DOOH Marketing
DOOH Advertising in San Francisco, CA
Nielsen DMA #10 · 2,542,480 TV homes. A live 30-mile plan around downtown San Francisco — reaching into Oakland, Berkeley, and the northern Peninsula — carries 6,268 active digital screens delivering 2.58 billion monthly impressions.
New to Out-of-Home?
DOOH Marketing Platform: Plan, Buy & Measure Digital Out-of-Home Campaigns
Every weekday, tens of thousands of cars cross the Bay Bridge from Oakland into San Francisco and back again — past gas pumps, grocery aisles, apartment lobbies, and bar TVs that never stop playing. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is advertising on exactly those screens: the ones people pass in the real world, on a route they already drive. Nobody skips it, closes the tab, or mutes it.
Goldfish Ads turns that whole Bay Area footprint into something you can plan in a browser: search real inventory by venue type and neighborhood, build a media plan, and launch in under 24 hours — a fraction of the weeks traditional out-of-home buying usually takes. Run it yourself in the self-serve platform, or hand it to our team to plan and manage end to end; either path gives you fast, precise activation across every market, publisher, and inventory source, with measurement built in so you can prove what the spend actually did.
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.
Below is that platform zoomed into one market — exactly what's bookable across San Francisco and the Bay Area right now.
Why San Francisco Matters
San Francisco's 873,965 residents anchor a much larger 4,648,486-person Bay Area metro[2], and four S&P 500 companies still call the city itself home, not just the wider region. Salesforce anchors Salesforce Tower in SoMa[6]; Wells Fargo keeps its corporate headquarters in San Francisco and is selling its longtime downtown tower to move to another building nearby in the city[5]; Uber runs out of its Mission Bay campus[7]; and Visa opened a roughly 1,000-employee campus at Mission Rock, next to Oracle Park, in 2024 — its own newsroom calls it "our new HQ"[8][9]. Airbnb, Levi Strauss & Co. (still at its 19th-century Levi's Plaza home), and Gap Inc. are headquartered in the city too[10][11][12]. Worth noting for anyone mapping the region: PG&E relocated its headquarters across the bay to Oakland[13], and several of the names people associate with "San Francisco tech" — Google, Apple, Meta — actually sit in Peninsula suburbs outside city limits.
The event calendar fills sidewalks and bars alike. Bay to Breakers, a 7.46-mile footrace that has run every year since 1912, now draws 70,000 to 80,000 costumed participants across the width of the city[14], while Outside Lands turns Golden Gate Park into a 225,000-capacity, three-day festival each August, billed as the largest independently owned music festival in the country[15].
Day to day, the commute looks different here than almost anywhere else: just 28.6% of workers drive alone, 18.7% take public transit, and 31% work from home, with a mean commute of 30.4 minutes[4] — a transit- and foot-traffic-heavy pattern that plays directly to rideshare-TV, urban-panel, and apartment-lobby screens rather than pure roadside reach.
Live Screen Map
Every dot is a bookable digital screen in the live 30-mile San Francisco 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 San Francisco plan[1] — the same corners you drive past on US-101, the Bay Bridge approach, and surface streets across SoMa. 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 San Francisco plan on 2026-07-04[1], with every screen counted once. The plan carries 6,268 active digital screens delivering 2,576,902,120 monthly impressions across the metro.
| Venue Type | Screens | Monthly Impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Grocery | 949 | 896,728,953 |
| Rideshare / Taxi TV | 783 | 6,249,907 |
| Apartment Buildings | 780 | 89,135,958 |
| Convenience Stores | 462 | 31,606,062 |
| Bars | 420 | 105,062,780 |
| Urban Panels | 388 | 190,347,373 |
| Casual Dining | 382 | 300,172,979 |
| Movie Theaters | 375 | 64,972,700 |
| Office Buildings | 217 | 68,899,008 |
| Gas Stations | 216 | 9,443,340 |
| Doctor Offices | 213 | 4,225,657 |
| Gyms | 152 | 22,638,293 |
| Bus Shelters | 144 | 15,347,211 |
| Sports Venues | 136 | 23,177,965 |
| Liquor Stores | 128 | 4,351,570 |
| Digital Billboards | 96 | 359,973,129 |
| Malls | 78 | 110,451,579 |
| Pharmacies | 75 | 1,469,727 |
| Taxi Rooftop Displays | 71 | 49,466,532 |
| Airports | 34 | 133,500,813 |
| Colleges | 28 | 1,483,703 |
| Hotels | 27 | 2,625,973 |
| Recreational | 24 | 19,434,635 |
| Other venue types | 90 | 66,136,273 |
| Total | 6,268 | 2,576,902,120 |
Venue types are mutually exclusive and sum to the plan total. Figures reflect the 30-mile radius around downtown San Francisco within the 2,542,480-home DMA.
San Francisco Billboard Sizes & Creative Formats
These are the actual screen sizes running in the live San Francisco plan[1]. Because a single screen can carry more than one creative dimension, the counts below are format instances, not unique screens — build one creative per aspect ratio and export it to each resolution. The market is dominated by 16:9 landscape, with a real block of 9:16 portrait for gas-pump and lobby screens.
| Resolution (px) | Aspect | Orientation | Format Instances |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920×1080 | 16:9 | Landscape | 11,607 |
| 560×160 | 7:2 | Landscape (banner strip) | 4,381 |
| 1080×1920 | 9:16 | Portrait | 2,495 |
| 1024×768 | 4:3 | Landscape | 642 |
| 1280×720 | 16:9 | Landscape | 467 |
| 720×1280 | 9:16 | Portrait | 246 |
20,266 format instances
Accept full-motion video (typically 10 or 15 seconds, silent).
19,952 format instances
Accept a static image — a single high-res JPG or PNG runs everywhere.
8,351 format instances
Support audio, concentrated in bar, dining, and gas-station venues.
Counts above are format instances pulled from the live ad-specs feed, not unique screens — a screen that accepts both a 16:9 master and a 9:16 crop is counted once per format. Ship a 16:9 and a 9:16 master and you cover nearly the entire market.
How Much Does DOOH Cost in San Francisco?
Running out-of-home in one of the country's most expensive media markets doesn't require a matching budget. 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 in an apartment lobby, on an urban panel, or on a grocery-aisle screen. You're never charged extra 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 San Francisco 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 San Francisco screens?
Live on San Francisco 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 6,268 screens, zoomed in on the San Francisco landmarks everybody recognizes. Each map shows the bookable digital screens within 1.5 miles of the spot[1] — the approach to the 1937 Golden Gate Bridge[18], Fisherman's Wharf, one of the busiest tourist draws in the western U.S.[19], Oracle Park and Chase Center in Mission Bay, Alamo Square, and out to SFO.
Couldn't load the per-store maps. Try refreshing.
Target Screens Along Any Route, Not Just a Radius
A radius is a blunt instrument in a market shaped like this one — a peninsula on one side, a bridge crossing on the other, and a coastline in between. Give Goldfish an actual route instead — the Bay Bridge commute, the Peninsula spine, a delivery run down 280 — and we trace it with the Mapbox routing engine[24], then geofence every bookable screen within reach of that path end to end.
Here are three metro corridors that carry a real share of the Bay Area's daily traffic — pick one to see the screens hugging it and the venue mix along the whole stretch, every dot a live, bookable screen from the same 30-mile plan[1]. Then there's the weekend drive north to Napa Valley wine country — every bookable screen along all 49 miles[25].
0 bookable screens sit within 0.75 miles of US-101 South Peninsula Corridor (San Francisco, CA → San Mateo, CA, 19.3 route miles). The mix along this corridor:
Corridor screens are filtered live from the 30-mile San Francisco plan [1] against Mapbox driving geometry [24], counting each screen within the listed buffer of the route. The Napa Valley getaway drive draws instead on its own dedicated corridor plan [25].
Screen Formats Active in San Francisco
Real photos of the screen formats running in the San Francisco 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
Mission District[20]
The cultural nexus of the city's Mexican/Chicano community, decorated with murals celebrating Latino heritage and mythology, and dubbed "the New Bohemia" by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995 — dense with the taquerías, bars, and late-night foot traffic that fill convenience-store and casual-dining screens.
Chinatown[21]
Established in the early 1850s, the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside Asia — by one 2013 estimate it draws more annual visitors than the Golden Gate Bridge, concentrating dense pedestrian traffic across just 24 blocks.
Haight-Ashbury[22]
Ground zero for 1960s counterculture and the 1967 Summer of Love, still drawing crowds every year to the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, which has run since 1978 — a steady tourist corridor of boutiques, cafes, and bookstores.
Castro[23]
One of the first gay neighborhoods in the United States, formally recognized as the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District by the Board of Supervisors in 2019 — a dense commercial strip of bars, restaurants, and shops with some of the city's highest pedestrian counts.
Suggested Campaigns for This Market
Tech & financial-services workforce reach
Office-building and urban-panel screens across SoMa and the Financial District, where Salesforce, Uber, and Visa's downtown campuses put thousands of employees on the same handful of blocks every weekday.
Build this plan →
Grocery / CPG drive-to-store
Grocery and convenience-store screens across the AM and PM commute — the single largest venue category in this plan, concentrated along the neighborhood corridors residents pass daily.
Build this plan →
Gameday & festival-season surround
Sports-venue, bar, and casual-dining screens geofenced around Oracle Park and Chase Center in Mission Bay, plus citywide bar and dining inventory during Outside Lands and Bay to Breakers weekends.
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 San Francisco. Different brands and markets — same platform, same playbook.
+64%
Familiarity Lift
B2B — HR Solutions
Read case study →
+130%
Consideration Lift
Banking — Betterment
Read case study →
29,000+
Store Visits Driven
Venue Types: Urban Panels — Auto Parts Retail
Read case study →
Frequently Asked Questions About San Francisco DOOH
What is DOOH advertising?
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is advertising on the digital screens you pass in the real world — gas-pump screens, grocery-aisle displays, rideshare-TV screens, bar TVs, and roadside digital billboards. It's a format viewers cannot skip, block, or mute, and it reaches people while they're already out in the city.
How much does DOOH advertising cost in San Francisco?
San Francisco 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 San Francisco?
The live 30-mile San Francisco plan carries 6,268 active digital screens across venue types including grocery, rideshare and taxi TV, apartment-building lobbies, convenience stores, bars, urban panels, and casual dining.
How many people can a San Francisco DOOH campaign reach?
The current San Francisco plan delivers roughly 2.58 billion monthly impressions across the Bay Area metro, which sits in Nielsen DMA #10 with 2,542,480 TV homes.
How fast can a San Francisco 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 California Markets
Plan a San Francisco Campaign
Sources
- [1] Goldfish DOOH Planning API — live saved plan (code Va0NKFE5f00), 30-mile radius around downtown San Francisco (lat/lng points targeting), de-duplicated so each screen is counted once, resold programmatic inventory excluded, pulled 2026-07-04
- [2] Wikipedia — San Francisco (2020 U.S. Census population 873,965; 4,648,486-person San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan statistical area, 13th-largest in the U.S.)
- [3] ustvdb.com — 2024-25 Nielsen DMA rankings (San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose #10, 2,542,480 TV homes)
- [4] Data USA — San Francisco, CA (U.S. Census ACS commute data, 2024)
- [5] Wikipedia — Wells Fargo (S&P 500 index component; corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California)
- [6] Wikipedia — Salesforce (S&P 500 index component; headquartered at Salesforce Tower, San Francisco)
- [7] Wikipedia — Uber (S&P 500 index component; headquartered at 1725 3rd St., San Francisco)
- [8] Wikipedia — Visa Inc. (S&P 500 index component; headquarters listed as San Francisco, California)
- [9] Visa corporate newsroom — "The future of work and commerce meet at Mission Rock" (new Market Support Center at Mission Rock opened June 2024; nearly 1,000 Visa employees moved in; referred to internally as "our new HQ")
- [10] Wikipedia — Airbnb (S&P 500 index component; headquarters in San Francisco, California)
- [11] Wikipedia — Levi Strauss & Co. (headquarters at Levi's Plaza, San Francisco)
- [12] Wikipedia — Gap Inc. (S&P 400 index component; headquarters in San Francisco)
- [13] PG&E newsroom — "PG&E's Oakland Headquarters Move and Purchase" (headquarters relocated to 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland)
- [14] Wikipedia — Bay to Breakers (annual San Francisco footrace; "currently the average participation is between 70,000 and 80,000")
- [15] Wikipedia — Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival (held annually in Golden Gate Park; described as the largest independently owned music festival in the United States; three-day capacity of 225,000)
- [16] Wikipedia — Oracle Park (41,331-seat capacity; home of the San Francisco Giants since 2000)
- [17] Wikipedia — Chase Center (seats 18,064 for basketball; home of the Golden State Warriors since 2019)
- [18] Wikipedia — Golden Gate Bridge (opened May 27, 1937; painted "international orange"; recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a Wonder of the Modern World)
- [19] Wikipedia — Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco (one of the busiest tourist attractions in the western United States; Pier 39's sea lion colony)
- [20] Wikipedia — Mission District, San Francisco (murals celebrating Latino heritage; cultural nexus of the city's Mexican/Chicano community; dubbed "the New Bohemia" by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995)
- [21] Wikipedia — Chinatown, San Francisco (established 1850s; the oldest Chinatown in North America; draws more annual visitors than the Golden Gate Bridge per a 2013 estimate)
- [22] Wikipedia — Haight-Ashbury (center of 1960s counterculture and the 1967 Summer of Love; annual Haight-Ashbury Street Fair since 1978)
- [23] Wikipedia — Castro, San Francisco (one of the first gay neighborhoods in the United States; Castro LGBTQ Cultural District established 2019)
- [24] Mapbox Directions API — driving route geometry for the US-101, I-80, and I-280 corridors, pulled 2026-07-04
- [25] Goldfish DOOH Planning API — dedicated San Francisco→Napa Valley wine-country route-corridor plan (code mQon-10Ry-0), 49-mile drive traced with Mapbox routing, resold programmatic inventory excluded so each screen is counted once, pulled 2026-07-04
Get Your Ad on San Francisco Screens
Every screen in the San Francisco Bay Area market, one place to launch it. Run it yourself or let our team handle it — live in under 24 hours.
Get Your Ad on San Francisco Screens