At Digital Signage Expo 2011, an Ayuda Media Systems demo dropped what could potentially be a big bomb on billing for digital out-of-home advertising.
Ayuda's demo for a new tracking and billing concept for DOOH advertising campaigns that bills clients by the look seems like it could go one of two ways: It could revolutionize how clients are billed, or it could go over like a lead balloon.
Ayuda has integrated Intel's Audience Impression Metrics (the Intel AIM Suite) with its Splash enterprise resource planning suite for DOOH networks to bill advertisers for how many times people look at their ads. The AIM Suite is basically Intel's re-branding of the anonymous video analytics system from CognoVision, which it acquired in November.
"The idea is to basically change the way ad-based campaigns are billed in digital out-of-home," said Ayuda Chief Software Architect Pierre-Yves Troel. "We came up with a concept where we bill per look rather than billing ... based on research."
DOOH networks usually charge by impression, a fuzzy measure of how many people passed by or had the chance to view an ad playing on a digital display. Ayuda's pay-per-view concept is intentionally modeled on the Internet model of billing for advertising, Troel said.
Using the Intel AIM Suite, Splash would keep track of both how many people look at the screen while a particular ad is playing and those people's demographic characteristics, Troel said.
"The benefit of that is you only pay for people actually looking at your ad and you also get to know exactly who looked at your ad," he said. "You pay for what you get."
And by "exactly who looked at your ad," Troel said he meant the approximate age and gender of the person looking at the ad, and that the actual images of display viewers are not collected.
Ayuda unveiled the concept demo the first day of DSE 2011 to gauge industry reaction to what is a very different way of doing business, Troel said.
"I'm sure the advertisers would be interested in this. Now it might be tough for the operators because they can't maybe guarantee the money they're making on a campaign," he said. "But we're trying to see where this is going to go. Maybe it's going to die, maybe it's going to live."
