Banners pasted over a billboard: what the contract must say

When someone pastes their own banners over a client’s billboard, who pays for the lost display days depends on what your advertising contract says and what you can prove. A contract that does not mention third-party coverage leaves the question open, and a WhatsApp photograph with no reliable date is thin proof. The first things to settle are the dates it was covered, who put the material up and whether you cleared it. This is not legal advice, so ask your own lawyer what your agreement says.

Here is how that looked at one outdoor media business, and what we changed in the software.

A client phones to say that someone has pasted their own material over the advertiser’s flex on one of your boards. The client’s own example was political banners. The advertiser is paying for a month of display, and for some of it nobody could see the ad. Are they owed days back?

Nobody can answer, because the software has no place to write the problem down. The client calls it an overlap, which is also the word the system uses for something else entirely. The only evidence is a photograph the client sent on WhatsApp, with the date stripped out by WhatsApp. So the question of who pays for the lost display days turns on a blurry picture and a date somebody types from memory.

What was actually going on

The word caused the first mistake. In the system, overlap already meant two bookings clashing on the same face of a board, and the system prevents that. What the client described was physical: a third party’s material on the board. Different thing, different consequences, and no record type for it.

The second problem was where the evidence would have gone. The endpoint that returns a site’s photographs handed every campaign photo, unfiltered, to the picker used when building a proposal. Storing a client’s blurry WhatsApp shot of a covered hoarding with the other photographs would have put it into the next sales deck.

And WhatsApp removes the capture date. A client’s photo carries only the date the client says it was taken. That typed date is the only basis on which a credit for lost days can be priced, so it has to be stored as a claim, not as a fact.

A later problem came from our own rule. A guard refused to record a billing decision because the record had not passed through the “verified” stage. A portal user had filled in every field in one pass, and the guard assumed records arrive one stage at a time.

What we changed

It is now one record with two doors. Field staff arrive with evidence, already photographed. A client who phones in a claim arrives with none, starts two stages earlier, and needs someone dispatched to look.

Not found is a proper finding, because clients sometimes report the wrong board. The billing decision is recorded rather than inferred: an authorised encroachment can still have cost display days, and an unauthorised one may have been cleared the same morning. Start and end dates are first-class, and an empty end means it is still there. Evidence has its own table and keeps where it came from, whether the crew captured it or the client supplied it.

On the phone, the report joins the offline queue, and the check that the dates fall inside the campaign runs before the report is queued. A rejection that arrives hours later, when the person has left the board and the photographs have been taken, is no use to anybody. The stage-by-stage guards were removed on the client’s instruction, and the tests that asserted them were rewritten to say why the rule went.

What it did not fix

The log records the decision about billing, not a credit amount. It does not say the system works out how many display days an advertiser is owed, and this article does not claim it does.

The date on a client’s photo is still typed by hand, because nothing can recover what WhatsApp removed. The record says so, and the price of any credit rests on that.

What to settle before it happens

1. Ask your lawyer whether your billboard contract says what happens when a third party covers the display, and who bears the lost days.
2. Agree one word for it that is not the word you use for two bookings clashing. If “overlap” means a booking clash in one place and a physical problem in another, the physical problem has nowhere to live.
3. Decide where a third-party photograph is stored, and what else reads from that place. Evidence that shares a folder with sales material will end up in a proposal sooner or later.
4. Record the dates as claimed or captured. A client’s photograph carries only the date the client says it was taken.
5. Record the billing decision separately from the incident, so a credit is a choice someone made and not an inference.

Where this ends up

Recording an encroachment, with its evidence and its billing outcome, is part of how AdBoard handles field work, and this is the system it runs for Gold Sign Media, an outdoor media operator. The client’s claim, the crew’s photographs and the decision on display days now sit in one record.