Glossary

A calendar interval during which a campaign, ad group, or ad is on air — the active period in the campaign and ad settings. An entity may carry several windows (a flighted schedule); the effective on-air time of an ad is the intersection of the campaign, group, and ad windows.

A set of ads within one campaign that plays as a unit: each appearance of the campaign shows exactly one group, and groups take turns from appearance to appearance. Lets one campaign rotate different cuts or products while remaining a single unit of frequency, budget, and reporting.

A single playback of an advertisement on a screen for its full duration. Ad plays are reported by the player and form the basis of statistics, billing and proof of play. One ad play may generate multiple impressions if several people are present near the screen.

Industry term: ad play.

A unit of ad placement in CS Play. Combines one or more media files with playback settings — duration, schedule, targeting — and is planned into playlists as slots. An ad may carry several files in different resolutions so screens with different proportions each play a matching file.

A campaign the planner schedules on its own. Two kinds: by frequency — you set dates, times and per-ad frequency, and the heuristic planner assembles and keeps updating playlists for every targeted screen; by triggers — ads carry trigger names that external systems call to put them on screen. UI labels in earlier versions: "Auto by frequency", "Auto by triggers"; the current UI calls the trigger strategy "Triggers".

The length of the ad block — the rhythm unit the playlist is built around; the duration of ad block setting in the playlist. Typically 60 or 120 seconds. Frequencies and starting blocks are counted in blocks of this length.

A group of related advertisements managed together. Campaign-level settings — date range, strategy, frequency, targeting — apply to every ad inside; ads add their own playback parameters on top.

A video wall — multiple physical displays arranged in a grid and playing one large unified image. Each panel runs its own player; a master frame acts as the clock source and slave frames synchronize playback to it, so content transitions happen simultaneously across the whole wall.

Labels attached to players, screens and frames that classify inventory and drive targeting: a campaign targeted by criteria automatically covers every screen matching its criteria expression, including screens added later.

A forecast of what one screen would play, block by block, at a chosen future moment, computed from the current campaigns, playlists and schedules. It shows overbooking, missing files and category conflicts before they go on air. Nothing in a cyclogram has actually played. UI label: "Cyclograms". English DOOH has no such term (it is a calque of the Russian циклограмма), so pair it with "playback forecast".

A page that summarizes state at a glance. In CS Play it is the inventory dashboard, which shows saturation and overbooking for every frame across the network.

A chronological log of user actions in the CS Play account — who changed what and when. Filterable by period, action type and author; covers campaign, ad, screen, player, schedule, playlist, and settings changes.

A campaign whose ads fill the airtime left after commercial campaigns are placed: house promos, venue announcements, decorative content — the screen never goes dark between paid spots. Kinds: system filler and filler by frequency.

A filler with its own frequency: it participates in planning like a commercial campaign — counted in the rhythm, spread evenly, guaranteed its frequency. Used for filler content with contractual obligations.

Per-ad filler setting for how many times it plays per block: at least once, only once, or as needed (default) — topping up only the remainder, possibly zero.

Per-ad filler setting for where in the block it may stand: anywhere (default), or after an ad — immediately after a commercial spot, producing the commercial-filler alternation.

All the players and screens one operator runs, seen as one population to roll out, update and monitor (fleet deployment, fleet-wide update). It does not mean vehicles, except in transit advertising, where the fleet is the buses or taxis that carry the screens.

An independently playing zone within a player’s output. Every player has at least one frame; splitting the output into several frames gives each zone its own playlists, criteria and variables while all of them play simultaneously. Screens are assembled from frames, and advertisements are planned and delivered per frame.

The area itself: a polygon of coordinates attached to an ad. The ad plays only while the player’s current position lies inside it, which matters for players that move, such as screens on vehicles; with no geofence, the ad’s other targeting alone decides where it plays. Geofencing is the name of the technique that uses such areas.

Industry term: geofencing.

How the ads of the active group are placed within one appearance of the campaign: distributed — each ad is a separate spot spread evenly across the appearance; glued (the "glue ads together" option; legacy UI label: "stick ads together") — ads play back to back as one continuous spot.

Round-robin rotation of ad groups across campaign appearances: group 1 plays in the first appearance, group 2 in the second, wrapping back to group 1. Showing all G groups takes G appearances of the campaign.

An HTML5 advertisement — a folder with index.html rendered by the player in a web view. Unlike a plain website ad it talks to the player through a JavaScript bridge (csBackend on PC and Android, postMessage events on Smart TV): it receives screen, frame and campaign metadata, can set its own duration and returns playback results such as programmatic data.

The shortest stretch of the playlist after which the pattern repeats — a whole number of ad blocks containing a whole number of plays of every campaign and every ad variant. The engine plans one loop; the screen plays it over and over.

A campaign with no playback settings of its own — a folder of ads that you place into playlists by hand as manual slots. Used for precise playlist control and fixed-position placements.

A file in the media library used as ad content: an image (PNG, JPG), a video (MP4, MOV), an HTML5 package (ZIP with index.html) or a website URL. One advertisement can bundle several media files for different screen resolutions.

The generated playback schedule of a screen: the loop projected across calendar time, bounded by the activity windows of each campaign.

Descriptive data attached to an installation, screen or frame — GID, installation type, physical size, address, coordinates, photos, OTS — that SSPs and buyers read before they connect. HTML5 creatives can also read screen, frame and campaign metadata through the player bridge.

A state where the total frequency demands of active campaigns exceed the available airtime in a block. The dashboard highlights overbooking per screen and period; the planning verdict warns about it before committing a schedule.

Camera-based proof that ads really ran: an IP camera (CamGrabber) photographs the physical screen — the real installation, not a rendered frame — at the moments tracked ads play. Photos are browsable in the CMS by campaign and ad and export as a filtered ZIP; capture schedules and offline-safe delivery cover campaigns end to end.

A named, single-level group of campaigns, for example all campaigns of one media plan, client order or sales period. Placements filter the campaign list and let you change the state of many campaigns at once; the Multiple campaigns wizard creates one from an Excel media plan. UI label: "Placements". The trade calls this kind of container an order or insertion order; use placement only for the CS Play object. In CS Play the word does not mean a physical location. CS Deals uses placement for a different term: the indoor or outdoor position of a display.

The quality result attached to every planned playlist and campaign: pass — best achievable quality reached; warning — valid, but a soft rule bent or spacing slightly off the ceiling; failure — a hard rule broken. Every verdict short of a pass comes with reasons and expected-vs-actual values.

The playlist setting that decides how empty time and overbooking are treated: Adhere frequency, Exact frequency with overbooking, Exceed frequency, Decrease frequency, Ignore frequency, or a fully manual playlist.

Two things share the name. The playback application runs on the device — a Windows/Linux PC, Android, Raspberry Pi or a Smart TV panel (Tizen SSSP / webOS Signage) — downloads scheduled content and plays it according to playlists, schedules and campaign rules, reporting playback back and surviving temporary network loss. The player account (the Players page) represents one such device on the platform: name, resolution, frames, geo-metadata, pairing credential and a license slot — every active player consumes one license, and screens are built from its frames.

An ordered list of advertisements prepared for playback on a frame. Consists of slots arranged in sequence; the player cycles through the playlist according to the schedule it is attached to.

Analysis the engine runs before solving: reports impossible starting blocks, overloaded blocks, degraded spacing ceilings, and overbooking — so settings can be adjusted before any schedule is committed.

Background loading of the next advertisement while the current one is still on screen, so the switch happens without a visible gap. Supported on all platforms; playback without preload (lower device load, slower switches) is available on PC and Android only.

A campaign that works like an automatic campaign by frequency but opens screen inventory to real-time bidding from external demand sources via the CS Context SSP. Screens require GID and metadata configuration before programmatic demand can reach them.

An automated report confirming that a specific ad was displayed on a specific screen at a specific time. Standard delivery verification in DOOH. Not to be confused with photo capture, which is photographic evidence from a physical camera.

The share of a frame’s available airtime that scheduled content takes, in percent per period. It can exceed 100% when the period is overbooked. UI labels: "Inventory saturation" (dashboard), "Saturation" (screen tab). The closest trade term is occupancy rate, the sold share of time, which cannot exceed 100%. Broadsign uses saturation for plays per loop, a different sense.

Industry term: occupancy rate.

A plan that defines when a playlist plays: date range, time of day and days of week. A schedule is assigned to one or more screens; the player switches playlists as schedules dictate.

The logical broadcast surface that campaigns target. Assembled from player frames: a simple screen is exactly one frame of one player, a composite screen combines frames — possibly of several players — into a video wall. Carries criteria, metadata and variables; screens do not consume licenses — licenses belong to players.

A one-time code that pairs a device with a player account (in legacy wording the account was called a screen — hence the name). Either a 6-digit PIN generated on the player’s Parameters page and entered on the device, or a 6-character code shown by an unpaired device and entered in CS Play. Pairing with a fresh PIN moves the player identity to that device, signing out the previous one.

One position in a playlist occupied by a single advertisement; its duration equals the ad duration. The planner fills slots according to campaign frequency and strategy.

For a campaign playing less than once per block: the block it first appears in — the start block number in the campaign settings; from there it repeats every N blocks. Out-of-range values wrap around to the equivalent valid block.

A filler with no frequency of its own — pure padding that fills whatever time remains after commercial campaigns and fillers by frequency are placed.

An advertisement shown on an external event rather than in the regular rhythm of the playlist. Triggers are fired through the local player HTTP API — immediately (interrupt) or queued (queue, queue-or-interrupt, queue-or-discard) — or from the server. Not supported on Smart TV.

An automatic campaign of the trigger kind: nothing in it plays on a schedule. Each ad carries a unique trigger name, and an ad plays only when a trigger event names it — fired through the player HTTP API, the CS Play Trigger app or at a set time. UI: strategy "Triggers" ("Auto by triggers" in earlier versions). Requires the Enterprise tier.

See also: trigger advertisement.

A campaign option exempting it from proportional slow-down under overbooking: its frequency stays as requested while the rest of the mix stretches. Costs spacing quality and is honored only while exempted campaigns together stay within half the block.

A named value defined on a screen or frame and injected into HTML5 advertisements at playback time. Used to customize a single creative per location — e.g. a phone number, city name or camera address.