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.