Audience Measurement

Audience Measurement

In 2009, the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) will deliver Australia's first industry-wide audience measurement tool for outdoor media known as MOVE (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility in Exposure).

MOVE is owned by the OMA and its five largest members - APN Outdoor, EYE, Adshel, oOh! Media and JCDecaux. The OMA represents the interests of all other OMA Media Display Members with inventory in the MOVE system.

Outdoor media operators have invested $5 million in building the new system which will be a world first in that it will provide audience measurement data for all main outdoor formats including roadside, transport (railway stations, airports, etc) and shopping centres.

It will also be the first time in Australia that media buyers will have direct access to accurate and measurable data on outdoor media campaigns.

A Federal Government grant of $830,000 was provided towards the development of MOVE under the Industry Cooperative Innovation Program (ICIP) administered by AusIndustry.

MOVE is being built by a consortium of Australian and international research companies, including Brisbane-based transport planners and modellers, Veitch Lister Consulting, and Simon Cooper Associates, the world's leading research expert in the visibility of outdoor media.

A new measurement currency - Likelihood-To-See (LTS) 

Unlike other media measurement systems, MOVE measures actual rather than potential audiences.

This is done by adjusting total audience numbers passing an individual outdoor sign according to attributes of that sign such as height, size, illumination factors and location. This adjustment is derived via a Visibility Index (VI) which was first developed as part of the successful Postar system which was introduced in the United Kingdom in the mid-1990's. Mr Cooper was the architect of the Postar system with the assistance of the Australian researcher, Dr Paul Barber.

Mr Cooper and Dr Barber have, since the original POSTAR research, extended the models into Europe and beyond. The visibility models as designed for Australia take into account further studies conducted for Ireland, Sweden and Finland, in particular the non-urban aspects of poster visibility and larger formats. The visibility models as adapted for Australia are also in use in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Ireland, the UK, Slovenia and China. The designers have also consulted on the USA and South African models and are currently adapting the models for the Netherlands, Turkey and Austria.

In applying the VI to total audiences passing an individual outdoor face, a Likelihood-To-See score is recorded against each outdoor face within the MOVE system. Reach and frequency results are then produced based on an LTS-only currency.   

Coverage

The MOVE system contains around 50,000 individual outdoor media faces, or 30,000 individual sites. Only inventory sold by Media Display Members of the OMA in the five metropolitan markets of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth will be included in the system.

MOVE will provide measurement data for all the main formats including supersites and billboards, bus/tram shelters, kiosks and phone booths, buses and trams, and a range of internal environments including airports, railway stations and shopping centres.

Timeframe

Outdoor media operators were trained on the MOVE system in late 2008 and will begin receiving final data in the first quarter of 2009. Once operators have received results for all five markets they will need to prepare a number of indicative packages for publication prior to the system's launch to market later this year.