DOOH & programmatic advertising glossary

What this glossary covers

Digital out-of-home advertising, DOOH, is advertising on the digital screens around us: billboards, transit displays, mall panels, airport walls. It borrows a vocabulary from both classic outdoor advertising and programmatic digital media, which is why a first campaign can feel dense with terms. This glossary keeps the definitions plain and buyer-first. Each entry answers one question in a sentence or two, then links to a fuller page if you want the detail.

The single idea to hold onto is the unit. Traditional outdoor rents a board for weeks and quotes a forecast. DOOH on Blindspot is bought by the play, one appearance on one screen, priced from about $0.23 in an urban market and shown before you book. That shift, from a rented flight to a counted play, is what most of the terms below are circling. It is also what lets a budget of any size spend on the exposure it needs rather than on filler time, from a single-screen first test to a worldwide flight.

The terms are grouped three ways: the units you buy, the controls that decide when and where a play runs, and the programmatic plumbing behind it all. If you want the wider primer first, start with what DOOH advertising is.

The units you buy

These are the things you are actually paying for. Digital out-of-home is bought and measured in plays, single appearances on single screens, and everything else, cost, audience, proof, hangs off that one unit. Get these four straight and a media plan stops being abstract: you can see exactly what a budget delivers.

• What is a play. A play is a single display of your ad on one screen. It is the unit Blindspot bills, so a budget buys real appearances rather than a projection, and every screen card shows its per-play price before you book.
• Proof of play. A proof of play is the verified record that an ad actually ran, logging the screen, the time and the place. It is the receipt that turns a campaign from a promise into a measured fact, and the base layer under any attribution.
• Impression multiplier. The impression multiplier is the viewers-per-play figure that converts one logged play into an estimated audience for a given screen. It is how a counted play becomes a reach number you can compare across placements.
• CPM vs per play. CPM prices a forecast of a thousand impressions; paying per play prices a fact that a screen played. Per play is the more honest and efficient unit, which is why it is Blindspot's metric while CPM stays the industry's comparison figure.

Targeting and timing

Once you know the unit, the next question is when and where each play runs. These terms cover the controls that decide that: which hours a screen plays, which moments and places trigger it, and how much of a screen's time is yours over a period.

• Dayparting. Dayparting is buying specific hours or parts of the day instead of running around the clock. On Blindspot it goes down to the individual screen, so each screen in a plan can carry its own hourly grid and its own plays-per-hour.
• Moment targeting. Moment targeting reaches an audience at a specific context, a weather change, a live sports score, a set hour, rather than at all times. It layers live triggers on top of the schedule so a message shows only when the world matches.
• Geofencing in DOOH. Geofencing targets or triggers screens by a geographic zone you define. A campaign can then light up only the neighbourhoods, radii or points of interest that matter, and stay dark everywhere else.
• Share of voice. Share of voice is the portion of a screen's or a network's ad time that is yours over a period. A higher share means your message appears more often in the loop, which matters most on a single landmark screen.

How programmatic works

Programmatic is simply automated buying and selling of DOOH. A few terms explain the plumbing: what is digital versus traditional, who sells supply and who buys it, and how a guaranteed deal differs from the open market, so you know where a self-serve platform like Blindspot fits. For the full picture, see the programmatic DOOH guide.

• Out-of-home vs DOOH. Out-of-home is the whole medium of advertising in public space; DOOH is its digital half. The digital half is what can be bought by the hour, priced per play, measured with proof of play, and made to react to live data.
• SSP vs DSP in DOOH. SSPs (supply-side platforms) sell screen inventory; DSPs (demand-side platforms) buy it programmatically. Blindspot sits on the buy side as a self-serve platform for advertisers, purchasing across supply rather than selling it.
• Programmatic guaranteed. Programmatic guaranteed is a reserved deal at a fixed rate, bought through automated pipes rather than an open auction. It trades some flexibility for certainty on premium or landmark inventory.

The terms you will hear most

If you read only three of these, read the three below. They are the ones that change how a budget behaves, because they all trace back to the same unit.

Because Blindspot prices per play across more than 3 million screens in 50-plus countries, the same logic works on a first single-screen test and on a worldwide flight: the money buys real, logged appearances in the hours and places that carry your audience, and nothing else. On a global tourism campaign it delivered 2,146,892 verified plays, 87% more than planned across 4,067 screens. There is also no minimum spend, so the smallest plan follows the same rules as the largest.

With the vocabulary straight, the next step is a plan. See real prices in the billboard cost guide, compare the field in the DOOH platforms guide, or let Blinky, the free AI planner, read a one-line brief and draft a per-screen schedule you can adjust.