Proof of display for lit, unlit and digital billboards

The proof of display to collect depends on the kind of board. A lit board needs a photograph of the flex and a night photograph to show it is lit. An unlit board needs no night photograph, because a night shot of an unlit board is a photograph of the dark. An LED screen needs a short video, because a still photograph cannot show whether it is playing.

Here is how that looked at one business, and what fixing it took.

You pay a crew to photograph your boards as proof that the advertiser’s flex is up. For a lit board that includes a night shot, to show it is lit. The crew’s phone offered a night shot for every board, including boards with no lights at all. A photograph of an unlit hoarding at night is a photograph of the dark.

So staff were being invited to capture proof that no report would ever count. Nobody wins from that: the visit is wasted, the photo sits in storage, and the record looks fuller than it is.

The second half of the problem was the screens. For an LED or digital board, a still photograph cannot tell you whether the screen is playing, frozen on one frame, or has dropped your client’s slot from the loop. A frozen screen and a working screen look the same in a picture.

What was actually going on

The completeness rule was already right. It only required a night shot when the board was lit, and the task list only raised a night task for lit boards. The fault was on the capture side. The screen offered Night to everyone, and the campaign data the phone received did not even carry the board’s lighting, so the phone could not have known.

Before changing anything we checked the production data. In the production data, 62 boards were lit, 55 were not lit and 3 had no lighting recorded. Lighting and the lit flag agreed in every case, and there was not one existing night photo on a non-lit board, so nothing in the past would break.

For screens, the rule was missing altogether. A printed hoarding fails slowly and visibly, so two visits a week catch it. A screen can go dark or freeze between visits, and a photograph cannot show it playing.

What we changed

The Night option now disappears for non-lit boards, on the phone and in the office portal, and a night answer left over from a previously selected board is dropped if the board changes. A board with no lighting recorded is treated as lit, because hiding the option on an unclassified board would quietly lose a proof shot, and the mistake would only appear at invoice time.

LED and digital boards moved to a daily check that must include a short video, because only a clip shows the screen playing. The rule follows what the board is, so a screen added tomorrow is covered on day one, and it outranks any setting on a single site. The classifier has to read three descriptive fields that disagree with each other, in any casing and on whole words only, so a “ledger board” is not a screen.

Running it found two defects that the automated checks had missed. A daily schedule expanded to zero windows, and a board with no windows never shows anything due, so the strictest rule would have become the most permissive. And a video could satisfy nothing, because a clip carries no shot type. Both are fixed.

Against the copy of the data, the 2 LED boards got 7 daily windows, each needing a wide shot, a close-up and a video. The other 126 stayed on the twice-a-week rule.

What it did not fix

The log does not say how many night shots were requested in vain before the fix, so the waste is not counted.

A video proves that the screen was playing while somebody filmed it. It does not prove the client’s slot appeared in the loop at every hour. That still takes a person watching.

What proof to collect for each kind of board

1. List your board types: lit, unlit and LED or digital.
2. For each, write down what proof shows the thing you care about: a photograph for the flex being up, a night photograph only for lit boards, a short video for a screen playing.
3. Check the crew’s app asks for that and nothing else. An unlit board should not offer a night shot.
4. Decide what happens to a board with no lighting recorded. Treating it as lit costs one extra photo; hiding the option can lose a proof shot you need at invoice time.
5. Know the limit: a video shows the screen playing while somebody filmed it, not that your client’s slot appeared in the loop at every hour.

If your report ignores a kind of evidence, the app should not ask for it.

Where this ends up

The one rule that decides what counts as proof for each kind of board is read by both the capture screen and the report in AdBoard, the system that runs for Gold Sign Media, an outdoor media operator.