How Clear Channel Belgium Lifted Its National DOOH Network From 75% to 99% Availability
Three years rebuilding the operations behind every digital screen advertisers actually see in Belgium.
Clear Channel Belgium runs the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the country. When campaign teams sell impressions, they sell uptime. In 2016 the national digital network was sitting at roughly 75% availability — meaning one screen out of four was either dark, frozen, or stuck on the wrong creative at any given moment. Over thirty months, we rebuilt the operating model around the iConic and CityPlay platforms, trained internal and partner teams on Broadsign, and structured an emergency procedure for city-mandated messages. Availability climbed to 99% and stayed there, while a brand-new 100-display CityPlay network was rolled out across Brussels.
Context
An out-of-home media business doesn't really sell screens — it sells delivered impressions. A 75% availability rate looks acceptable on paper, but in practice it meant Clear Channel was either over-promising inventory or compensating advertisers who noticed their creative had been off-air during prime hours. Worse, dark screens in tram stations and high-traffic streets are extremely visible, and city authorities expected the network to be available for emergency communications at any time.
When I joined as Digital & Innovation Project Manager, the operations side was reactive: incidents were caught by field reports more than by monitoring, software updates were rolled out manually screen-by-screen, and there was no shared playbook between Clear Channel staff, Broadsign operators, and the third-party technical partners maintaining the displays. Each event (Tour de France, Brussels marathons, public alerts) was handled as a one-off coordination effort rather than a repeatable procedure.
On top of stabilising the legacy iConic and CityPlay fleets, the business wanted to expand: a brand-new digital network of 100 City Play displays across Brussels was already on the roadmap. The transformation could not happen at the cost of operations.
Approach
I treated availability as a single accountable KPI rather than a side-effect of multiple teams' work. The first quarter went into instrumenting what we actually had: a per-screen view of uptime, software version, last-seen timestamp, and creative state. Once we could see where the 25% loss was coming from, the patterns became obvious — a handful of recurring failure modes accounted for the majority of downtime.
From there, the work was structural. I formalised the software update procedure for the Belgian iConic and CityPlay fleets so it became a planned, low-risk operation rather than a series of emergency interventions. I trained internal teams and external partners on the Broadsign platform, then made myself the single point of contact (SPOC) on event days so the operational chain ran through one person rather than a Slack-and-phone scramble. In parallel, I worked with the city authorities to set up an emergency procedure for public messages, which both increased the strategic value of the network and forced the operational reliability to match.
The 100-screen Brussels rollout was sequenced to feed back into the operations model. Every batch of new displays was a chance to refine deployment scripts, vendor coordination, and handover documentation — so the new network shipped already aligned with the higher availability standard rather than dragging it back down.
Key decisions
- Made network availability a single, owned KPI tracked weekly with the GM — no more diluted accountability across vendors.
- Standardised the software update procedure for iConic and CityPlay so updates were routine and reversible.
- Trained internal staff and partner technicians on Broadsign with the same curriculum, removing the knowledge gap that was driving rework.
- Acted as the single Digital SPOC during major events, so external partners had one phone number instead of three.
- Co-designed an emergency procedure with the City of Brussels for public messages, making the network operationally critical infrastructure.
- Used the 100-display CityPlay rollout as a forcing function for documentation rather than a parallel project.
Results
- →Network availability lifted from 75% to 99% across the national digital fleet — and stayed there.
- →100 new CityPlay digital displays deployed across Brussels without degrading the legacy network's KPIs.
- →Repeatable software-update playbook documented and handed over to the operations team.
- →Emergency-message procedure with the City of Brussels formalised and tested.
- →Internal teams and external partners trained on Broadsign at the same level, removing the prior dependency on a small group of specialists.
Lessons learned
- ▸Availability is owned by one person or it isn't owned at all. The first lever wasn't tooling — it was concentrating accountability.
- ▸DOOH networks fail in patterns. Once you can see them, 80% of the work is removing recurring causes, not heroic incident response.
- ▸Training partners and internal staff on the same platform with the same curriculum is the cheapest reliability investment available.
- ▸If the network becomes operationally critical (city emergency messages), business stakeholders fund the reliability work themselves.
“Matthieu is the kid in a playground of technology; he's 24/7 passionate and curious about tech and innovation. With a golden heart and a relentless focus on the customer, Matthieu is an asset in any team.”
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