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A surface is a place an experience is delivered: where a consumer meets the brand and who has custody of it.

What you can do with a surface

• tableMeasurement Plan · Content Types
• tableCampaign Brief · Tactics
• tableInstrumentation Plan · Channels

Its surfaces— 15

• WebsiteThe brand's own public website: the digital place most journeys pass through.
• Mobile AppThe brand's own mobile app: the authenticated digital place an established consumer acts from.
• Search ResultsA search engine's results page, where organic listings and paid placements meet a query.
• Social FeedA social platform's feed, where organic posts and paid placements reach a consumer.
• Video PlatformA video platform where the brand's videos are watched, recommended and advertised against.
• Email InboxA consumer's email inbox, where newsletters, promotions and nurture messages arrive.
• SMS InboxA consumer's text-message inbox.
• Call CenterThe phone channel's place: agents who take and make consumer calls.
• Third-Party WebsiteA website the brand does not own, where display, referral and earned placements appear.
• Partner SitesWebsites of partners that hand consumers to the brand.
• Print / PhysicalPrinted and physical material a consumer holds: a brochure, a rack card, a poster, a sign.
• Mailbox (Direct Mail)A consumer's postal mailbox, where direct mail arrives.
• Broadcast / OOHBroadcast and out-of-home placement: television, radio and outdoor media a consumer encounters without choosing to.
• EventsA physical or virtual event a consumer attends: a booth, a sponsorship, a hosted session.
• Physical LocationThe brand's own physical place: a store, an office, a venue where the consumer is served in person.

Why it matters

What goes wrong without it, as the commitments that license this kind say it, each standing on its sources.

• Campaign is the accountable initiativeMarketing organisations accumulate layers — programme, portfolio, initiative, workstream — each added by a team that wanted one more level of roll-up. Every layer is another place spend and outcome can be attributed, and after two or three of them it stops being answerable which level owns a number. One accountable unit that may nest inside itself gives the roll-up without the ambiguity.
  Understand Campaign Hierarchy
• Use external content taxonomy as a mapping, not masteryAdopting an industry taxonomy as the master buys comparability and hands over governance of the vocabulary. When the external scheme revises, local meanings move with it, and a term that carried a specific operational sense is reinterpreted by someone else's committee. A mapping keeps both: the comparison when it is wanted, and the local meaning when it is not.
  Content Taxonomy
• Make outcome quality, calculation method and attribution inspectableAn outcome number is only as good as the inputs, exclusions and window that nobody wrote down. Media measurement standards exist because outcome claims circulate detached from their method, and a figure with no stated method cannot be challenged, reproduced or compared against anyone else's. Keeping what a measure means apart from how it is computed is what makes either one reviewable.
  Outcomes and Data Quality Standards · Declaring the Grain · Measuring Visibility in the AI Era · Data-driven multi-touch attribution models · Causally motivated attribution for online advertising · A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook · Why Three Exposures May Be Enough · Digital Audience-Based Measurement Standards
• Delivery custody is a named chain, not one vendor fieldReaching someone involves several parties, and a single vendor field forces four questions into one answer: the manner of reaching them, the place it happens, the system that acts there, and who is accountable for it. The advertising industry built supply-chain disclosure precisely because an unstated intermediary is where accountability disappears.
  sellers.json and the OpenRTB SupplyChain object · PROV-O: The PROV Ontology
• Creative form is constrained by where it is deliveredA size is a property of a placement, not of a picture. Recorded on the asset it makes a creative look as though it has an intrinsic shape, and the constraint it was actually meeting — what a given surface supports — goes unrecorded. Stated against the surface, one asset can be delivered anywhere that supports it.
  IAB New Ad Portfolio: Advertising Creative Guidelines