Delivery

An automated guaranteed campaign is not sold at the moment of each opportunity. It is handed to the content management system as a schedule, and the content management system plays it.

This page is for the employees who own running campaigns — owner, admin, manager — and for anyone diagnosing a campaign that is active in CityScreen Context but not visible on the screens.

Outside the auction

An automated guaranteed campaign plays in a classic slot: sold before it plays, with the content management system controlling playout outside the platform’s auction.

Automated guaranteed campaigns are not offered to demand partners as bid opportunities and do not compete on price. They occupy airtime a step earlier, in the content management system’s own scheduling. What the auction fills is whatever the content management system still has to fill after its booked schedule is laid down. The two meet through the saturation figure that the capacity check reads.

The other pre-negotiated deal type, programmatic guaranteed, goes through the auction — it draws on its reservation to take precedence over the bids.

What is pushed, and when

The push fires when the campaign becomes processing, which happens when the demand partner activates it.

What crosses is the whole campaign in one call:

  • The campaign — its identifier, name, demand partner and period.

  • Every face on the campaign, with its periods, agreed frequency, creative duration and broadcast windows.

  • Every confirmed advertisement, expanded so that each combination of period and face group is its own entry, clipped to the overlap between the advertisement’s period and the face’s.

Advertisements that are not confirmed are left out, and so is an advertisement carrying no approved creative. If no confirmed advertisement exists at all, nothing is sent — which is why activation is refused in that state in the first place.

A successful push also triggers a refresh of the organization’s saturation figures, so the next capacity check sees the newly scheduled airtime.

Prerequisite

This delivery path assumes the platform’s own content management system. Automated guaranteed selling is available where that content management system runs the screens.

Acknowledgement and retries

The first attempt is made as soon as the activation is committed. After that, anything still unacknowledged is retried automatically.

An acknowledgement from the content management system marks the campaign and its advertisements as sent. If the content management system has taken the campaign but has not finished with it, the platform tries again.

When the push fails

Failures split in two, and the difference decides whether anything happens automatically.

Kind What causes it What the platform does

Retryable

A server error from the content management system, or a network timeout.

Keeps retrying automatically, and sends a notification after repeated consecutive failures.

Terminal

Any other unexpected answer, including a rejection of the request itself.

Stores the content management system’s message on the campaign, stops retrying, and waits for a person.

A campaign carrying a stored error shows the message on the campaign screen with a Retry button; pressing it clears the error and republishes the campaign. Retrying is available to an owner, admin or manager.

A campaign sitting in Processing with nothing playing is almost always one of two things — a terminal push error waiting on the Retry button, or a campaign whose only advertisements were never confirmed.

Stopping a campaign

Rejecting or cancelling a campaign that had already reached processing sends a stop instruction to the content management system naming the campaign, and the stop is retried automatically if the first attempt fails.

Cancelling an advertisement inside a running campaign is pushed the same way.

Plays coming back

The content management system is the source of truth for what actually played.

The platform pulls plays on a regular schedule for every organization that has a campaign either running or recently finished. Each play is stored against the campaign, the face and the advertisement, and a play pulled twice is stored once.

Plays are what the delivery figures and the automated guaranteed report are built from. See Under-delivery for the planned-against-delivered comparison, and Reporting for what a play row contains.

If a period shows fewer plays than expected after an outage between the platform and the content management system, ask the platform operator to collect that period again.

Photo captures

Where a face has a camera, photo captures are recorded against the advertisement and the face — up to three a day, morning, midday and evening — and are visible on the campaign’s shots tab. Each is marked as having been captured automatically or attached by a person.

The interface calls these photo captures shots, and ad plays are a separate record. See Photo reports.

Related pages