CPM Benchmarks: How Carry Signal Compares to Billboards and Digital

Advertisers constantly ask us: how does your CPM compare?

It's the right question — and it deserves a real answer, not a pitch deck number. Here's the honest landscape for Romania in 2026.

The Romanian OOH CPM landscape

Static billboards (major cities): €15–30 CPM estimated. These figures are based on operator-supplied footfall data for the panel location. They are estimates, not measurements, and they don't segment by time of day or audience type.

Digital OOH screens (mall/transport DSP): €4–10 CPM. Programmatic buys on indoor screens (shopping malls, airport, metro in Bucharest) are better measured and often better targeted. But inventory is limited and concentrated in premium locations.

Social media (Meta/TikTok/Google): €1–6 CPM depending on targeting. Highly measurable, highly targetable — but screen-blind. Digital impressions don't carry the same ambient, street-level presence that OOH does.

Carry Signal: designed to sit at the €4–8 CPM range with full route tracking and GPS-verified impression logging.

Why the comparison matters

Most Romanian OOH buyers compare mobile DOOH to billboards and assume the CPM will be higher because the format is newer. The opposite is often true.

Billboard CPMs are high partly because of the overhead: panel leasing, maintenance, permit fees, and the administrative cost of booking. A billboard operator needs to recoup all of that across 12 annual bookings. Mobile DOOH doesn't carry the same fixed infrastructure costs.

More importantly: billboard CPMs are estimated. When a media buyer includes a Carry Signal unit in their plan, they're buying measured impressions — logged to a GPS coordinate and a timestamp. That's a standard digital buyers take for granted. OOH buyers in Romania have never had it.

What accountability looks like in practice

Here's what a Carry Signal campaign report includes:

Route coverage: a map of every district the unit covered, with timestamps.

Impression count: modelled against pedestrian density data for each zone, time window, and day of week.

Creative log: confirmation that the display was active for the contracted flight duration.

CPM summary: cost-per-thousand-impressions, calculated from the route data — not a pre-campaign estimate.

None of this is experimental. It's the same methodology outdoor media auditors use in Western European markets, applied to a Romanian context.

Getting a projection

If you want to see how a Carry Signal campaign would compare to your current OOH or digital spend, we build free projections based on your target cities, flight dates, and monthly budget. The projection shows estimated impressions, modelled CPM, and how the campaign zones map to your audience.

Request a campaign quote from the contact page to get started.