When T-Mobile spent about $600 million to acquire the digital out-of-home (DOOH) company Vistar Media in January, it locked down a network of more than 1.1 million digital screens in 30+ countries. A small but intriguing part of that count are the more than 130,000 screens situated in the backs of taxis and rideshare vehicles.
The acquisition is the latest expansion for T-Mobile in the rideshare advertising arena. In June, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions formed a pact with Uber Ads for Uber to run ads on T-Mobile’s network of screens in its rideshare media network, called Octopus Interactive.
It’s not just T-Mobile getting in on rideshare advertising. Interest in the ad format has been growing for a few years, and it’s continuing to grow in 2025 as marketers pour considerable spend into DOOH ads and other brands like Uber and Lyft also build out their rideshare ad capabilities.
Need a Lyft?
Interest in rideshare ads has been growing for some time. Before T-Mobile inked its ads deal with Uber last year, it had already started tapping into the space by acquiring Octopus back in 2022. That same year, Lyft debuted its media network complete with in-car ads, and continued to grow its programmatic ad partnerships for the network in 2024, integrating with partners like LiveRamp to give advertisers the ability to use their own data for audience segmentation, and NCSolutions, to make the platform more attractive to CPG brands.
Last April, a law ending a ban on ads inside rideshare vehicles in New York City went into effect, opening up thousands of new screens to advertisers looking to target consumers. At least a quarter of the revenue from those ads goes to rideshare drivers.
Looking ahead, the DOOH market is predicted to only grow: over a third of the $10 billion in OOH spending expected to occur by 2027 will go to DOOH platforms, according to eMarketer.
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“The next iteration is just blurring the definition of what TV even is,” Tony Marlow, LG Ad Solutions CMO, said onstage during a panel at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year. “Right now we think of it as the largest screen in the home, but you’re starting to see an emergence of all of these nontraditional screen environments, whether it’s [the] back of an Uber [or] the back of your own electric vehicle.”
Strength in numbers
One of the most popular rideshare platforms on the market, Uber, saw its advertiser count jump about 35% in the second half of 2024 from the first, Ashan Khan, Uber’s head of agency partnerships, said in January at CES. Uber’s deal with T-Mobile to run ads on Octopus increased Uber’s inventory to more than 50,000 vehicles, the companies said in June.
Some agencies are also seeing an uptick in interest from clients in placing rideshare ads, with the retail, entertainment, hospitality, and tech industries particularly interested, Jennifer Farquhar, OOH head at PMG, told Marketing Brew in an email. The usual 15- to 30-second length of rideshare ads, coupled with the potential use of geofencing to make ad targeting more precise—plus the potential ability to send push notifications to passengers to encourage action—can be valuable, she told us.
“Overall, rideshare ads are a great tool for expanding reach in harder-to-cover neighborhoods, delivering hyperlocal messaging in busy urban areas, or rounding out a multichannel campaign,” she said.
Rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft aren’t just trying to bring in advertisers on screens but are looking to monetize their apps, too. Lyft began showing video ads to app users last March, while Uber rolled out in-app video ads in 2023.
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