A key part of building a smart digital advertising system is to deliver ad content and get insight. In general, we can build a digital advertising dashboard or digital signage system using a desktop or web application. This application will act as content host to deliver ad content. You can see a simple architecture of a digital signage system here:

The Ads System can be a desktop or web application. There is a local database to store ad content. The application will show ad content periodically.

In some cases, we can deploy multiple ad servers at several locations. We'll build a central database so ad content can be pushed to each local ad server. We also can design to deliver ad content based on location. It means each local ad server has a different ad location. In general, we can build a hybrid centralization and decentralization model as shown in this figure:

You can see from this figure that we need internet to connect between the server and local ad servers. Depending on your ad content type and size, we should estimate network bandwidth capacity in order to deliver ad content well. Ads content can be pushed to the local server at certain periods.

To make our digital signage system smarter, we can add intelligence features, for instance, detecting human presence while ad content is showing. The system should record that information and store it into a local server.

Getting information about the number of people watching ad content is necessary. We can record this information into a database. From that, we can get insight in order to determine the peak season for showing ad content.

In general, we can add a machine learning algorithm into the sensor device to obtain the density of human presence. You can see this in the following figure of a general architecture:

In a real-life implementation, we can use any sensor, including optical sensors like cameras, to detect human presence. We will discuss this in the next section.