Reporting
Reporting in CityScreen Context answers one question: what actually played, on which face, at what moment, and at what price.
This section is for the employees of a screen operator’s organization working in the client cabinet. Every reporting and statistics screen is open to all five employee roles, including viewer. Replacing a photo capture is restricted further.
One row is one ad play
The unit of counting is the ad play — a single playback of one advertisement on one face at one moment. Nothing in this section counts people.
| The interface labels this count Impressions, and the figure is a count of ad plays. In the wider out-of-home industry an impression is an audience figure — one person’s opportunity to see — and an ad play is a screen event. A media buyer reading a column headed "Impressions" in a CityScreen Context report is reading a count of screen events. When you send these numbers to a buyer, label them plays or spots delivered. |
A campaign that delivered 10,000 plays on a busy transit screen and 10,000 plays on a quiet lobby screen shows the same number in both rows. The audience behind those two rows differs, and the count does not express that.
OTS is carried alongside the count
Where a content management system supplies an audience estimate with the playout record, CityScreen Context stores it on the ad play as an opportunity to see (OTS) value, together with a short label describing which methodology produced it.
That value is stored and passed through. Every count the platform shows you, and every amount it charges, is derived from the number of rows. Where the platform aggregates plays and OTS in the same place, they sit in two separate columns side by side.
Not every integration supplies an audience estimate. OTS in CityScreen Context is a field reported by the content management system.
What makes a play countable
A play becomes a countable fact in three steps.
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CityScreen Context answers an ad request from the content management system with a winning advertisement, and records that decision.
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The screen plays the advertisement.
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The content management system reports the playback back, and CityScreen Context matches that report to the ad request it answered earlier.
Only the third step turns a decision into a fact. Until the playback is confirmed, the decision is an intention — it appears nowhere in statistics, produces no financial transaction, and is not reported to the demand partner as delivered.
CityScreen Context asks the content management system for playback records on a schedule, so a fact reported late is picked up on a later pass.
There is a deadline on the third step. A playback confirmed too long after the ad request was answered never becomes billable, whatever the screen actually did. Late and lost plays states the window and what it means for you.
Where confirmed plays are kept
Each sales model records its confirmed plays separately and has its own screen in the client cabinet.
| Sales model | What one row is | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
Real-time bidding, including programmatic guaranteed campaigns |
One confirmed playback of one advertisement on one face, with the winning bid and the platform’s commission |
Statistics, in the auction campaigns section |
Automated guaranteed |
One confirmed playback under a booked automated guaranteed campaign, with an optional audience estimate |
Guaranteed statistics, in the automated guaranteed section |
COT |
One confirmed playlist slot playback, priced at a flat per-play rate |
The COT tabs of Private-deal statistics |
Private deal |
One confirmed playback from a partner-supplied playlist, priced by the partner |
Private-deal statistics |
Each of these appears in the navigation only when the organization has that sales model enabled.
COT is a demand-side partner that books airtime through its own protocol; Supported partners sets out what each named partner is and which direction it talks.
An operator selling through more than one model reads the screen of each model. A report merges real-time bidding, COT and private-deal deliveries into one document — see Reports.
Counting and money are different subjects
This section owns the count. It establishes what a play is, how the platform learns about one, when it stops being eligible, and how it appears in a report.
What that play is worth, who owes whom, and how a period is settled belong to billing. The two do not always line up one to one: real-time bidding and COT plays each produce a financial transaction, automated guaranteed campaigns carry a price for the campaign as a whole, and private deals settle outside the platform entirely. See What gets billed before drawing a revenue conclusion from a play count.
Section contents
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
The confirmation deadline, what happens when a screen reports too late, and what to do about it |
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Photographs of the physical screen as proof of play — what is captured, how long it is kept, who can see it, and who may replace it |
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XLSX report generation, the report types, the automatic monthly reports, retention, and download |