It all started in the 80-ies of the XX century with the counting of the passenger flow and diary studies of advertising campaigns on static billboards.
Systematic studies have been developed since 1996 in Britain, thanks to the measurements of the Postаr company. The focus of research at that time was on the representation of any carrier, indicators of its popularity.
After a huge time and material costs of research, and the evolution of carriers in Britain (since 2008 Britain has reduced the amount of advertising inventory by 40% and almost completely switched to digital format) the market has come to a revolutionary measurement system of outdoor advertising.
One of the reasons of the increasing development of the market was crisis in 2008. Outdoor advertising at that time was measured with quantitative characteristics of advertising carrier.
Before the crisis the average cost of advertising plane was about 100 pounds, after market dropping the price fell to 80 pounds. The revolutionary solution was to shift the focus of the object of measurement in outdoor advertising from the advertising carrier to the audience.
In the opinion of insight Director of company Posterscope Worldwide, David Gordon, improving the quality of the measurements has been achieved due to the fact that researchers have started to talk about consumers as well as other media (TV, radio, press, Internet).
The 2008 crisis showed the weakness of OOH advertising compared with other media. UK is excessively studied. When the Internet began to gain media space, a special network which was engaged in its measurement was created. Internet companies understand that customers will not spend significant budgets, if they don't know what kind of audience they get. If we are not able to demonstrate that the audience for outdoor advertising is their audience, clients will not increase the budgets to post their ad on our carriers. They need to be confident that they will get their target audience and to understand on what they spend their money. If we are not going to conduct research, we will not be able to influence the advertisers' decision, so they will have no reason to increase the budgets for outdoor advertising.
Studies have gone from counting the number of passenger flows, now it focuses on the study of audiences and its targeting. Marketing opinion and the opinion of the advertiser is becoming a major in the British market of outdoor advertising today.
Four years and 19 million pounds were spent by researchers to study the out-of-home audience.
New tools Route (a joint project of the researcher Postar and its partners) is a methodology for the tracking of typical routes taken by the respondents with the help of GPS tracker.
During the study were collected data of 28 thousand movements near more than 450 thousand carriers (quantitative indicators of the overall OOH market in Britain).
Route outdoor media focuses on the measurement of the routes, the provision of media intelligence solutions for the outdoor advertising market. With the help of global studies it was able to answer the questions about the displacement speed of the respondents, the most popular locations, types of movement and ways of perception of OOH advertising.
Getting detailed information on the different types of target audience, their behavioral characteristics, today allows British advertisers to create a concentrated, focused content, depending on the audience, which cover certain carriers.
This revolution in the measurements is not over. In symbiosis of Posterscope and JCDecaux with using of eye-tracking technology was implemented the project Virtuo City.
Using various research tools (technology of eye-tracking, virtual tour around the city), analysts were able to learn what is actually seen by the outdoor advertising audience.
In addition, was conducted a special survey, on the basis of which the diaries were compiled describing the focus of attention and the degree of advertising memorability.
All advertisers who use research tools of Postarscope can use the revolutionary measurement system in Britain today.
Focusing on the successful experience of crisis solutions in the OOH market of the UK, Ukrainian outdoor advertising can follow their example.
The qualitative improvement of the infrastructure of ad carriers, optimizing their amount and focusing on audience research can help the domestic outdoor market to become more understandable, measurable, and predictable for most advertisers.
Studies are one of the main tools that can demonstrate the effectiveness of this media.
