MRG Evening Meeting – Postar Power
Postar was the topic under discussion at the first MRG meeting of the New Year, which took place yesterday evening at a swanky new venue in London’s West End. Our speakers were Helen Tridgell, managing director of Postar, Mungo Knott, buying director at Posterscope and the ever charismatic David McEvoy, marketing director at J C Decaux.
Tridgell firstly discussed the different types of research which form the Postar brief: traffic counts, visibility studies and the travel survey. Traffic counts were tricky as there are not many in existence so new counts were carried out and then, via the Neural Network programme, audience per panel figures were calculated.
The visibility studies traced peoples eye movements to discover how visibility varied and the opportunity to see (OTS) figures were adjusted accordingly to create visibility adjusted impacts (VIA). These were then combined with the travel survey to give coverage and frequency. The survey is an ongoing project as approximately 6,000 panels change every year and Tridgell anticipates results will become available before the end of the year.
Knott, in his role as the media buyer, then went on to discuss who, within the industry, is empowered by Postar and the effect of the new research on buying and planning campaigns.
Postar, he claimed, delivers power to advertisers, agencies, specialists, auditors and contractors by ‘completing the equation’, the equation in question being Investment vs Deliverables = Net Benefit where Deliverables equals Postar.
Postar offers a consistent measurement of facts and is objective, where so much research before has been subject to a single person’s interpretation of the data, and meets the needs of both the advertisers and contractors in terms of delivering net benefits. Outlining the benefits of buying with Postar which, he said, is ‘developing as the medium currency’, he concluded by describing Postar as a good ‘base for building’ and made some suggestions about further data which could be usefully incorporated into the study.
McEvoy then summed it all up by highlighting the accuracy and detail available through the use of Postar, citing recent campaigns from Channel 5, Colgate-Palmolive, Wrigleys and Barcardi as examples and discussed the benefits of good creative work when considering recall and recognition of campaigns.
When questioned by Derek Bloom about the possible integration of research in the outdoor and TV markets, McEvoy said that this was something that had been experimented with in the past – using BARB panel data – and something that he would like to see happen in the future.