.
Every screen in the plan is sold at one flat, transparent CPM (cost per thousand impressions) — the same rate whether your message runs on an expressway bulletin, a gas-pump screen, an office lobby, or a bar TV. You're never charged a premium for "better" inventory; a bigger budget simply earns more impressions across the metro. Scale up or down, market by market, anytime.
Start at $50/day
Enough to put a real message on Chicago screens — test the market before you scale.
No commitment
No annual contract, no minimum term. Run a single week or run all year.
One flat CPM
Every venue type priced the same — your budget buys impressions, not access tiers.
Ready to put your brand on Chicago screens?
Live on Chicago screens in under 24 hours. Run it yourself or let our team handle it. No rate card, no long-term commitment.
Screens Near the Places You Know
The same 18,712 screens, zoomed in on the Chicago landmarks you actually drive past. Each map shows the bookable digital screens within 1.5 miles of the spot[1] — Willis Tower, Millennium Park, Navy Pier, Wrigley Field, the United Center, and out to O'Hare.
Couldn't load the per-store maps. Try refreshing.
Target Screens Along Any Route, Not Just a Radius
Most out-of-home tools stop at a radius or a market boundary. Goldfish plans along the actual roads people drive. Hand us a route — a daily commute, an expressway, a store-to-store delivery corridor — and we trace it with the Mapbox routing engine[20], then geofence every bookable screen within reach of that path: the billboards, gas-pump screens, convenience stores, bars, casual-dining spots, and office lobbies a driver actually passes end to end.
Here are three of Chicago's major expressways. Pick one to see the screens hugging it and the venue mix along the whole corridor — every dot is a live, bookable screen from the same 30-mile plan[1].
0 bookable screens sit within 0.75 miles of I-90/94 Kennedy-Dan Ryan Spine (Skokie, IL → Calumet Park, IL, 30.3 route miles). The mix along this corridor:
Corridor screens are filtered live from the 30-mile Chicago plan [1] against Mapbox driving geometry [20], counting each screen within the listed buffer of the route.
Screen Formats Active in Chicago
Real photos of the screen formats running in the Chicago plan[1], ranked by how many screens of each are bookable here. Each format is matched to the venue types actually booking in the market — representative venue photography, not location-specific shots.
Neighborhoods & Trade Areas
The Loop[2]
The dense downtown core where the city's tallest towers and its Fortune 500 headquarters cluster shoulder to shoulder — the highest concentration of office-lobby and urban-panel screens in the market.
West Loop / Fulton Market[2]
Former meatpacking warehouses turned the city's most-talked-about restaurant row, and now home to Google's Midwest HQ and Mondelez International — bar and casual-dining screen density that spikes on weeknights.
Wicker Park / Bucktown[2]
Boutique retail, street art, and a lively bar scene draw a young, disposable-income crowd — a strong fit for lifestyle, beverage, and retail advertisers.
Pilsen[2]
A vibrant, historically Mexican-American neighborhood known for street art and one of the city's most distinctive food scenes — dense foot traffic through independent restaurants and grocers.
Wrigleyville[2]
The bars and restaurants surrounding Wrigley Field turn into a sea of foot traffic on game days — event-window inventory that spikes reach around the Cubs' 81-game home schedule.
Suggested Campaigns for This Market
Downtown workforce & B2B awareness
Office-building, urban-panel, and rideshare-TV screens concentrated in the Loop and West Loop, where the market's Fortune 500 and S&P 500 headquarters sit blocks apart.
Build this plan →
CPG & grocery drive-to-store
Grocery, convenience-store, and gas-station screens geofenced across the Chicagoland commute — the natural home turf for the metro's consumer-packaged-goods anchors.
Build this plan →
Gameday & festival surround
Bars, casual dining, and urban-panel screens around Wrigleyville and the United Center, plus the Marathon and Lollapalooza routes, timed to the city's biggest crowd days.
Build this plan →
Sports & Entertainment Footprints
What DOOH Delivers
Results from real DOOH campaigns run on the same venue types and audience tactics you can book in Chicago. Different brands and markets — same platform, same playbook.
+64%
Familiarity Lift
B2B — HR Solutions
Read case study →
+47%
Awareness Lift
CPG — Hair Care Brand
Read case study →
29,000+
Store Visits Driven
Venue Types: Urban Panels — Auto Parts Retail
Read case study →
Frequently Asked Questions About Chicago DOOH
What is DOOH advertising?
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is advertising on the digital screens you pass in the real world — highway billboards, gas-pump screens, gyms, grocery aisles, bars, and airport terminals. It is a format viewers cannot skip, block, or mute, and it reaches people while they are out living their day.
How much does DOOH advertising cost in Chicago?
Chicago DOOH campaigns start for as little as $50 a day with no long-term commitment. Every screen is sold at one flat, transparent CPM (cost per thousand impressions) — the same rate across every venue type — so a larger budget simply earns more impressions across the metro rather than access to different inventory.
What types of screens can I book in Chicago?
The live 30-mile Chicago plan carries 18,712 active digital screens across venue types including bars, grocery, gas stations, casual dining, office lobbies, apartment buildings, urban panels, digital billboards, transit, and O'Hare International Airport.
How many people can a Chicago DOOH campaign reach?
The current Chicago plan delivers roughly 7.1 billion monthly impressions across the metro, which sits in Nielsen DMA #3 with 3,654,750 TV homes — the third-largest television market in the country.
How fast can a Chicago DOOH campaign launch?
Campaigns launch in under 24 hours — plan, buy, and go live the same day, instead of the weeks that traditional out-of-home buying takes. Run it yourself in the Goldfish Ads platform, or have our team plan and manage it for you.
Nearby Illinois Markets
Plan a Chicago Campaign
Sources
- [1] Goldfish DOOH Planning API — live saved plan (code XUE1lDM8QVA), 30-mile radius around downtown Chicago/the Loop, de-duplicated so each screen is counted once, pulled 2026-07-04
- [2] Choose Chicago — Neighborhoods guide
- [3] Wikipedia — McDonald's Corporation (headquarters + Fortune 500 rank)
- [4] Wikipedia — United Airlines Holdings (Willis Tower headquarters)
- [5] REJournals — United Airlines reups at Chicago's Willis Tower
- [6] Wikipedia — Mondelez International
- [7] Wikipedia — Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM)
- [8] Wikipedia — Exelon Corporation
- [9] Wikipedia — Kraft Heinz Company
- [10] Wikipedia — Walgreens
- [11] Wikipedia — Abbott Laboratories
- [12] Wikipedia — Allstate
- [13] Wikipedia — Lollapalooza
- [14] Wikipedia — Bank of America Chicago Marathon
- [15] ustvdb.com — 2024-25 Nielsen DMA rankings
- [16] U.S. Census Bureau (2020) via Wikipedia — Chicago
- [17] Data USA — Chicago, IL (U.S. Census ACS)
- [18] Wikipedia — Wrigley Field
- [19] Wikipedia — United Center
- [20] Mapbox Directions API — driving route geometry for the I-90/94, I-290, and I-55 corridors, pulled 2026-07-04
Get Your Ad on Chicago Screens
Every screen in the Chicago market, one place to launch it. Run it yourself or let our team handle it — live in under 24 hours.
Get Your Ad on Chicago Screens