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Taking another look at pay-per-look DOOH

Digital out-of-home advertising experts talk about Ayuda's pay-per-look model for DOOH ad billing.

April 7, 2011 by Christopher Hall — w, t

Ayuda Media Systems recently unveiled a futuristic concept for an ad billing model that could potentially revolutionize digital out-of-home advertising.

Montreal-based Ayuda integrated the Intel Audience Impression Metrics Suite into its flagship ERP system for DOOH networks, Splash, to create a concept for billing advertisers based on how many times someone looks at their ads.

The company debuted the concept demo at February's Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the response has been mixed.

Reactions to the pay-per-look model from digital signage network experts, though, seems to be centered around something that not even Ayuda would dispute: the idea that this novel model for billing, even if feasible, is a long way off.

The idea behind the Ayuda concept is that networks enabled with the anonymous video analytics of the AIM suite would be able to gauge when people actually looked at a given screen and, based on the time stamp of that look, tell which ad was playing on-screen at that time. Advertisers, then, would be billed based on how many people looked at screens playing their ads, rather than based on the fuzzier "impression" metric.

Jason Kates, the founder and CEO of demand-side DOOH platform company rVue, said that Microsoft and Intel Corp. stumbled out of the gate by marketing their video analytics capabilities as "facial recognition" technology – and that the trend has continued since Intel acquired CognoVision and its anonymous video analytics solution.

Using "facial recognition" has too many creepy, homeland security-type connotations, he said, and the technology would face an easier time if it were marketed as "interactive advertising."

As for the Ayuda concept in particular, Kates said that getting DOOH networks to follow an Internet-style "pay-per-click" model is possible, but a long way off.

"Internally we call that skipping steps, and they skipped way out," he said in a recent telephone interview. "I mean, you're talking about everybody having to replace their screens or put cameras up on every screen, and it doesn't totally make sense."

ADCENTRICITY co-founder and CMO Jeff Atley echoed Kates' sentiments in a separate email exchange. The technology behind the Ayuda concept is exciting, and it is potentially a great solution for evaluation purposes, Atley wrote.

"However, the reality is that this is not currently a scalable solution. The capital costs and services fees to have this 100 percent across all DOOH locations are not feasible, especially as an 'un-recognized' metric," he wrote. "Even if ALL networks who have, say, 500 venues had 10 percent sample sets of the solutions or 100 venues, there's no certainty that they will be included in a targeted plan."

And Monte Zweben, founder and board chairman of SeeSaw Networks, said the pay-per-look model is "a great direction" and something in which his company would be interested – when it could be done at scale.

"I think there's an interesting evolution in our space, as the technology improves to be able to measure the actual facial recognition of people perceiving signs, screens and particular content pieces on screen," he said in a recent telephone interview. "That may emerge as a measurement standard, but we are, I think, many, many years away from seeing that broadly deployed on networks and being able to be used at scale."

All of which are sentiments that Ayuda itself would likely not dispute. The concept demo at DSE 2011 was just that, the demonstration of a concept that holds "much promise for both network operators and advertisers," according to the Ayuda website. Ayuda claims that the pay-per-look model would give network operators provable metrics to show their viability and advertisers the ability to only pay for the times their ads were viewed.

"This is a concept demo, much the same way car manufacturers demo concept cars at auto shows," Ayuda CEO Andreas Soupliotis said on the company's website. "While the pay-per-look concept is futuristic, it offers insight into a possible world where DOOH billing resembles the Internet's pay-per-click success as proven by Google AdWords."

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