“Eyes On” Metric To Revolutionize Out-of-Home Ratings: MediaWeek

Last week the Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB) – the US Out-of-home media auditing organization – unveiled its new ratings system for the industry. Not only is the system a milestone for the outdoor ad business, but it also breaks new ground for media ratings as a whole, writes MediaWeek. Here are some excerpts from the article by Katy Bachman. My comments are at the end.

“Nearly five years in development, the Eyes On ratings will replace the decades-old practice of relying solely on traffic counts to put a value on outdoor ads. The ratings will, for the first time, provide discrete demographic data pertaining to around 400,000 units. The service will go a step further than TV and radio ratings to incorporate the number of persons likely to see an ad as they pass a display.

“It’s a dramatic improvement in outdoor measurement. Quite frankly, it puts us in a position of having a better measurement system than any other medium,” said Paul Meyer, president and COO of Clear Channel Outdoor.

Eyes On has broad support among outdoor media companies, agencies and advertisers, which worked closely with the TAB to design a ratings system uniquely suited to the outdoor medium.

Practically owners of the new system, media companies invested millions of dollars, effectively rejecting The Nielsen Co.’s GPS-based survey, which was tested in Chicago and Los Angeles.

The writing may be on the wall for Nielsen, but the research giant is not giving up. “We continue to talk to interested parties about our service, which offers superior results,” it said in a statement. “We think it’s the best answer for the U.S.” (Mediaweek is part of The Nielsen Co.)

The TAB is scheduled to release the first market, likely Chicago, in June, then report ratings for all 200 markets in late fall. Ratings will be issued twice a year, once to update audience estimates and the second time to take into account changes in inventory.

For outdoor, it’s a huge change that will affect every aspect of how the medium is bought and sold. Marketers will now have the kind of metrics they need to evaluate outdoor alongside other media. Planners will be able, market by market, to determine weight and take into account an outdoor mix of billboards, bus shelters and posters.

“It’s a sure thing advertisers will spend more,” said John Connolly, COO at Kinetic, the world’s largest out-of-home agency and part of WPP. “A lot of agencies use optimizers, and they’ve never been able to plug in out-of-home.”

“For a lot of clients, we’ve had to sell outdoor into the plan as a test. The new ratings could open up new categories and new advertisers to outdoor,” said Jill Nickerson, vp, director of out-of-home at Horizon Media. “Packaged goods have always wanted more validation and more measurement because they’re used to national broadcast.”

Out-of-home advertisers also will be able to aggregate local campaigns with more efficiency.
“We can promote ourselves as a national medium, particularly when you can compare CPMs across markets,” said Tony Jarvis, executive vp, global research at Clear Channel Outdoor,” reports MediaWeek.

It is not clear how Eyes On will affect measurements of digital billboards, but the elevation of OOH’s status as a whole to that of a viable and measurable medium and its broader inclusion in the media plans will certainly benefit the digital OOH segment. The introduction of Eyes On that follows the advances in measuring the effectiveness of internet advertising (notably – Google’s paid search marketing metrics) is essentially putting the TV industry on the defensive. Ironically, TV now has to play catch up with the new media, as advertisers demand at least the same level of transparency to the ad spend. The recent launch of C3 – or average commercial minute ratings for cable and network TV is regarded by many in the advertising community as an insufficient measure that would not last long. Some analysts think it will have to give way to a more modern and accurate way of tracking ad dollars.

Add comment April 21st, 2008

Outlook for Out-Of-Home Advertising and Digital OOH Amid Recession: Good

The Out-of-home media, along with internet, is doing well, despite the drop in overal ad spending. Media Life Magazine’s Diego Vasquez quotes ZenithOptimedia Worldwide, “whose most recent forecast for U.S. spending has out-of-home spending growing by 11.2 percent this year, to $7.83 billion.”

According to Vasquez, next year ZenithOptimedia expects the OOH industry to grow at a similar pace: “11.3 percent, to $8.71 billion, and in 2010 it will grow another 11.5 percent, to $9.72 billion.That’s against 3.7 percent growth this year for the entire U.S. ad economy, which is down from the 4.1 percent growth ZenithOptimedia forecast back in December. It’s forecasting even slower growth in 2009 and 2010, by 2.1 percent and 2.2 percent.ZenithOptimedia is forecasting that worldwide out-of-home spending will grow 9.4 percent this year, 8.0 percent in 2009, and 8.3 percent in 2010.ZenithOptimedia senior publications executive Anne Austin defines out-of-home as including all outdoor advertising, from billboards to bus shelters and other forms of alternative media.Just last month, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America reported that 2007 OOH spending had risen 7 percent over 2006, to $7.28 billion,” writes Diego Vasquez.The rosy view of the medium, whose growth to a large extent is driven by digital technologies (billboards, digital signage networks), was supported by TNS Media Intelligence in New York. The research company reports that spending on TV, radio and newspaper advertising fell last year, but the outdoor ad category rose 4.9 percent. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interviewed Jeff Golimovsky of the OAAA last week, who said that the first digital billboards went up several years ago, and OAAA estimates there are now around 800 and growing, although that’s still a small portion of the nation’s 400,000 total billboards.

David W. Miller, an analyst with SMH Capital in Los Angeles told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Lamar Advertising claimed to have more than 600 digital billboard displays in 37 states and Canada as of December 2007, according to regulatory filings. The Baton Rouge, La., company has been, as Mr. Miller described it, among the most “evangelistic” about going digital.

Even as recessionary pressures seem to be slowing growth in the outdoor ad business in 2008, Lamar expects demand for space on its digital locations to buoy overall results, Mr. Miller said.

In a recent MediaWeek’s interview with top ad experts about the OOH evolution, Mark Kaline, global media manager for Ford, said this about the industry potential:
“Out-of-home is a sleeping giant. It is being kicked by technology. It’s being rustled by measurements. It’s being awakened in a way that’s very close to what the Internet is experiencing right now. It provides us with an event in a local market that we’re able to build launches around. It’s got the best of both worlds. It’s a national medium that can be localized in a way that allows you to geo-target. You can now tailor your ads using digital boards in a way that’s never been done before. With dayparting, there is now the opportunity to reach a certain audience while they’re traveling in close proximity to whatever it is you’re selling—it’s great. You can tell a story over time with a lot of little simple messages that add up to a big story.”

Add comment April 21st, 2008