A management tier that sits above your stores. Write a schedule once and it lands on every screen in the group — each one on that store's own local clock. Put DIRECTV® on every screen over satellite, so the picture never depends on the broadband link that just failed. Then sell the whole estate as one buy, and measure it store by store.
Most chains run their screens the way they ran them before they were a chain — one manager, one store, one afternoon. Enterprise puts a tier above the accounts you already have, so corporate reaches every store without taking anything away from the people who run them.
Set the Sunday board for 11:00 and it plays at 11:00 in Tampa and 11:00 in Denver. Every store carries its own timezone, and a store missing one is flagged before anything is written — not discovered three weeks later when its evenings were running on the wrong day.
Group stores by owner, region or format, and give each person view, schedule, control, report or manage on that group alone. A store manager who has not been placed in a group keeps their own store exactly as they had it — the feature restricts, it never quietly locks people out.
What played, where, and what didn't. A store that reported nothing appears as not reported rather than as a zero, because a chain-wide average quietly padded with ninety silent stores is worse than no number.
GameViewApplies to Gulf Coast Fuel · 4 stores · 8 screens
Preflight runs before anything is written. Chain-scale failures are invisible one store at a time.
A four or five screen build is the c-store standard, and it is deliberately the dullest possible wiring: each TV gets its own DIRECTV® receiver plugged straight into its own StreamBridge™, and Wi‑Fi carries control and artwork to all of them. No head-end rack, no matrix, no site survey — and no two stores wired differently.
The two addresses are identical in every store and on every box — that is the normalization. An installer never has to think about a subnet, and a receiver's identity is the pair (box serial, ip), not the address, so ten receivers on ten boxes never collapse into one.
Two networks, on purpose. The receiver link is private to this box — it is not a route to anywhere — and the cloud arrives separately over Wi‑Fi. Neither one can take the other down.
Artwork is distributed, not streamed: each box holds its own tapestry and plays it locally, so a slow night on the venue's Wi‑Fi shows up as a late update, never as a stutter on the wall.
Every place-based network sells "potential viewers" — capacity times a foot-traffic model, bought from a panel that has never been inside your stores. It is the reason chain screen inventory is priced like a guess. An Armada store counts the room instead: a small appliance on the store network measures how many people are actually in front of the screens, every hour, in every location.
The appliance already lives on the store network for control and diagnostics. Counting is a server-side toggle per box — nothing is installed in the store to turn a location into a measured one.
The appliance listens passively for the Wi-Fi radios people already carry and counts the unique ones close enough to be in the room — not everything the antenna can hear from the parking lot.
Device identifiers are hashed on the box with a salt that rotates daily and is never written down or sent anywhere. Only per-window counts leave the store. No cameras, no faces, no app, nothing to opt into.
One phone advertises itself under several rotating identities; those are merged before anything is counted. Then in-room devices are divided by a devices-per-person figure you tune per venue, and the store's overnight equipment is learned and reported separately rather than sold as customers.
Hour by hour, a day-by-hour pattern for every store, peaks, and the whole history kept — in each store's own local time. It is the same measurement the buy report quotes and the same one your own floor reports use.
A national brand does not want three hundred campaigns. They want a buy — a budget spread across the estate, creative they control, and an answer at the end. So a buy sits above campaigns the same way the chain sits above stores.
$1,000,000
The commercial agreement. One advertiser, one budget, one report.
40% · 25% · 35%
A share of the budget aimed at a group of stores, over a date range and a daypart.
written once
The unit that gets measured. It carries what was promised — showings, seconds, value, the frozen creative variant, and that store's own coupon code.
GameView$1,000,000 · 3 flights · 10 stores · 20 screens
Measured through Aug 1 · 1 of 20 screens has reported nothing
Delivery is rolled up nightly, and every report says the date it is measured through.
Two numbers, because they answer different things. Airings is measured directly — the number of times the creative actually came up on a screen. Showings is derived from on-screen seconds and the rotation length. A run already playing at midnight is a continuation, not a fresh airing, so one long evening is never counted twice.
Every store gets its own coupon code and its own short link, per creative. Scan a QR in Bay Pines and the scan says Bay Pines. If a buy ships one shared image with one code baked into it, the report says so and reports at the creative level — rather than printing a per-store split of numbers that were never attributable.
Stores are split between variants deterministically and the assignment is frozen, so editing weights mid-flight can never reshuffle stores that are already running. The headline is scans per 1,000 showings, never raw scans — and below the significance threshold the answer is “too close to call”, not a winner.
The baseline is pro-rated to the days that have elapsed. Measuring week one against a three-month promise and calling it “8% delivered” is true and useless. Preflight also reports what the buy will land on before a dollar of it is placed — stores with no screens, flights booking zero days, budget left unallocated.
Chain reporting fails quietly. A store that stopped reporting looks like a store that ran zero. A rollup that is two days behind looks current. An average across the estate absorbs both. Every number here carries the thing that would otherwise be left out.
| Term | What it counts | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Airings | The number of times the creative came up on a screen — a transition into the ad, inside the reporting window. | Measured |
| Showings | On-screen seconds divided by the rotation length. What a media planner means by “times it ran”. | Derived |
| OTS | Opportunities to see — showings × the store's measured audience × its attention factor. Null where the store has no audience measurement. | Derived |
| Coupon scans | Scans of that store's own code, for that creative. Reported per 1,000 showings so a busy store doesn't win the A/B on traffic alone. | Measured |
One vocabulary, deliberately. The word impressions is not used anywhere in a buy report, because a venue's own campaign report already uses it for person-hours of screen time — and a chain roll-up that prints a different quantity under the same heading is a number nobody can reconcile.