Ad Placement Mechanism for Public Displays of Private Owners

In this paper we propose an auction-based simultaneous ad-placement mechanism for multiple public electronic displays, that reflects the preferences of the public display owners and is run by a mediator. The mechanism assumes that the private owners of the public displays incur some cost for showing ads which is in accordance to the relative matching between the display owner's preferences and the ads' characteristics. The mechanism aims to maximize the exposure of a variety of ads to as wide an audience as possible, while maximizing the general welfare by applying a charging scheme that satisfies multiple desirable economic properties as truthful bidding on the part of both sides, i.e., the display owners and the advertisers, which in turn results in a balanced budget over time. We demonstrate, by means of simulations, that the performance of this auctioned-based mechanism efficiently selects the best adverts in response to the audience presents and achieves up to 99% of the optimal efficiency, if full information about the public owners and advertisers preferences is available to the mediator.