Global OOH metrics and measurement tool; Advertisers’ Food

 OOH medium being a global advertising platform is well accepted across all countries and boundaries with a significant portion in the advertising pie vis-a-vis the Indian market. Having the same kind of outdoor avenues, formats and branding styles in terms of creativity, innovation, printing, technology and other aspects, but despite that Out-of-home medium has gained higher respect in western countries such as the UK, US, Canada and various others. The reason that drove the success for the OOH medium in western countries is the robust mechanism system designed to elevate the status of the medium with data and statistics that helps in measuring providing value for the money invested by the advertisers and solution Providers.

USA

The biggest OOH market in the world is based in the USA, having OOH market size is 7.08 billion dollars as on date, is constantly working towards building a consolidated research bank, especially after COVID-19 to provide a level playing field to the industry and regain its growth at a faster pace than ever.

Last year, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) released new guidelines recommending a move toward an impressions-based measurement system to provide forecasted and reconciled-as-delivered daily impressions. The proposed framework addresses Advertisers & growing need for increased transparency and a more dynamic measurement system for OOH campaigns. The OAAA OOH Impression Measurement Guidelines are designed to set forth a new standard that uses Opportunity to See (OTS) as the core metric for measurement. It also proposes a refined and enhanced definition of OTS that more closely aligns with the same metric used by all other measured media combining predictive audience models with a clear measure of observed audience exposures at OOH displays across all formats. This is the same metric used for data inputs into Marketing Mix Models and Multi-touch Attribution Models. Under the new definition, OTS encompasses circulation as a measure in conjunction with; which factor in ad display size, placement, view angles and other traditional OOH attributes that impact audience, explains OAAA.

Moreover, the OAAA Data & Analytics Committee convened to set forth the new reporting minimum requirements and recommend as a next step to work with the MRC, ANA, ARF, Geopath, WOO and other related groups representing multiple aspects of the OOH ecosystem to evaluate these guidelines and begin developing a roadmap for cross-group coordination and accredited impression measurement.

A leading company- Geopath, a not-for-profit, tripartite organization (equally representing the buy and sell side of the OOH industry in the US) builds a smarter OOH marketplace through state-of-the-art audience location measurement, insights and market research innovation in the USA. Offering comprehensive solutions, Geopath is constantly upgrading its research methodologies in order to provide highly refined research data points to all parties.

For instance, Geopath Insights Suite, one of the tools, provides more granular measurement to the industry, including information about who audiences are, what they buy and what other types of media they consume throughout the day. It also gives them the ability to measure variances in audiences throughout the day, throughout the week, and the year. With the help of this data, Geopath measures OOH advertising exposure in granular time increments.

Canada

Canada has a national not-for-profit organization for the Canadian out- of-home (OOH) industry named ‘COMMB’ that is responsible for the collective marketing and measurement efforts for the OOH industry, developing proprietary audience measurement methodologies for a variety of OOH media formats and ensuring the voice of OOH is at the forefront of media via broad marketing and communications initiatives. Interestingly, the latest development implemented by COMMB included the measurement of

Audio ads in the year 2021. Audio OOH is a growing category as it allows marketers to reach target audiences with contextual audio content while they are out of their homes. This category is applicable in many retail sectors but is currently expanding rapidly in grocery and convenience stores. 

United Kingdom

Interestingly, the latest country to join the race of OOH measurement practice is the United Kingdom where the regional Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising trade body ‘Outsmart’ has announced the forthcoming launch of an industry-wide tool that will bring OOH media-owner data - both;classic and digital - into a single interface for buyers.

The aim of centralizing playout data across classic and digital inventory provides several benefits includes such as

1. Improves and promotes industry accountability

2. Is more efficient than the current ‘peer-to-peer’ approach

3. Fully standardized the data and improve the communication of the data

4. Can be independently audited and accredited

5. Presents future opportunities to better measure OOH in ROI studies e.g. marketing mix modeling

Alongside, Route is a renowned not-for-profit company and a Joint Industry Currency that provides audience estimates for out-of-home advertising in Great Britain which is used to facilitate and evaluate trading of out-of-home advertising.

Caption: How Route Comes Together

The key ingredients of Route’s measurement system include a Travel Survey of people conducted annually, Visual Attention research that uses eye-tracking technology to determine the probability that someone who is exposed to out-of-home advertising will look at it. Maps that Route has created a digital map of Great Britain. The map of the road network is derived from data provided by HERE, the location specialist. Volumetric Data that includes counts of traffic and pedestrians are accurately assigned to specific locations to know volumes passing those points. Lastly, the Traffic Intensity Model expands the traffic figures at known locations so that they cover the entire country.

In Q4, 2022, Route made an upgrade in its measurement system by developing new metrics that offer new metrics: contemporization of data to reflect current volumes; behavioral data to better understand traffic in retail environments; and visual data to update how likely people are to see out-of-home media. As part of the changes, Route now includes information on pedestrians’ speed of travel, based on multi-sensor tracker data, with the data able to identify three pedestrian behaviors – walking, wending or waiting.

Australia

Measurement of Outdoor Visibility & Exposure (MOVE) is Australia’s first national industry-wide audience measurement system for Out-of-Home (OOH) media. It enables a vastly more accurate measuring system aligning itself with online, TV and Radio. It covers all major outdoor environments including roadside, railway/bus stations, buses/trams, airports and shopping centers.

The MOVE system contains approximately 60,000 individual advertising faces (media formats) across the Out-of-Home (OOH) sector.

Every single face (media format) within the MOVE system receives an audience measurement result. These single results are then combined to provide total contacts and reach and frequency results for ‘packages; of faces or for total media campaigns. A package can consist of one face (eg. a supersite) up to several hundred faces.

Every face has a set of unique characteristics which influence the final results. These include the exact location (GPS coordinates), the size of the face, its orientation and whether or not the face is illuminated. Some of these characteristics are used to collect the total audience (Opportunity To See) while others influence the actual audience (Likelihood To See).

MOVE utilizes a new audience measurement currency in Australian media known as Likelihood To See (LTS). This means that only those people from among the chosen demographic who in all probability saw the OOH advertising campaign are included in the audience measurement results.

Last Thoughts!

Interestingly, all these countries have one thing in common - i.e. Intent to provide a consolidated solution to beat the biggest hindrance in the growth of the industry. All these countries are banking upon almost similar kinds of bases to source the data.

From the Indian OOH Industry perspective, similar data is available and processes are being used to derive the statistics of exposure on each site. However, what is lacking in the Indian OOH system is a reliable stakeholder that works like a custodian for the industry and its all stakeholders.

Also, it is a two-way road where the industry concessionaires also need to extend trust, reliability, and solidarity by joining the force to make the independent custodian a strong force to represent the industry amongst authorities, clients and other partners to demonstrate the muscle of the industry.

Noomi Mehta  Alok Jalan  Anant jain  Narayanaswami Shekhar  Prakash Arts Pvt. Ltd.  Rachana Lokhande   Pawan Bansal  Media4Growth Jahan Mehta  Pramod Bhandula  Shailender Luthra  VIVEK LAKHWARA   Sam Balsara  Dipankar Sanyal  Atul Shrivastava  Abhijit Sengupta  Gour Gupta  Promita Saha Khan   Kanan Modak  Sunil Kutty Menon  Sreedhar A R Ajay Chitkara  Atul Kansal Manesh Kumar Devesh Mittle Mangesh Borse Sunil S Maheshwari Ajaz Memon Kalpesh Vora Pranay Shah vishal shah Yashraj Gala Times OOH Amul (GCMMF) Tata Group Maruti Suzuki India Limited Mahindra Group Reliance Industries Limited Godrej Industries Group N. Chandrasekaran Vivek Nayer Yatin Chaudhari Somasree Bose Awasthi (she/her)