Cities: A moving target for planners
Opinion
The Six Nations returns to Edinburgh, bringing rugby fans and advertising opportunities galore. Ruth Chalisey looks at Route data with the city’s major events and ever-changing population in mind.
It’s easy to think of a city’s population as fixed. But the people in a city, and where they are within it, are constantly changing. Residents come and go, workers travel in and out, visitors arrive, and people’s movements around the city can change from one day to the next.
At Route, we’ve been analysing anonymised and aggregated O2 Motion data to explore these patterns across 2025, and this article looks at what the data can reveal for planners about a city – in this case, Edinburgh, where, of course, some of the major Six Nations action will be happening in early 2027.
Rather than focusing on absolute numbers, we’ve indexed each day against the average, where 100 represents a typical day. The data reflects the presence of residents, workers and visitors and allows us to see when and where Edinburgh was busier or quieter than usual.
Edinburgh’s people count varies throughout the year, reflecting everything from the regular rhythms of holidays to major events and unexpected disruption.
Source: O2 Motion, anonymised and aggregated data
The regular rhythms of city life
People counts across Edinburgh follow predictable calendar rhythms, including school holidays and bank holidays. The clearest example is Christmas Day/Boxing Day when the city-wide people count falls to around 12% below average.
But this decline isn’t evenly spread across the city. In the Central area – that includes Old Town, Princes Street and Leith Street – the Christmas Day count is 55% below average, the lowest reading for this group of areas across the entire year.
Several factors are likely at play. Some residents will have left the city for Christmas, while those who remain are likely to spend more time closer to home, with offices, shops, and many other destinations closed. The result is not simply a quieter Edinburgh, but a very different distribution of people across the city.
People counts also fall below average during the Easter, Summer and October school holidays. The summer dip is particularly pronounced around the start of the Scottish school holidays, suggesting another predictable shift in the city’s usual rhythms.
Changes in where people are can have implications beyond audience size. Recent analysis from The National Lottery found that retail sales increased during the summer months in several seaside towns and airport locations, including a 54% uplift at Edinburgh Airport.
The National Lottery suggests that a more optimistic holiday mindset may play a part, while changes in the number and mix of people passing through these locations are also likely to be part of the picture.
For OOH advertisers, these changes largely follow the calendar and can therefore be anticipated and planned for.
Equally, unexpected disruptions can occur, such as the arrival of Storm Éowyn in January 2025: footfall figures help us understand how this changed patterns of behaviour, but can’t help with advance planning.
The Murrayfield moments we know are coming
Scheduled events can dramatically impact the people counted in the city. On the dates of Scotland’s three Six Nations rugby home fixtures, all played at Scottish Gas Murrayfield, there were single-day spikes in people counts at an overall city level (1 and 9 February and 8 March).
However, focusing on the area where Murrayfield is located, the index was much more pronounced – more than double the average, reflecting the typical match attendance of over 60,000.
The pattern repeats throughout the year, from Six Nations fixtures to concerts by Robbie Williams and Oasis.
In August 2025, Oasis played three nights at Murrayfield, leading to single-day spikes in indexes for the area around the stadium. On the third Oasis night, the people count around Murrayfield was more than three and a half times its usual level.
The matches and the concerts were known about months in advance. Advertisers know when tens of thousands of people will converge on Murrayfield and can plan accordingly.
The Festival doesn’t stay at the Festival
Edinburgh’s festival season is different again. Rather than a single-day event creating a short-lived spike, weeks of activity draw people into the city throughout August.
Across Edinburgh as a whole, people counts peak 7% higher than average during the festival period, although some of this increase is attributable to other events taking place at the same time, including the Murrayfield concerts mentioned above.
The impact of the Festival becomes much clearer when we focus on the Central areas where the main Festival venues are located. Here, people counts remain above average for the entire Festival period, peaking at 30% above average on 16th August. And just as tellingly, when the Festival ends, the number of people in the core areas returns towards normal levels almost immediately.
What is perhaps more interesting is that the effect doesn’t stop at the Festival venues. For the duration of the Festival, there is also a sustained uplift in a number of more residential neighbourhood areas outside the Festival core.
Source: Route data
The heatmap above compares the daily average people count in each area of Edinburgh during the Festival period (1-24 August) against the annual daily average. The difference is represented as an index – a darker colour indicates an above-average people count during the Festival.
Several of the darker areas are within each reach of the Festival core and offer visitor accommodation. Festival visitors may therefore be spending time well beyond the main venue areas.
A separate analysis of visitors supports this wider pattern. Several more residential neighbourhoods adjacent to the Fringe areas are among the top 20 Edinburgh neighbourhoods showing the greatest increase in visitors during the Festival compared with July.
We can’t know from the data exactly what those visitors were doing, or whether the Festival drove every additional visit. But the pattern is consistent with Festival visitors staying, eating, drinking, shopping and spending time beyond the main venue areas. The Festival, it seems, doesn’t stay at the Festival.
For advertisers, that means a planned event can create less obvious audience opportunities across the wider city – not just in the places where the event itself is taking place.
Is Edinburgh unique?
To see whether these patterns were particular to Edinburgh, we also looked at Cardiff, another city that hosted Six Nations matches and major stadium concerts, including Oasis, in 2025.
Many of the broad patterns were similar. School holidays were associated with lower people counts, Christmas Day saw a particularly sharp fall in Cardiff city centre, and major sporting and music events were visible in the data.
But the comparison also highlighted an important difference. Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium sits within a largely residential area, whilst Cardiff’s Principality Stadium is located in the heart of an already busy city centre. As a result, a major event at Murrayfield can represent a much bigger change from the area’s usual activity than a similarly sized event in Cardiff.
The broad lessons may be transferable, but the uplift isn’t; how an event changes a city depends on where and when it takes place, and what is normal for that location.
What this means for planners
Look beyond an average day. Audiences change with seasonal patterns, holidays, major events and unexpected disruptions
Context matters. The same type of event can affect locations very differently depending on where it takes place, when it happens and the area’s normal pattern of activity
Think beyond the event location. The Edinburgh Festival analysis shows that changes in audience presence can extend well beyond the place where the event itself is happening
What this means for audience measurement
A poster or screen will stay in the same place, but the audience around it doesn’t. A location that behaves one way on an average weekday can look very different during a major event, a holiday or an unexpected disruption.
That’s one of the challenges we’re addressing by developing the new Route solution. Whilst the current Route audience figures take account of seasonality factors, for example daylight hours at different times of year and different seasonal travel patterns, this is by day of the week within a month (e.g. a Monday in September).
Under our new contract, we will produce a dataset that is even more granular, providing audience figures for all 365 days of the year, so the changing rhythms of people’s lives and journeys are better reflected in OOH audience measurement.
However, we still won’t be able to take account of storms and Oasis concerts that don’t follow the same pattern each year.
Explore Edinburgh’s OOH inventory
Explore the latest Route data (Q3 2026) for Edinburgh through our interactive dashboard.
You can view OOH frames across the city, focus on the different areas highlighted in our Festival analysis, and filter by environment, media owners and frame format.
Ruth Chalisey is Route’s research director