In an era when traditional media are under pressure and audience attention is highly fragmented, outdoor advertising still retains an undeniable vitality: it physically exists in urban and living spaces, does not rely on personal devices, and is difficult to “skip.” For this reason, over the past decade the value assessment of outdoor exposure has increasingly become part of industry discussions around “programmatic,” “digital,” and “intelligent” approaches. However, behind these tech buzzwords lies a relatively overlooked question: has outdoor advertising monitoring actually kept pace with the industry’s rapid evolution?

In today’s China market, where full‑scale, high‑intensity omnichannel marketing is the norm and outdoor placements can be part of audience planning, this article aims to return to basics and ask: has the core methodology for monitoring outdoor advertising been fully implemented? Must one be physically present at the placement to close the loop on abnormal-traffic oversight (e.g., missed placements, incorrect runs, or execution anomalies)? Is manual, on‑site monitoring the only effective way to verify authenticity? Without monitoring as a foundation, will technological upgrades only amplify uncertainty? This leads into the article’s topic: the importance of verifying outdoor ad placements and monitoring abnormal traffic (Part I), and an exploration of possible solutions.

Regardless of how media formats evolve, the underlying logic of ad delivery monitoring remains relatively clear and centers on three questions:

In the online and digital media space, these questions have already produced a fairly mature industry consensus: with credible third‑party monitoring systems, advertisers and agencies can perform relatively comprehensive verification of campaign execution and, on that basis, build more complex evaluation models for metrics such as impressions, reach, and frequency, thereby continuously optimizing targeting accuracy and return on investment.

There are three commonly used free methods for outdoor ad monitoring in the market today. Each method is widely adopted for specific media types but has practical limitations that create potential risks for advertisers and agencies.

If an agency is involved, it consolidates the materials, performs verification, fills gaps, and then submits the results to the advertiser. Although these three approaches are customary, in practice they inevitably raise a series of potential problems.

Why does monitoring and verification in outdoor advertising—an area with huge scale and clear value—remain at a relatively rudimentary operational level? Several factors may be at play:

Consequently, outdoor media often become a domain where most monitoring is provided by the media platforms themselves rather than being authenticated by independent third‑party systems.

Broker procurement is widespread in lower‑tier outdoor markets, which further magnifies the risks created by gaps in monitoring. Beyond the inherent complexity of the media formats, a structural feature of the outdoor execution chain objectively increases the risk when monitoring is absent: a high proportion of placements are handled by brokers.

Because of historical evolution and operating mechanisms, ownership, operation, and sales rights for outdoor media are often not highly centralized. Many inventory points are scattered across different regions and held by resource owners at different levels, and media consolidation or nationwide packaging capabilities are limited. In this context, brokers have long existed as the key link between advertisers/agencies and actual media resources, and in many campaigns, they take on the functions of execution and resource allocation.

Compared with digital media or online platforms, broker involvement in outdoor advertising is noticeably higher and the chain is longer:

Multiple layers of subcontracting in execution inevitably cause information to degrade as it is passed along.

The prevalence of brokers is not the root cause; the absence of a robust monitoring system is what allows risks to be hidden and compounded.

When continuous, objective monitoring is absent, these issues often rely on the executing party’s self‑reporting or after‑the‑fact explanations. If disputes arise, advertisers and agencies find it difficult to reconstruct the true execution and lack strong evidence for verification or accountability. Management of outdoor anomalies (missed runs, wrong placements) often remains at contract‑level remedies such as one‑for‑one or two‑for‑one compensation, rather than penetrating audits of orders. When client orders cannot be reconciled with primary media platform orders and there is no comprehensive third‑party monitoring system, relying solely on a first‑day photo as proof of full delivery makes the risk of fraudulent placements enormous.