An overhauled out-of-home measurement currency four years in the making has almost landed. When live, agencies will be able to gauge how many people moved passed their ads hour by hour across the country – regions and cities – across millions of miles of road and with every indoor venue modelled and mapped. Crunching the data has been no mean feat, per the OMA’s Elizabeth McIntyre, Grant Guesdon and Kylie Green, hence the delays, and agencies will soon see just how much data is coming at them. Circa 300 billion rows may throw up some curveballs when it comes to how people move, when they move, and what they are doing when they get to their destination. The outdoor industry is betting that the money will soon more closely follow the audience.
What you need to know:
- The Outdoor Media Association last week launched its new MOVE measurement system.
- Via 300 billion rows of data, agencies will soon be able to measure ad campaigns against hourly people movement across cities, regions and venues.
- But as yet, they’ve not got their hands on that data – with some licencing details still being ironed out.
- When they do, they will likely appreciate just how much data is being ingested, per the OMA, which is claiming a world first.
- The out-of-home industry is hoping the money then starts to more closely follow the audience.
The overhauled MOVE out-of-home measurement tool has been unveiled – though agencies are yet to get their hands on the new system which maps the eyeballs that travel past billboards in both the cities and regions.
The Outdoor Media Association, which has co-ordinated circa $20m in industry contributions to fund MOVE, was cagey about a timeline for agency access at its annual conference last week. Some licensing agreements are still being ironed out.
But when it does launch, MOVE should give media buyers a more granular understanding of who sees there ads, where – and when, down to the hour. Per the OMA every road, transport route and venue in Australia.
That means media buyers will be able to account for seasonality and monthly variations, as well as school and public holidays – and the new currency even accounts for the impact of daylight savings hours on sign illumination and visibility.
Crucially, in-venue measurement (e.g. shopping centres, gyms, airports) is being standardised, whereas MOVE 1.5 had no place-based measurement nor regional data. Claimed as a world first, the OMA acknowledged calibrating that volume of data has not been without challenge.
(MOVE 1.5 was introduced two years ago as a stop gap to bring digital out of home into the original 2010 tool while the all-new system was in build mode – and with several delays along the way.)
The new system, configured in partnership with Ipsos, captures billions of data points from sources including a two-week mobility survey of 5,000 people, ABS Census data, mobile data, geolocation data and shopping centre heat maps.
The upshot is a synthetic audience of 2 million, whose movements are projected onto the 22 million people (97 per cent of Australians over 14 years that the OMA says connect with outdoor media each week) and mapped against more than 150,000 OOH assets nationally to measure the reach of a campaign against target demographics and markets.
Each asset is measured individually against metrics like Realistic Opportunity to See (i.e. viewability), which measures the total audience that can see the signs, accounting for factors like size, proximity, illumination, dwell time and obstructions. Meanwhile, Visibility Adjusted Contacts uses eye-tracking data to provide insights on how many people have actually viewed the sign (i.e. attention) and Neuro-Impact Factor measures long-term memory encoding and emotional response based off the reported weighted average.
Four years in the making
MOVE 2.0 has been under construction since 2021, with the slated 2023 launch inevitably blowing out as the lofty scope of the project was realised and the industry reeled from the impact of Covid.
OMA chief Elizabeth McIntyre joined the industry body towards the tail-end of MOVE’s delivery, but acknowledged industry frustration at continued delays. She cited “the size of the project” and “the amount of data that needs to be calibrated” as key blockers.
“We've got to remember as well, what we are doing here is pioneering a world first for out-of-home – you don't know what you don't know... until you try. That's been the experience, especially for Ipsos, because they haven't done this size project before.”
There were also regulatory hurdles to clear: OMA and MOVE general manager Kylie Green noted the federal privacy reforms impacting the use of mobile phone data that had to be adjusted for.
“The system's been built to be agile so that we can be future-proofing it and making sure that as the information becomes available, we can accommodate it – and one of the ones along the way was the mobile data. They switched off the ability to even collect that degree of information, which was thankfully only a small portion that contributed to our broader build, but it was still a challenge that we had to overcome.”
Communicating those obstacles, and the subsequent shifting timelines, was another challenge, but one McIntyre says the OMA has dealt with “transparently”.
“I think if you're open with people around that - and just the magnitude of the task in terms of just the amount of data - everyone starts to understand a little bit more… I think they appreciate a little bit more what they're going to get,” she said. “So it's been an education process, but I am proud of the way that we've maintained open communication and transparency.”
The OMA is neither the first nor likely the last to blow out new currency timelines – and McIntyre threw a jab at her TV counterparts.
“I think the big difference – and I probably it isn't right to keep drawing comparisons – but one comparison I will draw is that MOVE will measure all of the industry with all of its members. I'm not sure that OzTam can say the same,” she told Mi3.
“We are very proud of the unity that our industry is showing and that we are actually reporting on areas and formats that we haven't done before.”
(OzTam would likely counter that Voz is now live and that agencies can actually use it.)
Macro vs micro
In the time it’s taken to get the new standard currency (almost) up and running, agencies have taken matters into their own hands, going in-house or to third parties for solutions that promise an omnichannel view – and can map media spend back to business outcomes.
But Grant Guesdon, who’s long led the development of MOVE, that's okay, as MOVE is designed to be complementary with other measurement tech.
He said there’s no “magical” solution that can “tell us how all out of home formats work”. As such, “from my perspective, those [other] tools have a role to play, probably at a macro level. But if I'm looking to understand the audience of individual locations and individual size, that's the industry currency that does that,” per Guesdon.
McIntyre affirms that the ultimate upshot will be for “everyone to have more confidence in what they thought they knew”. Plus, it will “allow them to look at maybe trying a different sort of mix with other formats and seeing how that impacts their campaign”.
She says agencies will “in time” have direct access to the MOVE data to ingest into their own tools, in addition to supply side platform (SSP) partners, but there’s still work to be done to figure out what that might look like.
“We've been buoyed by their enthusiasm, but they're now starting to realise how much data that is going to be [headed] for their own measurement systems.”
It means a direct transfer of audience data is unlikely, per Guesdon.
“There would probably not be a way that it can be packaged so that they could use it, nor would they probably want to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars on Amazon to store it - like we have to. But there would be certainly the potential for APIs to get the reporting values out and stuff like that, so at least they're getting their campaign results.”
He adds that future integration with economic and market mix modelling tools could be a possibly and “would certainly be an area the board will look at”. But they’ll likely be much further down the pipe. For now, he says the focus is on getting the new currency “into the planning and buying system”.
“I think a lot of this is about walking before you can run – we don't want to overload the industry,” adds Green.