Research

The audience for out of home media is extremely difficult to research. Unlike other media such as television, radio, cinema, press or the internet, there is no editorial environment. A respondent might remember what they have read, seen or listened to simply by reference to the name of a programme or publication they had seen or heard. Very few people, if any, will have a sufficient knowledge of the outdoor medium to provide meaningful answers to questions about posters.

As direct questions about exposure to the medium are so unlikely to bear fruit, we have to find another underlying methodology for the research study. The result is that we break the measurement task into a number of separate parts, each contributing a vital element to the overall understanding of audience exposure.

The first two components are relatively straightforward. We obtain counts for the number of vehicles and people either driving or walking down every road in Great Britain. We also conduct an audit of the characteristics of every advertising panel for which we require an audience measure.

The third step is to identify individuals’ travel patterns and relate these to the known location of poster sites. Knowing how many people go past a panel and how often they do so we can estimate the number of individuals with an opportunity to see that site (gross OTS).

However, as out of home advertising does not have an editorial environment we cannot be certain that passing a panel equates to seeing the site. To overcome this obstacle, Postar adds a further dimension by studying the propensity of people to see differing types of posters across a wide range of potential circumstances. A Visibility (or eye-tracking) Study produces a series of coefficients that are used to reduce the gross OTS by a measured factor. From this we derive a “visibility adjusted” or net audience.

In summary, Postar measures travel patterns for the population throughout Great Britain; estimates vehicle and pedestrian traffic at individual advertising panels and finally gives an estimation of the eye contact with the posters.

To solve these issues, four distinct research projects are undertaken;

• Vehicular & pedestrian traffic counts
• Visibility study
• Travel survey
• Panel audit

Sophisticated statistical models are then employed to bring the original research together for the purpose of estimating cover and frequency data.