Glossary

The words this trade actually uses

Half of these mean different things in India, Britain and America, and a media owner explaining "face" or "proof of display" to a new client has nowhere to point. So: plain definitions, as the words are used on the ground.

Out-of-home advertising (OOH): Advertising that reaches people outside the home — billboards, hoardings, unipoles, gantries, transit and digital screens. In India the whole category is often just called "outdoor". Media owners sell space on these structures; advertisers and agencies buy it.
Hoarding: In India and much of South Asia, a hoarding is a large outdoor advertising structure — what American English calls a billboard. (In British construction usage the same word means a temporary barrier around a building site, which is a different thing entirely.) A hoarding management system and a billboard management system are the same product under two names.
Billboard: A large outdoor advertising panel, usually mounted at height beside a road. Sold by the month in most Indian markets, and priced by size, lighting, traffic and the junction it faces.
Unipole: A billboard carried on a single steel column rather than a lattice frame. Common on highways and at junctions because it needs a small footprint, and usually commands a higher rate than a wall-mounted panel of the same size.
Gantry: A structure spanning the road, carrying advertising above the traffic. High visibility, usually the most expensive inventory a media owner holds, and often subject to the tightest municipal permissions.
Face: One advertising surface on a structure. A single hoarding may carry two faces pointing in opposite directions, and each is booked and billed separately. Availability is tracked per face rather than per structure, which is why "how many sites do you have" and "how many faces can you sell" are different questions.
Occupancy: The proportion of a media owner's faces that are booked over a period. The single most watched number in the business, because unsold days cannot be recovered — an empty face earns nothing and the day does not come back.
Proof of display (POD): Photographic evidence that an advertisement was actually mounted and displayed as booked. Usually geotagged and dated, captured at installation, during the run and sometimes at night to show illumination. Clients increasingly make payment conditional on receiving it.
Mounting and printing charges: Costs charged on top of the display rate: printing the flex or vinyl, and the labour and access equipment to fit it. Quoted separately from rent because the client may supply their own printed material.
Card rate: The published monthly rate for a face, before negotiation. The rate actually agreed is often lower, which is why what was quoted last time — and to whom — matters more than the card rate when a client rings back.
Purchase order (PO): The document by which a client authorises spend, naming the sites, the period and the amount. When an invoice does not match the PO — a date moved, a site swapped — payment stops until somebody reconciles the two.
Media owner: The business that owns or leases the structures and sells the advertising space on them. Distinct from the agency, which buys space on behalf of a brand. Software for a media owner is about inventory, availability and getting paid; software for an agency is about planning and buying.
DOOH (digital out-of-home): Out-of-home advertising on electronic screens rather than printed material. Sold in time slots shared between advertisers rather than as an exclusive month, so the same screen carries several campaigns at once.
Site code: The internal reference a media owner gives each structure, usually encoding city and sequence. It is what makes a conversation about "the Gangapur Road one" precise enough to bill from.

AdBoard Twin is software for media owners built around exactly these concepts — faces, occupancy, mounting charges and proof of display are things it already knows about rather than fields you invent. See what it does or open the live demo.