Article

Research key to providing DOOH audience metrics

Out-of-home networks are beginning to use OVAB's ‘Average Unit Audience' as the base metric for their audience research.

December 17, 2008

Every digital out-of-home (DOOH) network should have a study done on the demographic makeup and type of their network audience, says Bob Martin, president and CEO of LevelVision, a DOOH network known for its floor-mounted screens in college bookstores.

In the past, networks have been proving their worth to brands and ad agencies by doing commissioned audience measurement studies through firms such as OTX, Arbitron and Nielsen.

With the release of the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau's (OVAB) Audience Measurement Guidelines at its first-annual Summit on Oct. 29, 2008, more networks are jumping on board and using the bureau's "Average Unit Audience"(AUA) metric as a standard for measuring DOOH impressions.

LevelVision, a recent addition to OVAB's line-up of network members, completed an Arbitron study in early November of its network of 315 screens in college bookstores. Arbitron found that the LevelVision:College network delivers more than 20 million AUA impressions each month to an almost pure composition of the "Millennial" and adult 18-24 audience segments.

"Once networks perform a demographic study, they can breakdown those percentages and compositions of their audience to develop AUA impressions to provide to advertisers," Martin said. "The problem has been that people have been able to calculate CPMs for these networks, but the CPMs were based on the overall audience of the entire network, not the effectiveness of a single advertiser's campaign."

"Ad sales are not where they should be because of the disconnect in the metrics that the various networks are delivering," Martin said. "No one speaks the same language or the right language to the audience on the agency side."

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Guidelines, not standards

Suzanne Alecia, president of OVAB, points out that the guidelines are not under ‘official' use by research companies Arbitron, Nielsen and OTX, but are being taken into consideration during those studies.

"The guidelines are just that. They're not strict standards at this point," said Alecia. "They essentially outline the information that you should be reporting. This information should be common across any audience study from any researcher for any network."

OVAB is working with it advisory board and members on a compliance process for the future, and eventually, Alecia says, an audit process.

"We didn't want to hold back publishing the guidelines until we worked through that because we wanted to get everybody at least capturing the right data and reporting it," Alecia said. "So we're not coming out with any kind of OVAB ‘seal of approval.' A lot of the member networks will need to back out in the field to gather more data, so there's some time it will take to get all of that done."

Some of the firsts

Another network to jump on board early and bring the guidelines into its research has been Danoo, a digital entertainment network based in San Francisco. Danoo commissioned an Arbitron study to calculate the network's performance based on responses to on-screen ads about upcoming movies and TV shows. The study was intentionally performed using the Average Unit Audience as an impression guideline.

Danoo digital out-of-home media in NYC