Outdoor industry postpones launch of new currency MOVE until next February
Australia’s outdoor industry has postponed the beginning of its long awaited audience measurement system MOVE until next year – and set a date of February 23 for the launch.
MOVE stands for Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure. The project – mainly funded by APN Outdoor, EYE, Adshel, JCDecaux and oOh!media – will cost around $5m. Other inventory covered will include TorchMedia, GOA Billboards, Bishopp Outdoor Advertising, Metrospace Outdoor Advertising, Savage Outdoor Advertising, Outdoor Systems, independent outdoor media (iOM) and Bailey Outdoor Advertising.
The decision on timing for the launch, which had been originally expected earlier this year, divided the leaders of the Outdoor Media Association, with some members wanting to launch the Sydney data immediately.
However, with the audience data for Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth not likely to be ready until January, the board decided to postpone. MOVE Chairman Steve O’Connor, CEO of JC Decaux, said: ““There was robust debate by the members of the MOVE Board as to whether or not to release the system this year with Sydney data only, and then roll out the other markets as they became available,” O’Connor said: “In the end, the Board resolved that it was in the industry’s best interests to launch all markets and all formats at the same time.”
There will be a launch event in Sydney on February 23
The project has been led by a technical committee headed by former OzTam CEO Ian Muir and including MFA representative John Grono. Muir said: “With this system we have 60,000 individual faces carrying unique characteristics that impact the target audiences in different ways depending on variables such as the time of day, the speed of the traffic, and their exact geographic location. In addition, the building of MOVE has required the integration of four different processing applications which were necessary to combine the enormous amount of data involved.”
MOVE CEO Helen Willoughby said that another reason for the delay was the last minute arrival on the project of Simon Cooper, the man behind the implementation of POSTAR, a similar scheme in the UK.
A key metric measured by the system will be LTS – Likelihood To See.
According to MOVE, its data sources include:
- Site characteristics of 60,000 faces across the four categories of Roadside – billboards; Roadside – other; Transport and Retail/Lifestyle.
- Australian Bureau of Statistics Census population statistics.
- Travel information of 600,000 individual person trips sourced from 68,000 Government Household Travel Surveys.
- Land use information of each market – schools, shopping centres, workplaces, etc.
- Survey results of 15,000 respondents used to determine movement within airports and shopping centres, as well as trip variability over time.
- Eye tracking studies.
The delayed project has already drawn some industry criticism. In June, Mindshare’s Bruce Mundell suggested the outdoor industry was sitting on the data, a claim the OMA denied.
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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These guys are pretty funny. Another firm date, eh!
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It is pretty funny how the outdoor advertising industry take measurement so seriously in the context of variables which won’t and can’t be incorporated into a precious algorithm. I travel on the M4 each day, and through Annandale, and I’m constantly amazed at how the industry can be so precise about audience size and type when there is graffiti on artwork, billboards obstructed by trees, which have grown over time to obscure the message, and even very expensive billboards facing eastward over east-bound traffic (i.e. the creative can only be seen via your rear view mirror). I’d give that example an LTS of 0, but I’m sure the client is paying a bundle. A measurement methodology which lacks a common sense approach is useless and will be disregarded accordingly.
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And Tim, I can categorically say that the industry was NOT sitting on the data as some ‘pundits’ suggested.
Unfortunately, there were a combination of errors detected when we got a ‘first-look’ at the data. For example, some sites had a zero audience which for large roadside is totally unbelievable. This meant checking all 60,000 sites again, as well as re-processing each market as some key data was missed during procesing, meaning that the audience data simply made no sense.
So what to do? Release wrong data to adhere to a time-line, or to “take the hit” and release late?
The OMA made the only sane decision – to do what was unpopular and delay. Hey, of course I wanted it out there as much (no, more!) than the next person, but robustness of the results correctly took precedence.
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…yawn, wake me up when they are finally ready.
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