What a play is
A play is one appearance of your ad on one digital out-of-home screen. When a screen runs its loop, each advertiser gets a slot, usually a few seconds long, and every time your creative fills that slot, that is a play. It is a single, countable event. Ten plays means the screen showed your ad ten times. A campaign running across a thousand screens for a week is, underneath, just a large number of these individual plays adding up.
That matters because the play is the honest atom of digital out-of-home. It is not a projection or a rate card; it is a thing that either happened or did not. On Blindspot the play is the unit you plan with, the unit you price against, and the unit that gets logged as delivered. When you build a plan on the map, every screen card shows a price per play and how many plays your schedule will run, and the running cost updates as you add screens and hours. There is no minimum spend, so a plan can be a single screen running a handful of plays or thousands of screens running millions of them, and the same unit measures both.
A play versus an impression
The two words get used as if they mean the same thing, and they do not. A play is a display; an impression is an estimate of who saw it. When one play runs on a busy transit screen, the screen might be passed by dozens of people, so that one play is credited with many impressions. The impression figure comes from multiplying the play by an audience number for that screen, an average of how many viewers pass per play. Useful for sizing an audience, but it is a model, not a receipt.
This is why the unit you buy on matters. Traditional buying often quotes a cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, an industry unit built on that audience estimate. Two campaigns can quote the same CPM while running very different numbers of real displays. Buying on plays removes that ambiguity: you agree a price for a display, the display runs, and it is logged. The impression count still exists on Blindspot, reported as a clearly labelled estimate on top of the plays, but the number your budget is spent against is the one that provably happened. The CPM versus per-play guide works through the difference, and the impression multiplier is the factor that turns a play into that audience figure.
How Blindspot bills per play
$0
from, per play on urban panels
0M+
screens priced per play
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countries, one unit
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verified plays, one worldwide flight
Because the play is the unit, pricing is simple to read. Each screen carries its own per-play price, set by its operator and market, from about $0.23 on a busy urban panel up to roughly $40 a play on a Times Square spectacular. You pick screens, set the hours each one runs on a 7-day by 24-hour grid, and choose how many times it plays per hour. The plan multiplies price by plays and shows the total before you commit. Nothing is estimated in that number: it is a count of displays at a stated rate.
When the campaign runs, each play is logged as delivered, which is what makes per-play billing auditable rather than a forecast. On one worldwide tourism flight, Blindspot delivered 2,146,892 verified plays across more than four thousand screens, 87% more than planned, and every one of those plays was a display that ran. The full breakdown is in the proof-of-play explainer, which covers the verified log behind the billing. This is also what lets a budget stay efficient at any size: because you pay for real displays and not filler time, the money buys the exposure it needs whether the plan is one screen or a global flight. See how it is priced end to end in the billboard cost guide, or open the map and build a plan.
A play is a display that provably ran, not a forecast.
The unit, in one line