Outdoor industry finally launches audience metric MOVE
The Australian outdoor industry’s five year project to launch a planning currency finally bore fruit today with the formal launch of MOVE – Measurement Of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure – at an event in Sydney this morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GStpQ4ZnBzI
The initiative – a joint project by the Outdoor Media Association on behalf of the industry’s main outdoor players – has seen an investment of more than $10m.
The result is every outdoor format charted within the system which carries 1.2 terabytes of data covering around 60,000 outdoor positions across the country’s five major metro areas.
The huge operation used pre-existing government data to plot consumers’ movements from home to work or leisure destinations and understand what form of transport they use to get there. This was then plotted against data gathered via 15000 people wearing special camera-equipped glasses to understand the visibility to consumers of various out of home sites. This data is then used to generate a Likelihood To See, or LTS, score for ever outdoor advertising position.
Via the MOVE website, media buyers are then able to develop media plans covering both geography and demographics.
Launching the system in front of around 300 industry representatives today, OMA chairman Steve O’Connor said that an ambition of the new currency is to increase outdoor’s share of advertising spend from 4% to 6%. O’Connor told the audience: “It’s a world first because it covers all major formats. It’s the most sophisticated and accurate measurement system for outdoor globally.”
John Grono, the Media Federation of Australia’s representative on the project, added: ‘This is the biggest thing I’ve ever worked on. When we started we wondered how the hell we were going to do this. I have never seen anything as intellectually daunting and so difficult to build. Nobody has ever done this before in the world.”
Meanwhile Ian Muir, who chaired the MOVE joint industry committee, suggested that the level of information is greater than for any other advertising medium. He said: “I doubt the other major media would do this. They’ve got too much to lose if they try. It will be interesting to see how they respond.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Small correction Tim. The n=15,000 covered the airport surveys, shopping centre surveys, the ‘longitudinal’ survey and the eye-tracking survey combined.
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Without wishing to diminish in any way the magnitude of what has been achieved, I would like to gently correct John Grono’s claim that it is a world first. Almost identical modeling was completed a year ago for the Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement, providing demographic profiles and reach/frequency estimates for over 370,000 individual outdoor panels in 205 markets across America. It was based on 20 separate surveys, some 80,000 interviews, US Census Bureau data, and nearly 2 years of work by an Australian (!) media researcher and data integration specialist. The next task is to add product usage target groups, further OOH formats, and even competitive media. This is planned to be done over the next 2 years.
http://www.eyesonratings.com
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Thank you Peter. As I said during the launch presentation, the US Eyes On project was using the same approach we settled on back in 2005, but only for roadside billboards.
The difference is that MOVE covers roadside billboards, street furniture etc, PLUS transit (externals, internals and stations/concourses), shopping centre internals, and airport internals.
Peter, please correct me if I am wrong, but I know of know other audience measurement system that covers all these various out-of-home formats (using LTS and not OTS) in the one integrated system. It was on this basis that MOVE lays claim to being a world first.
Cheers!
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@ John.
Very impressive achievement. It was probably in the launch pres but how many people were in the wearing glasses sample? Were they people who normally were glasses? Did they know why they were wearing the “special glasses”? eg as part of a survey into outdoor media?
Thanks
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Thanks Gezza.
The eye-tracking was based on 42 or 44 people (my memory fails me). Each wore the glasses for around 3 hours doing a ‘task’ not knowing that the objective was to see whether they looked at the various formats of the advertising panels. The task they were given meant they used various methods of travel so that they passed most of the different formats. An example would be .. catch a bus to Bondi Junction, co and spend $50 on yourself, catch the train to Martin Place, walk up to Town Hall station, catch a train to North Sydney, catch a bus to the zoo, there will be a hire car there for you which you drive to North Ryde and then drive back to Bondi via Gladesville and Leichhardt along specific roads – it was just like “a day out” to them.
We found that people “look” as they move around so similarly (it is a limbic action) so a small sample size was more than adequate as it generated around 14m frames of video that were inspected to only count “hits” of AT LEAST 200ms or five consecutive frames. People who wore eyeglasses were included but we found no difference to those who didn’t. We also found that age and gender made no difference.
Hope this helps.
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Thanks John. As expected thorough and unbiased.
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