Last night’s Media Research Group Evening Meeting saw a heated discussion about the release of the new outdoor research, POSTAR. The concern was over the introduction of a new measure of visibility of posters, Visibly Adjusted Impacts.
Peter Bowman from WCRS was worried that the much lower figures achieved by the VAI in POSTAR would devalue the medium; lower-rating sites could be pulled down thus increasing demand and costs for the existing sites. He also worried clients would no longer be interested in the medium.
Both Ivor Hussein from Lowe Howard Spink and Chris Morley from COS, who had both presented the new research, responded to the effect that the new research should help clients’ money to work better within the medium; if useless panels are weeded out surely this is a good thing, not bad. If anything clients should be more confident in using outdoor now, Ivor said, because they now know how many people they are reaching. This should also bring in clients who did not use outdoor in the past because of unreliable data.
Harold Lind said the outdoor industry had effectively gone from an NRS type measurement to BARB; he hoped the industry would welcome the new measurement, rather than winge about lower audiences, and suggested “it should be used as a stick to beat NRS.”
Chris Morley likened the new POSTAR to a readership survey going down to the detail of not just the magazine or newspaper, but the section, the page number and the actual position of the ad. “Outdoor is blazing a trail” for other media to follow, he said.
The basis of the new POSTAR was to provide:
- A realistic measure of OTS
- A quantified measure of visibility, VAI
- Coverage and frequency data able to reflect different buying strategies
- Open and equal access to the data
- Desktop planning/buying tool
- Keep POSTAR up to date
Neural networks were used to calculate the Visibly Adjusted Impacts; each site has been classified according to position, angle, lighting, and distance from the kerb; the neural nets measure exactly how much traffic passes each site and experiments to measure accurately what people see and the order they see it in when passing posters. An eye camera was used to study the impact of sites.
Chris Morley sees the key benefit of the new research as the fact it represents a revolution in poster research and attitudes; this is also helped by the creation of a genuine JIC to bring outdoor in line with other media. He hopes the research will allow for many more multi-formatted campaigns.
Mills and Allen pointed out from the floor that they had already responded to the research by getting rid of their bad visibility sites, and they will invest in better audience-reaching sites.
