What is Route? It is a revolution for outdoor media

As Postar becomes ‘Route’, its Managing Director, James Whitmore, explains what his £19 million research project is going to mean for outdoor media.

Today we announce a new audience measurement currency for the outdoor medium. It is called Route.

The survey is so new and so different that we have chosen to rebrand the company. After many years dutiful service, Postar is no more. It has slipped this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

We wish to signify that this is not evolution; it is revolution.

We now know who is travelling where, how, when and at what speed. By defining the audience you will be able to use the data to plan, trade or value the medium.

The new name is designed to reflect this. Increasingly, time spent out of home is about understanding the routes that people take. It is about knowing the pathways of the eye. The medium is changing rapidly and we must think from the point of view of the audience, not from the position of a poster. If we start with a deep knowledge of how people move about, we have the flexibility to decide what we put in their way in terms of communication opportunities.

Of its kind, the new survey is the largest and most complex ever attempted. As a consequence, it has required the highest investment ever devoted to a study of out-of-home media. This is the first time it has been possible to look at every aspect of outdoor life, from the single-minded perspective of the population going about its daily business.

No matter what mode of transport, or whether indoor or out, all the possible pathways in Great Britain have been mapped and the flows of people have been estimated.

For the first time, we have a single measure from which to gauge the relative efficiency of every one of the various advertising formats and environments in meeting an audience brief.

The core of the study is a four-year travel survey that so far has sampled just over 28,000 people. Using GPS devices to collect data over a nine-day period we have collected over 19 billion data points. We estimate that using this passive technique gives us around 14% more journeys than a comparable recall-based study.

It isn’t too much of a surprise that people in rural areas travel further and longer by car. But did you know that north easterners are the furthest walkers? Or that people in the east of England travel at the greatest speeds. Or Londoners get around almost 25% slower than Glaswegians? Move to Scotland and imagine what you could do with all the extra time.

The importance of knowing exactly how people spend their time out of home, their mode of transport and the speed at which they move gives us some certainty as to what they might see as they go about their daily business.

One thing that we have in abundant supply, is data.

A hugely complex traffic intensity model has been created to map and populate every pathway in the country. The geography has been created from scratch and it is to scale, even for tube corridors and railway platforms.

The model looks at every possible route that can be travelled, either on foot or by car, on board a bus, a tube or train. It includes passages through shopping malls or in the car park of a motorway service station and many other examples besides. The model takes data from the travel survey together with information from many different count stations, such as ticket barrier volumes from TfL and road traffic numbers from the DfT.

Of course, another joy of GPS data is that when you know distance and time, by default you can calculate speed. Indeed we are able to determine speed by time of day, so it is possible to look at the relative approach time for an advertising sign in the morning or evening.

Slower traffic or pedestrians will accumulate more “hits” and therefore audiences will be higher during rush hour. If we know the approach speed and time, we can also calculate how many individual advertisements in a scrolling or digital loop will be in view.

The most complex task is to create algorithms that calculate the probability of each respondent being exposed to any advertising site (or combination thereof) for any period of up to one year.

Ipsos MediaCT and their partners, MGE Data, a GIS specialist based in Prague, have put everything together.

One part of the old Postar does survive, albeit in a much updated form. We retained the pioneering eye-tracking research that Birkbeck College has been conducting since the mid-nineties. We returned to first principles to reassure ourselves that the initial reading of the data still passes muster. After first clarifying a number of issues, we went on to extend the work to look in more detail at how people see the world.

In particular, we studied specific environments such as tube, rail and retail. We sought to understand the relative visibility of buses to both people in cars and those on walking on the pavement. We even looked at how people see things from inside a train or tube or on board a bus. Finally, we sought to calibrate the relative impact of illumination and motion (such as digital and scrolling display) on the hit-rates for these formats.

It is then a relatively straightforward task to populate the study with information about the nature and location of the advertising displays. So far, over 360,000 sites have been placed on the maps and correctly orientated to them. The members of the Outdoor Media Centre, using bespoke software tools, conduct this process.

At last, the medium has a people-centric view.

Welcome to Route.