Five disciplines for selling screens on evidence

Our evidence rests on three methods that identify no individual. Building-entry counts, aggregated by hour and supplied by property managers, estimate how many people pass a screen. Matched-district holdout tests compare an advertiser's own sales, coupon redemptions or store visits between exposed districts and comparable unexposed ones. Brand-recall surveys use panels whose members have agreed to take part. Each method has a weakness I state in the proposal: entry counts do not show attention, holdout districts are never perfectly matched, and recall depends on question wording. I decline measurement that relies on faces, phone identifiers or movement histories. The Personal Information Protection Law treats facial information as sensitive and sets tight limits on image collection in public places, and residents never agreed to be studied on their way home.

I set list prices by building grade, screen position, loop length and season, and publish them to agencies with their conditions. In a soft market the temptation is a general cut, which teaches buyers that list prices are fiction and is slow to reverse. I prefer three other tools. A price floor for each tier gives the sales team a clear limit before escalation. Smaller packages, shorter flights or fewer cities let a cautious advertiser buy without discounting the core product. Additional evidence, such as a holdout test, offers a buyer something useful in place of a lower price. Every month I compare realised price with list by tier, alongside sell-through, so that falling occupancy is visible early rather than explained after the quarter has closed and the agency negotiations for the next one have begun.

National brands buying through agencies want reach, consistent reporting and campaigns spanning several cities. A dental clinic, a gym, a kindergarten or a car dealership wants the twenty compounds within three kilometres of its door and a two-week flight it can afford. The two groups need different products, not different discounts. Our district fortnight packages, launched in 2024, sell clusters of residential screens around one neighbourhood at a fixed price, with self-booking, a standard creative check and a short results note. Local advertisers bring more compliance work: medical advertisements need approval documents before we publish, and small businesses rarely employ a lawyer. I size the content desk for that volume and protect national campaigns from displacement when local demand rises in the weeks before public holidays.

Every screen hangs on a wall we do not own. Office landlords, property managers and, in residential compounds, the owners collectively all have a stake in what a screen shows and what it pays. I treat these partners as a market requiring its own marketing rather than a procurement line. Each partner receives an annual statement of screens, operating hours, fees and complaints, which property managers can share with owners' committees. That matters because the Civil Code treats income from the shared parts of a residential building, after reasonable costs, as belonging to the owners. Because our majority shareholder is itself a property manager, independent managers sometimes suspect that we favour its sites. Identical published terms for Hexiaolan buildings and third-party buildings remain the most persuasive answer I have found.

Our content-standards desk of eleven reviewers checks every advertisement before it plays. The Advertising Law makes a publisher responsible for checking supporting documents and the content it carries, prohibits superlatives such as 'best' or 'national-level', and requires prior review for categories including medical and pharmaceutical advertising. Counsel decides questions of law; the desk applies the answers and records each decision. Beyond the law, we set our own category rules for shared spaces. Residential entrance halls are seen by children and older residents twice a day, so since 2025 we have excluded unsecured consumer lending and paid-livestream apps from those screens entirely. For an advertiser, brand-safety means not appearing beside something embarrassing. For us it also means not embarrassing the compound that hosts the screen.