DOOH advertising platform: selling screens like airtime

A DOOH advertising platform sells digital out-of-home inventory — screens, loops and slots — with the discipline that broadcast sales have always had: inventory with live availability, a rate card with rules, bookings, proof of play from the actual plays, reconciliation and billing. Digital out-of-home is the closest medium to digital in how it is delivered and the furthest in how it is sold; a platform closes that gap. OpenMediaLogic is a DOOH advertising platform of this kind, in the same system as TV and radio, deployable in any market and live today in three.

Two things called a DOOH platform

The term covers two different products, and a buyer should know which one is being offered.

• Programmatic supply-side platforms and ad servers — Broadsign, Vistar Media, Hivestack and their peers — connect screens to programmatic demand: an impression-based auction, creative delivery, and reporting to a DSP. They are the right tool for selling remnant and audience-targeted inventory to programmatic buyers.
• Sales and inventory platforms run the operator's direct business: the screen network as inventory, the rate card, the booking of campaigns by an agency or a sales house, proof of play, certificates and invoices. This is where OpenMediaLogic sits, and it is the larger share of most operators' revenue.

The two coexist: an operator sells its network directly through a sales platform and fills what is left programmatically. The same split exists on television — see programmatic TV for how buying by rule rather than by negotiation works there.

What an operator needs from a sales platform

• Inventory — every screen, its location, format and loop, grouped into the packages the operator actually sells
• Availability and booking — a buyer sees what is free for the dates and books it; a booking is a booking on every screen in the package at once
• Rate card rules — by format, location class, daypart and season, applied by the system
• Proof of play — plays reported from the player, reconciled against the booking, and turned into the certificate the client and the agency accept
• Reporting against actual plays — delivered plays and audience against the plan, not against the schedule
• Billing — invoices and closing documents from the same record as the booking
• Cross-media — the network sold beside TV and radio in the same plan, which is how agencies buy it

What a slot on a screen actually is

The unit of DOOH inventory has no equivalent in broadcast, and most of the difficulty in selling it comes from that one fact.

A screen runs a loop: a fixed cycle of slots — commonly six to twelve, of ten seconds or so each — repeating all day. An advertiser does not buy a moment, it buys a share of the loop over a period: one slot in a loop of eight means one play in eight, which over an operating day on one screen is several hundred plays. The sellable quantity is therefore share × screens × days, and it is continuous rather than discrete. There is no equivalent of a break that is either sold or not.

That has two consequences a sales system has to handle. A package is the unit, not a screen. Networks are heterogeneous — a roadside billboard, a mall spider and a lift screen differ in format, resolution, loop length, dwell time and audience — so operators sell curated packages, and availability has to be computed across every screen in one at once. And the same inventory is sold in two currencies at the same time: classic out-of-home trades by period, digital buyers want impressions, and an operator running both has to keep one inventory picture underneath two ways of pricing it.

Delivery is settled differently too. Broadcast produces an affidavit from what the playout did; DOOH produces proof of play from what each player reported, screen by screen. A screen that was dark for four hours, or a player that fell out of sync, is a shortfall that only the play log shows — and a makegood in DOOH is usually settled in extra plays rather than in extra days.

How OpenMediaLogic does it

The DOOH page describes the workflow: screen inventory, booking and reporting against actual plays. Because the platform is cross-media, a DOOH operator's inventory appears to agencies beside the television and radio inventory of the same market, and a media group that owns screens and channels sells both from one place. Beeline Kazakhstan's move to a single workflow across 11 TV channels, radio and DOOH — −32% media costs in nine months — is the buyer-side result of that: case study.

Deployment outside the current markets

DOOH audience currencies differ by market — Route in the UK, MOVE in Australia — and the platform connects to the market's currency through its API, bills in local currency and stores data in the country. Onboarding takes 48 hours, reference data migration included.

Request a demo on your own network. Related: TV advertising software, media sales automation, the vendor landscape.