FAQ: DOOH and SSP

Digital Out of Home (DOOH) refers to digital advertising in public places. The Grassfish DOOH module is an extension to IXM One that supports you in the process of selling digital and analog advertising spaces. The main purpose of the DOOH module is selling digital spaces. However, it supports analog spaces just as well.

The DOOH module provides you with many practical features that support you in the ad selling process. Here are some of the things you can do:

• Manage digital and analog advertising spaces directly in IXM One.

• Add products and prices with different methods of content distribution and price calculation.

• Manage agencies as well as direct clients. Additionally, assign and calculate agency discounts and bonuses.

• Benefit from our flexible booking management and stay on top of things with unambiguous booking states.

• Create bookings with multiple individual booking items.

• Save time and effort with bookings that automatically generate DOOH spots in IXM One.

• Add special prices and discounts per individual booking or in total, and easily calculate taxes and duties.

• Keep an overview of your bookings with our DOOH chart and dashboards.

• Print business proposals, order confirmations, reports, and invoices.

• Take care of commission accounting, including distribution of commissions to multiple employees per booking.

The DOOH module makes the whole sales process a lot easier. It facilitates client and content management, guides you through the complete booking workflow from start to finish, helps manage pricing, and supports you with a clear overview of sold and free ad spaces in your network.

The DOOH module not only helps you keep track of your sales process, it allows you to manage both digital and analog products in one central place. You can use the variety of its helpful features just as much for analog as for digital advertising. This includes creating business proposals, reserving and booking ad spaces, having a clear utilization overview, and printing order confirmations and invoices.

The DOOH Module is integrated in IXM One which has the following advantages:

• Users of the DOOH module are the same users as in IXM One. Whether they have access to DOOH features or not is based on their individual user rights.

• You simply specify all ad spaces that you use in DOOH as locations in IXM One, whether they're digital or analog.

• IXM One helps you to easily upload or create spots for your DOOH bookings.

The DOOH workflow support guides you through the different stages of a booking - from its creation to its completion. The booking states give you a clear indication of what has already been done with a booking and which steps you can take next. Learn more about booking states.

The players apply the times that you specify in a booking item to their local time. If your players are in a different time zone than IXM One, the displayed booking state in IXM One may differ from the actual playout state on the respective players. For example, IXM One can show the status "Running" even though the playout on the player hasn't started yet because IXM One time is ahead of the local player time.

You can modify some booking parameters such as ad-spaces or the end time while a campaign is already running. This allows you to adapt to changing market conditions or campaign needs. Learn more.

The owner is the primary sales person of a booking and usually its creator. However, in some cases you can select a different owner depending on your booking permissions. The important thing is that every booking must have an owner. In addition to the owner, you can select another sales person who may also receive a provision from the sales. By default, the owner gets 100% of the provision. The provision of the additional sales person is deducted from that.

Airtime is the time reserved for advertisement spots from the DOOH module or a supply-side platform (SSP). You can set what percentage of time should be used as airtime for your entire network, a location, or a player.

It's important to note that up to the specified airtime percentage can be used for advertising. How much airtime is really used for DOOH and SSP depends on the bookings. If there aren't enough bookings to fill the airtime, the system fills it either with standard content or more DOOH content, or more SSP content depending on your settings.

There may be times when you can't reserve a booking because it exceeds the available booking capacity. This means that some or all selected ad spaces are fully booked at the desired time. In this case, the system provides you with information about which advertising spaces are fully booked, during which period, and which players are affected. You can then immediately adjust your booking.

Yes, you can use players with specific display times for your bookings, regardless of content distribution. The capacity calculation of these bookings takes the specified play times of each player into account. That is, it checks the capacity within the display times of the selected player. You can also combine players with and players without display times in one booking.

However, please note that the capacity calculation doesn't take holidays into account. It's based on Monday through Sunday.

Surcharges are additional costs for ad placement, for example, during peak times such as holidays or promotional periods. You can easily add surcharges to your booking items to maximize your revenue. Please note that only administrators can create and manage surcharges.

The DOOH chart displays the current capacity and status of all bookings and products in your network. Use it to quickly check for available time slots and to immediately add new bookings when you spot an opening.

Theoretically, yes. Let's assume that 60% of your ad spaces are booked and there are so many bookings on the waiting list that they alone would take up 80%. That would add up to more than 100%. However, in the chart you don't see 140%, but 60% booked and 40% waiting list. This suggests that the chances of getting a free space for a booking are slim due to many bookings on the waiting list. However, the chart won't exceed 100%, because you can't actually book more than that.

By the way, digital products can make up between zero and 100 percent, while analog products can make up either zero or 100 percent. Analog advertising such as a poster can either be placed or not, there is no in-between.

Availability refers to available ad spaces in the selected period. The more bookings you have during this period, the less ad spaces are available. However, availability is also influenced by other factors. For example, it may be lower if a location is deactivated for maintenance work or even 100% if a location is not used for DOOH content at all.

The percentage that you see in the chart is the sum of booked and reserved booking items. It shows how much capacity is occupied and how much is left for a new booking, helping you search for available spaces.

There are specific colors for each booking status to help you get a good overview of the booking situation. However, you only see one color per stack, even if different booking statuses can exist at the same time.

For example, if 50% of the available ad spaces in a day are reserved and there is a waiting list that would take up 70% of that day, the bar will be at 50% and displayed in the color of the waiting list. This is a simplification, but at first glance it helps you assess the situation. On that day, you're less likely to find a place for a large booking, but you may be able to accommodate a smaller booking without putting it on the waiting list.

As an admin, you can customize the chart colors in the system parameters.

You can export the DOOH chart as an XLSX file that you can open in Microsoft Excel. The export includes all data from the chart such as product information, booking dates and times, and the booking status.

For digital products, pricing is based on the content distribution. That is, how your content is played out. You have the following options:

• Frequency: Set a frequency that specifies how often the system tries to play a spot. For example, every two minutes for the duration of the campaign.

• Live tags: Use live tags to specify that the system only plays a spot under certain circumstances. For example, only if a person that matches the target group stands in front of the screen.

• Playbacks: Set a number of target playbacks to specify how many times a spot is played. For example, five playbacks on selected screens for the duration of the campaign.

• SoV: Use Share of Voice to specify what percentage of advertisement time is sold. For example, ten percent of the advertisement time for the duration of the campaign.

When working with playbacks or live tags as content distribution, you can set a specific number of target playbacks. However, the same number of target playbacks will produce different results depending on which content distribution method you choose. Here are two examples that illustrate how 15000 playbacks are handled based on the content distribution:

• Playbacks: If you have a network of five players and you want them to show your ad 100 times a day for 30 days, book 15000 playbacks.

• Live tags: If you book 15000 playbacks for a month on your network of five players, each player will be asked to play the target ad a maximum of 15000 times on the first day of the booking.

If you select multiple live tags from different live tag groups, at least one from each group must be active on the player to make the booking item valid. For example, if you select the following live tags, the spot will be played if the city is London or Vienna and the weather is foggy or rainy.

DOOH spots are simply spots that you use for DOOH. They don't have any particular rules or functionality. You can use ready-made spots or create spots from a template directly in the booking item. The spots are automatically stored in a predefined spot group and the DOOH playlist.

Consider the DOOH playlist as a pool for DOOH spots rather than a normal playlist. You don't have to fill it. When you add a spot to a DOOH booking item, it's automatically added to the DOOH playlist. To play DOOH content, the DOOH playlist must be assigned to all players that you want to display the spots.

By the way, you can only have one DOOH playlist per network. This ensures that the system plays your DOOH spots without any problems.

Simply put, a supply-side platform (SSP) is a programmatic advertising platform that allows its clients to run ads provided by third-party vendors.

Yes, the Grassfish DOOH module and the SSP module work together. The SSP module provides an interface to programmatic advertising platforms, while the DOOH module supports ad sales. Learn more

You can use multiple SSP providers with the Grassfish system. Please note that this requires specific configuration. Learn more

To play SSP content, you must set up a connection to the SSP provider and create a dedicated playlist, spot group, and category in IXM One. Learn more

Yes, you can set airtime for SSP on your player, just like you can set airtime for DOOH. This allows you to specify how much airtime goes to SSP advertisements.

If you want more, you can randomly play SSP spots to fill unused DOOH airtime. Learn more