There was a time when the phrase "out of home" referred to billboards, bus shelters, and the occasional blimp. Now it apparently also refers to what happens when a social media platform decides that one billion mobile screens are insufficient.

TikTok is expanding its "Out of Phone" advertising program through a new partnership with Vistar Media, the digital out-of-home company that T-Mobile acquired in January for $600 million. The arrangement will allow brands to push their TikTok content — the vertical videos, the trending sounds, the entire aesthetic vocabulary of the app — onto Vistar's network of more than 1.1 million screens in shopping malls, urban panels, and assorted high-traffic locations, including the digital billboards of Times Square.

The two companies first collaborated last year on what TikTok describes as "platform-native content tailored for DOOH," which is to say, videos that look like TikTok videos but appear in places where one cannot actually use TikTok. (Whether a fifteen-second dance trend gains or loses something when displayed at a gas station remains, for now, an open question.)

"OOH has become a natural extension of mobile," said Lucy Markowitz, senior vice president and general manager of Americas Marketplace at Vistar, in a statement that would have made very little sense to anyone working in advertising before approximately 2018.

TikTok introduced the Out of Phone initiative in 2023 with partners including ReachTV, GSTV, and Vevo, and has since added Curb, Westfield Malls, and others. Dan Page, global head of media and licensing partnerships at TikTok, told MediaPost at the time that the company's goal was to be "ubiquitous" across what he called the two billion "New Screens" that exist beyond mobile devices.

It is a reasonable enough ambition for a platform whose future in the United States remains, shall we say, subject to ongoing legislative discussion. If you cannot be certain your app will remain on the phone, better to have already left it.

Original story published in MediaPost: "TikTok Expands Out-Of-Phone Ad Program With Vistar Media"