APN Outdoor has joined forces with research companies The Lab and Neuro-Insight to discover the formula behind the power of movement in outdoor advertising – to be known as the ‘Transit Factor’ – through a new study.

The study paired ethnography, observing real people in their real world, with neuroscience, studying the brain’s reaction to stimulus, to compare and identify the key differences between static and moving advertising.

Following on from APN Outdoor’s previous studies, such as #myrealworld in 2015 and Media Attention in 2016, the study promotes the case for outdoor to be the centrepiece of more media campaigns, in particular the power of movement achieved with transit.

APN Outdoor CEO Richard Herring said: “We are proud to promote this unique research collaboration in market. APN Outdoor have no peer in market when it comes to transit, and we’ve known for many years that transit advertising works.

“We know people see it multiple times a week, we know that it delivers incremental reach, we know audiences are continuously growing and clients love it. What we needed to do was reinforce these attributes and prove to our advertisers why.”

Neuro-Insight’s Peter Pynta, who helped lead the research collaboration, said: “This is the first time we have ever combined such different methodologies – observing real people’s behaviour in the real world with science to substantiate claimed behaviour with neuroscience, proving beyond a doubt moving ads ignite the brain like no other formats.”

“The study analysed over four billion data points, with subjects exposed to moving and static ads, and the only relative difference was movement. Movement increases memory encoding in the brain and memory encoding increases ad effectiveness. And transit advertising is 20 per cent higher than all other outdoor formats when it comes to memory encoding.”