THE TOP 10 INSIGHTS

Out-of-Home / Ambient Media, June 20, 2003, Hollywood

1. New efforts in OOH research reflect on measuring the ROI of all advertising. (OOH = Out of Home, outdoor, billboards, transit ads, in-store ads, kiosks; or, how about just "Ambient Media", for those who want to stamp out all unintelligible initials.) Declines in broadcast ratings and print circulations appear to be fueling interest in alternatives like these. How does the value of a million people driving by your billboard compare with the value of a million people watching TV when your commercial is on? Seeking an answer can cause one to rethink how you decide what to spend in any media.

2. Hi-tech has hit the medium called the "oldest": (Remember those signs over shops in ancient cities?). We heard applications for an impressive array of gadgetry and procedures. How about eyeglasses with miniature cameras that can show if drivers look at billboards when they drive past? Or electronic devices carried by respondents on their daily travels that will read signals emanating from billboards whenever they get close to one? We heard they are feasible, but we didn’t hear from anyone who has used them. However, we did hear pros and cons from users of a number of other new approaches.

3. The basic question: measure "opportunities to see" or "did they see"? That’s one we should worry about for every medium. For OOH, results from several new ways of measuring "opportunities to see" (OTS) using global positioning satellites (GPS) and/or digital mapping and route finding (GIS) were presented. On the "did they see" side were case histories on a fabulous ethnological observational study (See #10), and a recognition-based ad tracking survey from our firm (#8). The answer to that basic question was usually a matter of cost, and who was going to pay for it.

4. GPS simplifies the job: In Canada and Italy researchers have respondents carry small global positioning devices with memories that record where they travel. They report full and accurate recording of all trips over a one or two week period: a marked improvement over diaries and phone interviews that depend on the mind’s ability to recall all trips and routes. Colombia researchers have a different use: interviewers carry devices with GPS, and the ability to record details about a billboard, when searching for every OOH site in a city.

5. GIS and digital maps helped greatly: Being able to record originations and destinations for trips on a digital map, and have the map program determine distances and all the streets that were likely taken to get there, offers great savings over times when such information had to be drawn on and recorded from paper maps. No one indicated they are still using paper maps in this work.

6. Modeling is being used: When large government surveys in the Netherlands and Canada provided part of the information to measure traffic past sites, small surveys providing the missing data were used to build models that could apply what was learned to all the cases in the large government data bases. Models were also used to estimate cumulative reach: the number that would have an opportunity to be exposed to at least one of a selection of billboards over a certain period of time. It is used when the basic data that had been assembled did not cover periods that long. Andrea Mezzasalma didn’t go quite as far as those who feel modeling is a poor man’s substitute for measurement, but he did emphasize how his Italian system avoided it. GPS devices made it easy to accurately record every trip an individual made over a two-week period. Cumulative reach for a one or two week period was tabulated directly from actual reported data, something that could not have been done in systems based on "trips you took yesterday".

7. Specifications for measuring in-store advertising were spelled out in a paper by Doug Adams and Jim Spaeth for POPAI (Point of Purchase Advertising International). Like the preceding measures of outdoor media, they based everything on "opportunities to see", which in this case was defined as being in the store. From this they defined ratings as the number that were in stores showing the ads as a percent of the total population. Reach was the percent of the population that had ever been in a store with the ad. Frequency was the average number of opportunities to see for those reached. Since they had reach and frequency, they multiplied them together for a gross rating points (GRP) figure. They thankfully recommended a different name: IRPs (In-store Rating Points). Interest in in-store advertising is said to be fueled by the growing acceptance of Recency Theory that says ads are more effective when people see them just before they buy.

8. Ad tracking offers direct, comparable measures of ROI. Ann Breese, Director Marketing Research at Starbucks, and I presented a case where the value of OOH and all other advertising Starbucks conducted last summer was measured directly. It was done with recognition-based ad tracking surveys conducted online before and after the campaign. In the second wave, respondents were shown all 24 commercials, ads, billboards, etc., used during the summer, and asked if they recognized each of them. They were also asked if they bought the advertised product in the latest period. This was factored in with the amount spent to run each advertisement to produce two key measures of Starbucks’ return on their investment in each piece of advertising. First was the number that had noticed (recognized) the advertising, and then the number of additional purchases produced, for each one cent spent per capita. The results showed the OOH advertising reached and affected people as efficiently as Starbucks TV, radio and print advertising. These ad tracking studies also show the amount of overlap between media, a key piece of information crucial to sound decisions on which mix of media is best, but one seldom available from the normally available measures of media audiences. Here OOH was clearly superior, adding more to the overall reach of the campaign than any of the other media.

9. Jim Spaeth’s mind has not retired. This was his last appearance as President of the Advertising Research Foundation, but his comments about the Starbucks research showed, to paraphrase the old commercial, he still thinks good – like a researcher should. He asked how we showed which of the media was best when we had respondents who increased their purchases, but recognized several pieces of advertising. We said it was done with a simple aggregation of the results. Advertising found most often in the groups of advertisements recognized by those who bought more, were shown as the ones associated with the greatest production of additional buyers. He suggested more sophisticated conjoint-like procedures, might help by showing which was most important in driving purchases at the level of the individual respondent. If dummy variables were inserted for each advertisement recognized their regression coefficients would provide another, and possibly better, measure of their importance. Here, like most conferences, you get some of the best ideas from discussions after the presentations.

10. Ipsos fielded the dream job for swinging researchers: ethnographic research at pubs, clubs and bars. The researchers were with patrons before, during, and after their visits. Why? To observe how often they notice advertising on TV screens in the establishment, and any effects it had on their conversations or behavior. Sarah Gale and Liz Landy from Ipsos-RSL, UK reported on this and other research their firm conducts to measure the impact of such advertising. They will also put cameras by the screens pointing at the patrons so they can count the number of times they look at the screen. That is compared with door counts showing the number that came into the establishment, providing the key and often overlooked ratio in this OOH medium: What percent of those who had an "opportunity to see" the advertising, actually did see the advertising?

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