With the rise in programmatic advertising, traditional methods for measuring outdoor media effectiveness are falling short. In this op-ed, Allan Breiland, research lead – Australia for On Device, explains why geolocation data and passive tracking are now essential for accurate measurement.
Measuring out-of-home (OOH) advertising has always been a bit like trying to piece together an upside-down jigsaw puzzle. You know the pieces all fit together perfectly to make a beautiful picture, but putting them together is bloody hard.
It’s always been the case, of course, but it’s become a much more pressing issue for a few reasons. One being that the OOH sector has been booming while the rest of the ad market has suffered anaemic growth and even declines across most formats.
The decline in linear TV audiences have driven marketers to turn to it for mass reach more than ever, making it one of the most in-demand and powerful channels out there right now.
But the realities of business are that CFOs want to understand the impact and contribution of different media channels, and while us marketers understand the power of the ethereal nature of OOH, it can be hard to pin down next to those concrete looking digital metrics.
The increased adoption of programmatic trading has also fuelled the growth in OOH, bringing efficiency to the OOH space by allowing ads to be delivered across thousands of screens in real time – reducing a whole lot of manual labour.
But we know that the flexibility comes at a cost, namely that traditional measurement techniques are struggling to keep up. Most OOH measurement strategies are post-campaign surveys, which question people on their travels (such as when they travelled, and how long for), in order to determine whether they had an “opportunity to see” an ad.
This “opportunity to see” model was always riddled with inadequacies and assumptions, even when there was just one fixed placement per site. So imagine how it makes a measurement purist like me feel in a hyper-flexible programmatic world.
Since we can no longer predict where or when an ad will appear, we need measurement techniques that capture real-world exposure as it happens. Asking people where they’ve been and for how long in a survey simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
This approach needs to be advanced in order to capture the reality of OOH today. If we don’t, we can’t expect the increased investment in OOH to be maintained if media buyers aren’t able to measure, in granular detail, the results of the campaigns.
One of the options that can resolve this challenge, for both measuring programmatic and traditional OOH, is to move towards geolocation data rather than relying on claimed behaviour.
Whilst not new, in the modern marketing landscape, geolocation data is a better bet because it enables us to match audiences to specific sites and make more educated assumptions about the ads they would have seen. It doesn’t rely on our unreliable memories – it’s fixed data and as a result, it’s accurate data.
Geolocation data works by passively tracking audiences, and collecting and analysing data from people who agree to be part of the panel. Due to the uncertainty of where ads are being placed due to programmatic buying, this is more important than ever. Using geolocation data can allow any marketer to passively measure consumer movement and determine exactly who has been exposed to an ad, eliminating the guesswork that comes with survey-based methods.
As an example of how this would work practically, geolocation data can tap into first-party data panels via consumers’ smartphones. This allows us to accurately track when a consumer crosses into the geofenced area of an ad, and which can be matched to a delivery from an outdoor company that would have displayed a certain ad at a certain time and location.
This puts OOH on more of a level playing field with other media, such as digital, which has traditionally been easier to track to a granular level. It means we compare the true effectiveness of OOH to other channels, and understand more holistically where results are being driven from.
By passively measuring ad exposure in this way, we can offer advertisers a clear understanding of who saw their ad – and a much better understanding of whether it worked.
With programmatic trading continuing to grow, the days of “good enough” measurement are over. If the OOH industry wants to truly demonstrate the effectiveness of outdoor advertising, it needs to fully harness the power of geolocation data through passive measurement.
For brands, this is an opportunity to optimise their spend, refine their targeting, and ensure that OOH media delivers measurable impact. The technology is here, and the need has never been greater.
