DOOH Marketing
DOOH Advertising in Des Moines, IA
Nielsen DMA #67 (Des Moines-Ames) · 480,550 TV homes. A live 30-mile plan around downtown Des Moines reaches 2,884 active digital screens delivering 567M monthly impressions.
New to Out-of-Home?
DOOH Marketing Platform: Plan, Buy & Measure Digital Out-of-Home Campaigns
Out-of-home used to mean one static bulletin and a four-week wait. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) replaces that with a screen network — highway billboards, gas-pump displays, grocery aisles, office lobbies, bars, and gyms — that updates in real time and can't be skipped, blocked, or muted. It reaches people while they're actually out in the world, not scrolling past an ad.
Goldfish Ads turns that network into a platform: plan, buy, and measure DOOH across 100+ US markets and 35+ venue types, live in under 24 hours instead of the weeks traditional out-of-home buying takes. Run it yourself in the self-serve tools, or hand the whole thing to our team to plan and manage — either path gets you fast, precise activation across every market, publisher, and inventory source, with measurement built in 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.
Zoom that platform into one market and here's what it looks like: everything currently bookable across Des Moines.
Why Des Moines Matters
Des Moines is Iowa's capital and largest city, with 214,133 residents in the city proper and 709,466 across the metro[3]. For a metro this size, it carries an outsized concentration of corporate headquarters — mostly insurance and financial services. Principal Financial Group, an S&P 500 company[5], is headquartered downtown, with roughly 6,100 employees across the Des Moines region[20]. Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Iowa's dominant health insurer, and EMC Insurance both run their headquarters from downtown towers[6][7], and Nationwide staffs a corporate office downtown even though its global headquarters sits in Columbus, Ohio[8][9]. Just north in the suburb of Johnston, Corteva Agriscience runs a major agriscience campus — its global headquarters is in Indianapolis, and a planned seed-and-genetics spinoff would be headquartered at the Johnston site in late 2026[10]. That density of white-collar, 9-to-5 office traffic is exactly what makes office-lobby and downtown apartment inventory perform here in a way it wouldn't in a market without a comparable HQ base.
It's also a drive-everywhere market: 70.9% of workers commute by car alone and the average trip takes just 19.5 minutes[4]. Grocery, gas-station, and convenience-store screens catch that same commuter loop daily — and grocery alone accounts for the single largest slice of the plan, which tracks with Hy-Vee, the employee-owned Midwest chain, being headquartered a few miles west in West Des Moines[19].
On the calendar, two events reshape reach: the Iowa State Fair, which pulled nearly 1.2 million fairgoers in 2025, just short of the prior year's record[11], and the Des Moines Arts Festival, which draws 200,000-plus visitors to Western Gateway Park every June[12]. Both concentrate downtown and East Village bar, casual-dining, and billboard screens into the highest-traffic windows of the year.
Live Screen Map
Every dot is a bookable digital screen in the live 30-mile Des Moines 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 Des Moines plan[1] — the same corners you drive past on I-235, University Ave, and Merle Hay Road. 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 Des Moines plan on 2026-07-05[1], with every screen counted once. The plan carries 2,884 active digital screens delivering 567,028,574 monthly impressions across the metro.
| Venue Type | Screens | Monthly Impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Grocery | 1,364 | 288,368,220 |
| Bars | 335 | 94,684,465 |
| Casual Dining | 252 | 113,401,056 |
| Office Buildings | 119 | 9,117,742 |
| Movie Theaters | 115 | 6,055,051 |
| Gas Stations | 108 | 4,857,439 |
| Convenience Stores | 103 | 3,017,587 |
| Sports Venues | 87 | 11,785,852 |
| Apartment Buildings | 83 | 4,153,871 |
| Doctor Offices | 83 | 2,000,774 |
| Digital Billboards | 42 | 8,757,324 |
| Other venue types | 35 | 2,530,047 |
| Malls | 34 | 9,556,583 |
| Liquor Stores | 32 | 530,666 |
| Rideshare / Taxi TV | 31 | 30,654 |
| QSR | 28 | 4,399,661 |
| Gyms | 27 | 3,447,880 |
| Pharmacies | 6 | 333,702 |
| Total | 2,884 | 567,028,574 |
Venue types are mutually exclusive and sum to the plan total. Figures reflect the 30-mile radius around downtown Des Moines within the 480,550-home Des Moines-Ames DMA.
Des Moines Billboard Sizes & Creative Formats
These are the actual screen sizes running in the live Des Moines plan[1], counted as unique screens (not format instances). You don't build a file per screen — you build one creative per aspect ratio and export it to each resolution. The market is overwhelmingly 16:9 landscape, with a meaningful block of 9:16 portrait for gas-pump and lobby screens.
| Resolution (px) | Aspect | Orientation | Screens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920×1080 | 16:9 | Landscape | 2,516 |
| 1080×1920 | 9:16 | Portrait | 223 |
| 1400×400 | 7:2 | Landscape (spectacular) | 25 |
| 728×90 | 364:45 | Landscape (banner) | 18 |
| 840×400 | 21:10 | Landscape | 17 |
| 300×250 | 6:5 | Landscape (banner) | 10 |
2,667 screens
Accept full-motion video (typically 10 or 15 seconds, silent).
2,666 screens
Accept a static image — a single high-res JPG or PNG runs everywhere.
750 screens
Support audio, concentrated in gas-station and grocery venues.
Listed formats cover 2,809 of the 2,884 screens; the balance run less-common sizes or publisher-defined formats. Ship a 16:9 and a 9:16 master and you cover nearly the entire market.
How Much Does DOOH Cost in Des Moines?
There's no rate card and no six-figure minimum to run out-of-home in Des Moines. 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 a grocery-aisle screen, a downtown office lobby, a gas-pump display, 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 Des Moines 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 Des Moines screens?
Live on Des Moines 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 2,884 screens, zoomed in on the Des Moines landmarks you actually drive past. Each map shows the bookable digital screens within 1.5 miles of the spot[1] — the Capitol, the arena, the ballpark, East Village, the fairgrounds, and out to Jordan Creek.
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, a highway, a store-to-store delivery corridor — and we trace it with the Mapbox routing engine[18], then geofence every bookable screen within reach of that path: the billboards, gas-pump screens, convenience stores, bars, casual-dining spots, and grocery stores a driver actually passes end to end.
Here are three of the metro's major arteries — the I-35/I-80 spine plus the I-235 downtown loop that connects them. 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-35 North-South Spine (Norwalk, IA → Ankeny, IA, 30.2 route miles). The mix along this corridor:
Corridor screens are filtered live from the 30-mile Des Moines plan [1] against Mapbox driving geometry [18], counting each screen within the listed buffer of the route.
Screen Formats Active in Des Moines
Real photos of the screen formats running in the Des Moines 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
East Village[16]
Warehouses-turned-lofts east of the Capitol along locally owned shops and restaurants — the market's densest walkable dining and nightlife strip, and the highest bar/casual-dining screen concentration in the plan.
Sherman Hill[17]
The city's oldest neighborhood, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979 — Victorian and brick residences a few blocks from downtown office towers.
Historic Court District[16]
Downtown's civic and social core, home to the Downtown Farmers' Market plus trail, restaurant, and entertainment access.
Western Gateway[16]
Sculpture-park district anchoring the west end of downtown, and the host site for the Des Moines Arts Festival's 200,000-plus annual crowd.
Suggested Campaigns for This Market
Grocery / CPG drive-to-store
Grocery, convenience-store, and gas-station screens through the AM and PM commute — the single densest slice of the Des Moines plan at 1,364 grocery screens alone.
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Insurance & financial-services recruiting
Office-lobby and downtown apartment-building screens to reach the workforce behind Principal, Wellmark, EMC, and Nationwide's downtown corporate corridor.
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State Fair & festival surround
Roadside digital bulletins plus bar and casual-dining screens concentrated downtown and along the route to the fairgrounds during the Iowa State Fair and Des Moines Arts Festival windows.
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 Des Moines. Different brands and markets — same platform, same playbook.
9.9x
Foot Traffic Lift
Foot Traffic — Apparel Retailer
Read case study →
+130%
Consideration Lift
Banking — Betterment
Read case study →
+47%
Awareness Lift
CPG — Hair Care Brand
Read case study →
Frequently Asked Questions About Des Moines 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 office lobbies. 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 Des Moines?
Des Moines 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 Des Moines?
The live 30-mile Des Moines plan carries 2,884 active digital screens across venue types including grocery, bars, casual dining, office buildings, movie theaters, gas stations, convenience stores, sports venues, and roadside digital billboards.
How many people can a Des Moines DOOH campaign reach?
The current Des Moines plan delivers roughly 567 million monthly impressions across the metro, which sits in Nielsen DMA #67 (Des Moines-Ames) with 480,550 TV homes.
How fast can a Des Moines 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 Iowa Markets
Plan a Des Moines Campaign
Sources
- [1] Goldfish DOOH Planning API — live saved plan (code kZ0VgPU25so), 30-mile radius around downtown Des Moines, resold programmatic inventory excluded so each screen is counted once, pulled 2026-07-05
- [2] ustvdb.com — Des Moines-Ames media market page, 2024-25 Nielsen season
- [3] Wikipedia — Des Moines, Iowa
- [4] Data USA — Des Moines, IA (U.S. Census ACS commute data)
- [5] Wikipedia — Principal Financial Group
- [6] Wikipedia — Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield
- [7] Wikipedia — EMC Insurance Building
- [8] Nationwide — Des Moines, IA office location page
- [9] Wikipedia — Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company (global HQ, Columbus, Ohio)
- [10] Corteva — "Corteva Announces Headquarters for Two Future Companies Following Planned Separation" (2026)
- [11] Radio Iowa — "2025 Iowa State Fair attendance ranks third" (Aug. 19, 2025)
- [12] Wikipedia — Des Moines Arts Festival
- [13] Wikipedia — Casey's Center (Des Moines, Iowa)
- [14] Wikipedia — Principal Park
- [15] Wikipedia — Iowa State Capitol
- [16] Greater Des Moines Partnership — Downtown Des Moines Neighborhoods guide
- [17] Wikipedia — Sherman Hill Historic District
- [18] Mapbox Directions API — driving route geometry for the I-35, I-80, and I-235 corridors, pulled 2026-07-05
- [19] Hy-Vee — "Our Company" corporate overview
- [20] Greater Des Moines Partnership / DataDSMUSA — "Major Employers in the Greater Des Moines Region" list (data as of 2023-05-17)
Get Your Ad on Des Moines Screens
Every screen in the Des Moines market, one place to launch it. Run it yourself or let our team handle it — live in under 24 hours.
Get Your Ad on Des Moines Screens