Outdoor Industry Unites To Present First-Ever Out Fronts

The suite of new tools set to make out of home (OOH) advertising easier to plan, buy and measure, took centre stage at the Outdoor Media Association’s (OMA) first-ever Out-Front Webcast.

A bunch of exciting new initiatives were announced at a virtual OUT-FRONT event today hosted by OMA and MOVE CEO Charmaine Moldrich and general manager of the OMA and MOVE Kylie Green.

The event featured discussions with the industry’s best and brightest, including data and insights director for oOh!media, Tara Coverdale and managing partner of Avenue C and OFC Chair, Pia Coyle.

The inaugural industry showcase launched initiatives that will be available for agencies and clients from January 2022. This includes an update to MOVE (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure) which will now measure digital screens.

Included in MOVE 1.5 is a new qualitative measure based on neuroscience, the neuro impact factor, giving buyers an insight into the impact of their campaigns, weighted by the audience, for both classic and digital signs.

Adding to the new measurement tools is a standardisation document, which sees the industry unite on terminology, geography, screen ratios, insertion orders, as well as a shift to selling the channel using Share of Time as the common currency.

Share of Time is the percentage share of display time received out of the total display time over a defined and agreed buying period, including other advertisers’ content, programmatic and other commercial arrangements.

Crucially, agencies and advertisers will now be able to use Share of Time when planning their campaigns, making it easier to buy by location and environment to meet their desired campaign objectives.

And in a media channel first, the Outdoor industry announced it is moving toward carbon neutrality in 2022. The industry will calculate the carbon output of OOH campaigns and give advertisers the chance to offset and reduce the carbon impact of their media spend.

Charmaine Moldrich, CEO of OMA, said: “With more and more people back out and about as restrictions ease this summer, advertisers need to be in the right places and spaces to connect with audiences.

“Not only have we made it easier to buy and measure audiences, but we are also providing a measure showing the impact our signs have on audiences.

“Giving advertisers the opportunity to get their messages to the nine in 10 Australians our signs reach each day. What’s more, over the next year we will be working to make Outdoor more sustainable by offering advertisers the choice to offset the carbon footprint of their campaigns.”

The new digital measurement metric provides reach and frequency scores for digital signs based on the average audience dwelling by the environment, by ad play length, and by Share of Time bought.

Pia Coyle, Avenue C, managing partner and Chair of the Outdoor Futures Council (OFC), said: “Clients and agencies always want as much data as we can possibly get our hands-on. And so, while waiting for MOVE 2.0, we really wanted to be able to measure digital signs, and MOVE 1.5 does that for us.

“We’re excited to get into the new platform and see how audiences properly move around and what Share of Time is going to do to that audience so that we can start to understand better metrics to buy and measure digital signage. It’s a great addition.”

Moldrich, added: “MOVE 1.5 will give buyers more accurate reach and frequency scores for their campaigns, as well as opening a new dimension to audience measurement by scoring the impact of their campaigns on the people who see them.

“Industry standardisation will only supercharge these new tools because as we make Outdoor easier to transact, we are setting the industry up for future developments in programmatic and automation.

National head of investment for MediaCom, Nick Thomas, said: “It has been a huge amount of work and it’s taken an amazing amount of collaboration from all the partners including the OMA, our clients, and the Outdoor Futures Council.

“We’re not just representing the agency, we’re representing the client’s voice too, and when I think about the work we’ve done in the standardisation space, it’s a massive leap forward for the category and something we should be really proud of in the industry.”