OOH joint-industry currency Route is developing a platform for linking its audience data with playout data from Outsmart’s Playout.
The platform will enable Route to move from providing planned audiences to delivered audiences, “closing the gap between what’s on the plan and what happens in real life,” according to CEO Euan Mackay.
The platform is expected to launch “later this year” after an initial development phase that began with a prototype built using Claude Code.
Mackay revealed the project during a webinar hosted by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in support of the release of its latest white paper, Signals in the Noise 2.
In his presentation, Mackay acknowledged there is a perception that OOH data is not showing up well in media mix modelling (MMM) exercises. “Something’s not translating from the [Route] data into the models,” he said, adding this is neither the fault of the data quality nor the models themselves.
Rather, modellers are struggling to get the right OOH data into their models due to issues of access.
“The JICs, and particularly Route, have something of a legacy problem in accessing the data,” Mackay acknowledged. “My former boss and colleague Denise Turner used to say, ‘For a medium that’s so highly visible, OOH data is practically invisible.’ And this is something that we were very keen to address.”
Hence the effort to link Route and Playout data and make this more accessible to econometricians.
The platform is being developed in partnership with The Media Leader’s parent, Adwanted UK, which last year was appointed by Route, alongside Ipsos, to collect, process and output audience data for OOH.
Julie MacManus, Adwanted Group’s head of transformation, told The Media Leader: “Combining granular Playout data with Route’s audience insights has the potential to deepen econometricians’ understanding of OOH’s role in the media mix, and we’re delighted to be part of the project.”
Mackay further explained that by combining Playout and Route data, modellers will be able to “attribute audiences directly to” moments when ads run on digital screens.
He continued: “Because we’re building this system fresh, we have the capability to shape what data is made available and how this looks for the data modelling teams. This is going to make the data, we think, far more usable for modelling purposes.”
The new platform will show audience delivery “in a much more granular level”, such as by day, by hour, by audience segment and by geography, “all simply by entering in a campaign identifier.”
Mackay concluded: “OOH has always worked. Now we can enable it to finally show up in the models.”
Adwanted UK is the trusted delivery partner for three essential services which deliver accountability, standardisation, and audience data for the out-of-home industry.
Playout is Outsmart’s new system to centralise and standardise playout reporting data across all outdoor media owners in the UK.
SPACE is the industry’s comprehensive inventory database delivered through a collaboration between IPAO and Outsmart.
The RouteAPI is a SaaS solution which delivers the ooh industry’s audience data quickly and simply into clients’ systems.
Contact us for more information on SPACE, J-ET, Audiotrack or our data engines.
