Hourly billboard scheduling, by the screen.

What hourly campaign scheduling is

The unit underneath is the play, one ad appearance on one screen, and the per-play price is shown on every screen card before you book. An hourly schedule simply decides when those plays happen. There is no minimum spend and no agency in the middle, so a schedule can be as small as a single screen running a two-hour window, or as large as thousands of screens each dayparted to their own local rhythm. This guide covers who lets you book by the hour, how per-screen scheduling works, what it saves, and how contextual triggers take timing past the clock.

That is the efficiency at the heart of it: any budget, a single screen or thousands, spends only on the hours that carry the audience instead of paying for filler time, and Blinky, the free AI planner, is built to find exactly those windows.

Which platforms let you book by the hour

An honest comparison. Several self-serve platforms offer dayparting on their own networks, so hourly control is not unique to Blindspot. What is unique is a per-screen hourly schedule applied across a global inventory, priced per play. Competitor details are attributed to how each platform publicly sells.

To be clear: Blip Billboards and Fliphound do let you daypart on their screen networks, and Adomni offers self-serve dayparting priced on CPM. The true differentiator is a per-screen hourly grid across a 3M+ global inventory, priced per play rather than per thousand impressions. Competitor figures reflect how each platform publicly sells and can change. Compare the field in the DOOH platforms guide, or see the booking flow.

How per-screen hourly scheduling works

When you build a plan on Blindspot, each screen you pick gets an hourly grid: seven days across, twenty-four hours down. You paint the hours you want that screen to run, the same way you would block time on a calendar. An empty cell means the screen sits dark that hour and you pay nothing for it. A filled cell means the screen plays your ad, and you set how many times it plays in that hour, its plays-per-hour, so a busy rush-hour slot can run harder than a quiet mid-afternoon one.

The important part is that the grid is per screen, not per campaign. A subway platform, a mall entrance and a highway billboard in the same plan carry three different schedules, because their audiences move at three different times. You schedule each screen to its own peak: the transit screen to the morning and evening commute, the mall screen to lunch and after-work shopping, the nightlife screen to the late evening. One campaign, many rhythms, each tuned to a place.

Because Blindspot is fully self-serve, none of this needs a media buyer. You see the per-play price and live availability on every screen, set the hours, and the running cost updates as you paint. If you would rather not build the grid by hand across hundreds of screens, Blinky, the free agentic AI planner, will read a one-line brief and propose a schedule per screen for you, which you can then adjust cell by cell. Blinky reads from more than 7 million data points on how audiences move through a place, so its first draft already weights each screen toward its own peak. Screens are approved by their operator in roughly two business days and campaigns go live in about 48 hours.

Why buying peak hours cuts 30% of the cost

The biggest hidden cost in a billboard buy is the hours nobody is watching. A traditional flight rents a screen for every hour of every day, so you pay the same rate for a 3am empty concourse as for the evening rush. Those dead hours are pure waste: the plays run, the money leaves, and almost no one sees the ad. Hourly scheduling removes them. You buy the commute, the lunch window and the evening, and you drop the overnight and the dead midday hours entirely.

A worked example. Say a screen costs about $0.23 a play in an urban market, and you would run it all day, every day. Roughly a third of those hours, the overnight and the deep midday lull, carry very little audience. Cutting them removes about 30% of the plays and about 30% of the spend, without losing a single useful appearance. The freed budget then buys more plays in the windows that actually convert, so the same money works harder. How much you save scales with how peaked your audience is: a nightlife or commuter brand saves more than an all-day convenience brand.

This is not a theory. On a worldwide tourism campaign, Blindspot ran 4,067 screens and reached more than 97 million people over 51 days, and by concentrating delivery into peak windows the campaign delivered 2,146,892 plays, 87% more than planned, with the evening as the strongest window. The full breakdown is in the Visit Maharashtra case study. The mechanism is the same at any size: put the plays where the people are, and stop paying for the hours when they are not.

Beyond the clock: contextual triggers

Hours are the base layer of timing, but the day does not always follow the clock. A rooftop-bar ad wants a warm evening, not just any evening. A rain jacket wants the rain. A crypto exchange wants the moment the price moves. On top of the hourly schedule, Blindspot lets a creative fire on live conditions, so a screen can be booked for a window and still only show a given ad when the world matches.

The live triggers available today include weather and temperature, air quality (AQI), stock and crypto prices, live sports scores, and a custom live-data API for anything you can feed it. You set the rule once, for example run the iced-coffee creative only when it is above a set temperature, and the platform swaps the message in and out as conditions change, inside the hours you already scheduled. It is dayparting extended from the clock to the world.

Layered together, the two give tight control over when and where a message appears: the hourly grid decides the windows, the plays-per-hour decides the weight, and the triggers decide the moment. See how it comes together in the weather-triggered advertising guide and the rush-hour playbook, or browse screens and start building.