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While new technologies and greater reliance on analytics have driven significant advancements in measurement across the advertising landscape, out of home (OOH) has always faced a unique set of challenges related to performance measurement. Print, TV and even digital have consistent and standardized approaches to measurement with metrics that are often integrated into the technology used for their distribution.
In OOH, however, there remains an infinite number of ways in which a consumer can potentially interact with an ad. The diverse set of variables influencing audience interaction with an OOH message, plus the fragmentation of inventory types and formats, only adds to the complexity of capturing and quantifying impact.
Marketers experienced with OOH have always said they could “feel” the impact when included in media strategies. They know it works. They just haven’t been able to definitively prove it. Unfortunately, the inability to quantify impact has contributed to OOH owning some of the lowest CPMs in advertising while garnering just a 4% share of the overall media marketplace (lower than the global 7% OOH share).
Times are rapidly changing. Whereas measurement in OOH used to primarily be about counting traffic to determine how many times a passerby might have had the opportunity to see a piece of OOH inventory, the industry now integrates a wide range of new observed data sources from mobile devices, smartphone applications and connected cars to provide marketers with enhanced forecasting capabilities, precise transactional metrics and the insights that are standard across other channels.
Agencies and planners using OOH now have at their fingertips richer information and deeper insights related to audience behaviors and population movements, all of which are informing more precise targeting, planning and execution. OOH audience data can be used in attribution studies to determine not just if an audience was exposed to a message but what happened after the exposure occurred. As a result, brand marketers can have a clearer and more consistent view of OOH’s impact and influence when deployed as part of a broad omnichannel media campaign.
Certainly, there is more work to do to overcome roadblocks to full OOH integration. The universe of digital screens and inventory types has grown exponentially. In addition to traditional billboards, still very much at the heart of OOH, the industry now includes a bevy of video, transit and place-based displays, the volume and diversity of which pose a challenge in aligning against a common and unified set of metrics. The industry is currently building a comprehensive catalog of assets to establish a consistent set of metrics across all OOH inventory to support its rapid growth.
