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Why reliable measurement matters to digital out-of-home

Access to a reliable and consistent source of measurement continues to be a challenge facing the industry.  

October 25, 2009 by

A favorite way of describing our industry (digital location-based media) is that it is bringing the benefits of online media to the offline world. While we are still in our (relatively) nascent stages as an industry, we would do well to look at what truly catalyzed the online space and sent it shooting across the chasm, never to look back. 

Having been in countless conversations evangelizing the power of digital location-based media over the past two years, I believe the biggest challenge facing our industry is the fact that buyers don't have access to a reliable and consistent source of measurement. As a result, they don't tend to believe the numbers being relayed to them and, consequently, they aggressively discount the value of the media and aren't comfortable making sizable buys. 

Frankly, having seen a lot of marketing materials across different companies in our industry, I don't blame them. There are almost as many methodologies as there are companies.  Some of the claims are patently false and bordering on absurd. "Forward-looking statements" are pretty much the norm. At the end of the day, I can't fault them for not taking anyone at face value. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a massive problem.

The biggest reason this chafes me is that I know our medium works. I've designed and conducted scores of research studies at RMG, and we take great pride in conducting ethical and robust research to learn about what works and doesn't work in our networks. I know the results are valid. Reputable third-party researchers have verified the methodology and results.

Consistently, we deliver outstanding marketing value against virtually every key metric we have tested. Now, this isn't universally true in every case or for every product, but across what is now well over 50 research studies, the average results best every other form of media I am aware of. To have all of that good research get tossed out with the bathwater is frustrating.

The result of this is that buyers are left with no other alternative than resorting to their own observations to guide decision-making. Any marketer knows that personal observation is inherently flawed and, when used alone, can lead to errant decision-making.  Ultimately, the goal of our industry needs to be to remove personal observation (as much as possible) from the buyer's decision-making process and replace it with consistent, trusted measurement. Only then will we be able to receive the pricing and buys we deserve.

There are three levels of data that need to be addressed. At the basest level, we need to prove that a certain number of people see our screens. The OVAB guidelines are a step in the right direction here, but are still early on the adoption curve.

For RMG's Health & Fitness network in health clubs, we partner with Nielsen to measure traffic, watch rates and demographics on a monthly basis and make those results publicly available. This helps for sure, but it's far from the industry standard, which makes it hard for buyers to compare our network to much else.

Companies such as TruMedia have technologies that could help tremendously here by providing further insight (gender, age) beyond the contextual knowledge driven by our locations, but they are still expensive and lack broad adoption. Until one of these approaches reaches a critical mass that enables them to be viewed as a "standard" by buyers, we still lack a common accepted currency for traffic and notice rates.

The second level is proving that people are taking something away from the interaction with our medium. This could be something soft like advertising recall, brand perception shift or purchase intent, or it could be something more concrete like inbound texts or content downloads to mobile phones. It's tough to get around custom studies here, but if the industry was to agree to a common methodology for case studies and could get approval from clients to feed the blind results into a central database, it would be possible to make an industry case for more dollars. The more concrete measures such as inbound texts or mobile downloads enable an entirely different "cost-per" business model. Based on results we've seen on our Urban Mobile network around mobile downloads, this may be a viable alternative to CPM-based impression selling, and one that brings us very much in-line with traditional models of online buying.

The final level (and the holy grail of all marketers) is being able to track impact on sales.  While this is quite possible for networks at the point of sale (such as our Business Traveler network in airport retail) to demonstrate this impact (we've seen same-store sales lifts of over 150 percent compared to control stores), it is a greater challenge for those that are removed from the point of sale.

Again, the mobile phone is our industry's best friend here in the form of QR codes, mobile coupons or Wi-Fi transactional hubs. As our phones become more and more of a transactional device, our industry should use its timeliness and proximity to sale to take advantage of our joint presence out in the world with mobile phones. Clearly, this behavior becomes immediately trackable, allowing us to tell a definitive ROI story back to advertisers.