Route launch: industry reaction
Postar has re-launched as ‘Route’ today, unveiling its new out-of-home audience research system.
The audience research body for outdoor advertising in Great Britain invested £19 million into investigating how Britain moves when it comes to seeing outdoor ads. Here, Newsline has collected some reaction from around the industry.
You can also read a separate article from Route’s managing director, James Whitmore, here.
It’s been a long time coming, but then it’s been no small task. As befits the media research closest to the nation’s infrastructure, Route has been designed and built with almost CrossRail-like levels of complexity, technical challenge and necessary attention to detail.
Route is transformative in that we get the opportunity to see the medium from the point of view of the person rather than the panel, which is always a welcome re-positioning of perspective.
The challenge now is for the wider agency, media owner and specialist marketplace to make great use of a great data set. This will not be without difficulties as we grapple with how to refine the data extracted to yield rich, succinct and engaging insight.
Agencies should be genuinely interested in and excited by the long awaited launch of Route, the new Out of Home research. It brings a valuable level of data led consumer insight into the industry allowing experiences to be created based on measurable consumer behaviour.
It will make the planning of outdoor more accountable and flexible, and if used dynamically it will be a strong platform for advertisers to deliver static or digital content with greater accuracy and relevance.
Smart businesses will utilise the captured Out of Home experience of 23,000 individuals, as individuals. The opportunities for greater optimisation and accurate measurement of client specific effects and outcomes are significant. Well worth the wait.
The outdoor advertising industry is big business in the UK. The last set of figures released from the Outdoor Media Centre, the trade body for the industry showed that one in 10 advertising pounds are being spent on out of home (OOH) media.
But for what is often termed ‘the oldest medium’, to continue to develop, it has been necessary to invest in a ground breaking research project.
The launch of Route today, created from ‘big data’, leads the world of OOH advertising research in its scope and depth. The result is an unprecedented view of how the public interact with out of home advertising.
To achieve this Route, which is owned by both media owners and media buyers, has invested £19 million in a four year study that has created 160 million data records and 19 billion GPS records.
The scale of the challenge is best understood by imagining the enormous array of variables which are created by mapping a journey through road, rail, underground, airport and shopping environments and within each one of those assessing a realistic opportunity to see an advertising frame of a particular size, facing a particular direction, at a particular time of day. Multiply this by every journey undertaken and by 28,000 respondents on multiple days and the complexity begins to become clear.
The result of all this data is that advertisers can understand a lot more about their customers behaviour in the active space outside their home or workplace and use this information to select advertising opportunities which will target them most effectively.
Which group of sites are best suited to light radio listeners? How do you reach those who visit the cinema more than once a month and what mode of transport is likely to be taken by those who use Sainsbury’s for their main weekly shop? The new Route data is able to answer questions like this because it has been structured in an entirely different way, focussing firstly on the habits of the audience, and then on their interaction with the advertising frames.
This level of insight is invaluable to agencies whose need is to ensure that their advertising campaigns are effective and their media investments are efficient. It provides the first real opportunity for buyers and sellers in out of home to trade audience impacts rather than the traditional average cost per frame.
Whilst Route is just starting on its journey it is likely that the challenges of the future will become even more sophisticated.
Billboards that could talk personally to us have long been predicted. Now new techniques such as geofencing, where an individual can be linked to a point in real time and receive a direct message are on the horizon
Creative executions in out of home have a greater degree of influence on the level of awareness than they do within any other media, so work on the quality as well as the quantity of audience impact is likely to grow in importance.
Today Route is welcomed by the industry as the most sophisticated out of home research study in the world and it is well placed to ensure that the oldest medium continues to help clients advertise to their customers in the modern world.