DOOH & Ad-Tech Glossary

A single time-window on a screen where one ad plays, typically 10-30 seconds in DOOH, sold as one impression-bearing unit.

Second-generation viewability, beyond 'screen was on,' measures gaze direction, head pose, and per-person dwell to estimate real attention.

Long-form name for DOOH, digital screens in public/shared venues, bought as media inventory and measured like CTV.

DOOH is digital screen-based advertising in public and shared spaces, bars, gyms, retail, transit, bought and measured the same way as web or CTV.

Average seconds a viewer spends in front of a screen, the foundational input to DOOH attention and viewability.

One opportunity for one person to see one ad. In DOOH, an impression is a playout × audience-size, not just a playout.

The umbrella category for all advertising outside the home, billboards, transit, posters, plus the digital subcategory DOOH.

Advertising on screens located inside a specific kind of venue, bar, gym, salon, doctor's office, where the audience self-selects by being there.

DOOH inventory bought through real-time auctions instead of insertion orders, the same DSP/SSP plumbing that runs web and CTV.

The probability that a served impression was actually visible to a human. In DOOH, viewability = playout completed × audience present.

A real-time auction venue that matches DSP buyers with SSP sellers, the marketplace where ad impressions are priced and cleared.

Two IAB transparency standards declaring which SSPs are authorized to sell a publisher's inventory, the spine of supply-side fraud prevention.

A buy-side ad-tech system. Advertisers (or their agencies) log into a DSP to set targeting, budgets, and creatives, then bid into exchanges.

Pre-auction technique where multiple SSPs bid in parallel before the ad-server call, invented on the web, ported to CTV, now reaching DOOH.

The current IAB Tech Lab spec for real-time bidding. Adds native DOOH support, CTV pod-level requests, and ID-less identity primitives.

The open-source header-bidding library, the de facto standard for parallel SSP auctions on the web, CTV, and (growing) DOOH.

The auction protocol that prices ad impressions in ~100ms, bid request out, bid response in, winning creative served.

An SSP's published list of authorized sellers, pairs with ads.txt to make the full supply path auditable.

A sell-side ad-tech system. Publishers and screen networks expose their inventory through an SSP, which auctions it to DSPs.

Buy-side practice of preferring the shortest, cleanest path from advertiser to impression, cutting reseller hops and arbitrage layers.

Legacy sell-side technique: SSPs are called sequentially in a fixed order, and the first to fill wins. Largely replaced by header bidding.

Percentage of video ad impressions that played to 100%. The headline quality metric for CTV/DOOH; ~95% is the floor for premium inventory.

Google's Interactive Media Ads SDK, the most-deployed VAST player in the world. Handles tag fetching, parsing, error fallback, and pixel firing.

IAB Tech Lab spec that lets third-party verification scripts measure viewability and brand-safety from inside any video player.

VAST tracking pixels fired at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of video playback, the standard for measuring playback progress.

The IAB XML spec that tells a video player where to fetch a creative, what tracking pixels to fire, and how to handle errors.

The URL a video player calls to fetch a VAST XML response, the entry point of the ad-serving handshake.

A tracking pixel that fires only when an impression meets the MRC viewability threshold, distinct from a raw impression pixel.

Deprecated IAB spec for interactive video ads, a JavaScript-based ad runtime that ran inside the player. Replaced by OMID + SIMID.

Percentage of impressions that ran in content that meets the advertiser's content-safety policy, typically GARM-aligned categories.

Total ad spend divided by attributable customer acquisitions, the bottom-of-funnel ROI metric for performance campaigns.

Cost per thousand impressions, the universal pricing unit for display, video, CTV, and DOOH advertising.

Clicks divided by impressions. Largely irrelevant for DOOH (no click target) but a foundational metric in web display and search.

CPM normalized for viewability, fraud, and brand-safety pass rates, the apples-to-apples comparison metric across inventory types.

Percentage of ad requests that result in a paid impression. 100% means every slot filled; sub-50% means half the inventory is wasted.

A controlled experiment measuring the incremental effect of an ad campaign, exposed group vs. holdout, before vs. after.

Revenue divided by ad spend. The inverse framing of CPA, preferred when revenue is variable per conversion.

A standardized hierarchical vocabulary for describing audience segments. IAB Audience Taxonomy 1.1 is the industry default.

Audience data the advertiser collected directly from its customers, CRM records, on-site behavior, purchase history. The cookie-deprecation winner.

A campaign rule limiting how many times one viewer (or screen) can see one ad in a time window, prevents wear-out and budget waste.

The IAB Tech Lab's standard audience segment vocabulary, released 2022, segtax=4, covers demographics, interest, intent, and behavior.

Audience targeting that works without per-user identifiers, contextual, cohort-based, and signal-based. The post-cookie default.

A modeled audience built by finding people similar to a seed group, typically a CRM list or pixel-fired conversion cohort.

A 16-bit code in OpenRTB that identifies which audience taxonomy a segment ID belongs to. Lets multiple taxonomies coexist on the wire.

Audience data sourced from outside the advertiser and publisher, typically licensed from data brokers. In decline as identity deprecates.

Buyer-grade audience clothing signal, business, casual, athleisure, formal, uniform, streetwear, outdoor. Unique to Trillboards.

A discrete audience-group descriptor, solo, pair, small_group, mixed_group, family_unit, coworkers. Trillboards' headline audience signal.

The discipline of measuring connected-TV ad performance, viewability, reach, frequency, attribution, across multi-app environments.

An elliptic-curve cryptographic signature scheme, fast, small (64 bytes), and high-assurance. The signing primitive for Trillboards proof-of-play.

Running ML model inference on the end device (the screen) rather than in the cloud, sub-100ms latency, no raw data egress, GDPR-clean.

A funnel-position descriptor for on-screen audiences, awareness, consideration, decision, post_purchase, unknown. Trillboards-emitted.

A cryptographically-signed log entry attesting that a specific creative played on a specific screen at a specific time. Trillboards uses Ed25519.

Trillboards' on-device computer-vision package, face detection, attention, audience composition. All inference runs locally; no faces leave the device.

Industry trade publication and research firm focused on programmatic ad-tech. The canonical daily-news source for DSPs, SSPs, and exchanges.

Digital Place Based Advertising Association, the global trade body for digital OOH. Sets standards for DOOH measurement and impression definition.

Industry-standard research firm publishing ad-spend forecasts and digital-media benchmarks. Renamed Insider Intelligence in 2021.

EU and California privacy regulations governing personal-data processing in advertising. Foundational for any global ad-tech operation.

The technical standards arm of the IAB. Maintains OpenRTB, VAST, OMID, ads.txt, sellers.json, and the IAB taxonomies.

IPG Mediabrands' research arm, produces the most-cited global ad-spend forecasts. Foundational for industry sizing.

Media Rating Council certification that a measurement methodology meets industry standards, required for billable viewability claims.

Out of Home Advertising Association of America, the US trade body for OOH. Maintains the canonical US OOH taxonomy and the proof-of-play standard.