Maximizing the Impact of Out of Home Measurement

Where is out of home (OOH) headed in a world of media fragmentation and greater competition for consumer attention? 

The ARF helped to answer these questions at their Maximizing OOH Impact event this week. A roster of participants including Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President, Research and Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor, Christian DeBonville, Director, ESPN Advertising and Marketing Intelligence and Emma Carrasco Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer, Senior Vice President of Global Strategy, National Geographic Society weighed in on how data, technology and creative can all be leveraged to raise awareness, improve branding and efficiently capture the consumer journey.

OOH at a Measurement Inflection Point

According to Barry Frey, Chief Executive Officer, DPAA, “OOH is one of the hottest media today.” He cited three pivotal societal and technological changes have been a boon for OOH. First, we are spending more and more time out of the home. “We are increasingly an active mobile society,” he asserted, “and we are becoming a more urban society.” As mobile phones become ubiquitous, this fuels the ability to track people wherever they go. Second, Frey sees advertising inside the home as “fragmenting at best and declining at worst.” Third, with the addition of digital data capabilities, OOH is now able to count, measure the impact and attribute usage just like the rest of the media industry. This improvement in measurement coupled with a safe, viewable, closed system that has no ad blocking, places OOH on an equal footing with other establish media options.

Data and Technology

The advent of improved technology that results in more valuable data is pivotal to OOH’s growth. The ability of marketers to track the consumer journey with mobile geo location data, for example, has created opportunities and greater confidence in OOH. Nielsen has been very active in expanding its OOH measurement offerings as are companies such as iQ Media which offers visual detection data that includes mood and engagement metrics.

“There are three reasons why mobile is so important,” Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President, Research and Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor noted, “Everyone has a phone and we carry it with us all the time. In fact, 85% of adults have their phone within arm’s reach all the time.” The full consumer journey becomes evident because the data tells us where people are, their routes throughout the day and their possible exposures to billboards. The methodological road has been long one but now refinements in the methodology, such as radius assessments and direction of travel, give the advertiser greater confidence that ads have actually been viewed.

Clear Channel’s case study “not only used mobile data in the planning and measurement of OOH, we also used it to amplify the impact of OOH by retargeting people who have seen OOH ads with mobile ads,” Stevens explained. This has a priming effect where the lift in store visits with and without the additional mobile ads could be compared. “There is a higher lift from people who have seen both the OOH ad and the mobile ad,” he continued, “It is a one plus one equals three effect going on. There is a natural synergy between mobile and OOH.”  Stevens is finding that these results are valuable sales tools for advertisers who may be using mobile but currently do not have an OOH strategy. “An integrated media strategy can yield better results overall,” he concluded.  

Powerful Creative Is a Must-Have

Powerful creative also plays an important role in OOH effectiveness. Emma Carrasco, Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer, Senior Vice President of Global Strategy, National Geographic Society, has developed a Photo Ark Campaign to help raise awareness of the last 12,000 species in captivity before they disappear. “Our partnership with the Outdoor Advertising Association of America enabled us to take this campaign to a whole new level,” she explained, where association members can get more involved in spreading the message. She shared with me that the feedback has “been tremendous,” with support across traditional out of home, digital, transportation, for example.  Social engagement, and its resulting data, has offered a huge, measureable boost in awareness.

Carrasco sees the next five years as a continuation of National Geographic Society’s efforts to build a complete documentation of all of the species in captivity. Currently 7,000 animals have been photographed, but there are still 5,000 left to do. “We want to bring awareness to what happens to society when these species disappear. We might actually have a chance to save some of them.”  Strong creative in conjunction with OOH ad placement and measurement will help propel this worthy cause.

Data Debunks OOH Myths

OOH exposures are surprisingly pervasive. Christian DeBonnville, Director Advertising and Marketing, ESPN, found that “the OOH audience is seen throughout the year, throughout the day and not just the biggest events in bar locations. It is programming that is on in the morning, during mid-day when we presume people are at work or at the gym or other out of home locations where we are seeing significant lifts.”

He noted that agencies and clients are more receptive to giving credit for audiences that are seeing programming and ads outside of the primary residences. The ability to credit the full consumer journey is great news for both advertisers and content creators.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Perfecting Out of Home Measurement: An Interview with Clear Channel’s Andy Stevens.

Clear Channel Outdoor Americas has improved its RADAR OOH (Out of Home) insights and analytics tool by adding Cuebiq’s real-time mobile analytics and location data. The value? Location, location, location. More technically, “location insights and footfall attribution analysis based on aggregated and anonymized mobile location data, to identify audiences exposed to CCOA’s printed and digital billboards,” per Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President Research, Insights and Analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor. Stevens has a deep background in Silicon Valley with stints at ShareThis and AOL and now, at CCOA, he is tasked with developing strategies to drive ROI growth for the company and its clients.

This exclusive interview with Stevens provided details on this ground-breaking initiative:

Charlene Weisler: Please give us an overview of Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR.

Andy Stevens: Here’s the elevator pitch: Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR uses mobile location data to identify the audiences that have been exposed to billboards. There is complexity in how we translate anonymous aggregated location data that comes from various sources like mobile ad exchanges or directly from apps, but fundamentally the goal is to understand the viewing audience, which then allows us to offer better targeting for advertisers because we know which billboards best reach your target customer. It also allows us to deliver measureable results so we can show you what user behaviors the campaign actually generated.

Charlene Weisler: Is Clear Channel the sole partner of Cuebiq’s OOH data?

Andy Stevens: Yes. They work in other sectors but we are their exclusive partner using data for Out of Home.

Charlene Weisler: What is footfall attribution? How does it work and why is it important?

Andy Stevens: It’s measuring the impact that the campaign has on store visits; people physically going into stores. It’s important because, despite the huge transformative growth of online commerce, 85% of what is bought is still bought offline. That’s a stat from the National Retail Federation. So for marketers, being able to measure the impact their campaign has on real world store visits is incredibly important. It’s particularly transformative for businesses where the location is the key signal of intent. Think about a gym; the measure is that people go there. Same for a QSR; for the most part, people visit the restaurant to buy something. We can measure that foot traffic and show if it has been driven by exposure to an OOH ad.

Charlene Weisler: What has been the benefit of adding Cuebiq?

Andy Stevens: When we rolled out Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR early last year, we knew the location data landscape would continue to grow. We designed CCO RADAR to be sure that we could continue to evolve as new data sources became available and Cuebiq represents the next generation of location data. They not only have large scale data – about 60 million devices – but the data is persistent. They continually measure location data so they know where those devices are. That’s really important for OOH because we need to be able to understand if someone definitely went past a billboard to be able to measure the performance of the ad against them. 

So let’s say you are driving from Manhattan to Jersey City and you didn’t open an app on your phone. Traditional location data sources relied on the ad calls from apps, so we wouldn’t have known that that person made that journey if they didn’t open up an app when they got there. With Cuebiq we now have a persistent anonymized data source at much greater scale than we ever had before. And we now offer more martkets, more detailed metrics - cutting the results by demographics, time of day, day of week and we receivethe results more quickly. In the past we worked on a two to three week turnaround. Now it is two to three days. And we have lower costs.

Charlene Weisler: Can you give an example with an advertiser?

Andy Stevens: Let’s take that gym example: 24 Hour Fitness campaign used location data in two different ways – for planning purposes and for attribution. For planning, they had two target audiences – current 24 Hour Fitness customers and competitive gym customers. We used RADAR data to identify which locations best reached those targets and then identifed the best billboard locations in LA and San Francisco for a highly targeted campaign. The measure of success was whether we could drive more visits to the gym for both target groups. After the 8 week period of the campaign, we measured footfall attribution comparing those who were exposed to the ad and those who were not. We saw a 248% lift in visits. That is really impressive!

Charlene Weisler: Will this help facilitate cross platform measurement and if so, how?

Andy Stevens: We absolutely have our eye on that. Marketers need to better understand not just each channel in a silo but how the entire marketing mix impacts performance. The Cuebiq data is a big part of that because it gives us sufficient scale to be able to sync anonymous mobile ad ids with third party data sets. That’s how digital advertising is measured. We are putting OOH on the same playing field.

Charlene Weisler: What are some areas that still need to be added to your system?

Andy Stevens: We’re contunally adding more metrics and more behaviors into CCO RADAR. But we don’t identify people as specific individuals. We  use the anonymous mobile ad id which brings us into the digital data ecosystem. This is how digital advertising has been so successful because it uses anonymous ids. The first behaviors we looked at with CCO RADAR were offline behaviors. Going beyond footfall, we can now measure tune-in or understand what apps they may use by interfacing with third party data sets to enhance our targeting capabilites.

Charlene Weisler: How many markets do you reach?

Andy Stevens: We’re in 43 of the 50 largest markets in the United States and 140 airports, and that includes street furniture and roadside inventory. But we can’t measure moving ads, such as on a bus, because they change location.

Charlene Weisler:  Where do you see OOH measurement three years from now?

Andy Stevens: We know we have great OOH locations and we know we can provide excellent targeting with the largest creative formats, it’s unskippable – all of the inherenet benefits of out of home.What has held us back in the past is that people couldn’t measure outcomes and lacked the sophisticated analytics and behavioral intelligence to establish where to buy. Today we can connect all of the technologies that are being used to measure advertising performance across the board. The more we can do that in the future the closer OOH will be to the level of digital adverising. And we already have a programmatic component  for our digital inventory. We will continue to do that to make advertising easier and easier to buy.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

On the RADAR. Q&A Interview with Andy Stevens

Andy Stevens, SVP of Research and Insights for Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, spent most of his career in digital advertising. Although he started primarily selling pop-up ads, he saw digital becoming a major force in the industry. “I loved it because digital gives you a huge amount of granular audience data. You can verify who has seen your ads.” 

But digital was not an advertising panacea for him. He explained that, “There are huge benefits found in digital, but in the end, the creative execution is sometimes lacking, and recall is not always great.” So about a year ago he made the decision to move to OOH (out of home). “OOH has many intuitive benefits but has had its challenges,” he confided. “The creative canvas is huge, highly-visible and there is no ad skipping, which is great, but, until now, there has been no ability to verify or pinpoint who is seeing the ad and hence no true detailed audience data available. The good news is that mobile technology is helping OOH bridge the data gap of who actually sees the ad and what they do after seeing it. I saw the opportunity to use my knowledge in digital and translate it into the OOH arena.”

In this interview, Andy talks about his path to research, his current job at Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, how digital and out of home data helps inform advertisers about the consumers’ journey, privacy protection in location-based verification and his advice to the next generation. He also offers some insights into where he sees the media industry headed in the next three to five years.

Charlene Weisler: Andy, Clear Channel Outdoor Americas has just announced a new research and sales initiative called Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR. What is that?

Andy: We chose the term “RADAR” because the tool is designed to give you a better view of the physical landscape and the OOH assets in it. RADAR overlays data from various mobile sources and illustrates where audiences move throughout the physical world.  Further, it denotes the best OOH locations to reach them. Using this anonymous and aggregated audience data ,we  can be better informed about when and where consumer groups shop, work, live, seek entertainment as a way to get a physical world attribute to their behaviors. Then we overlay our inventory throughout the day. It’s like mobile advertising, using the same consumer behavior, but using it for OOH. 

Charlene: Is there a thought to combining OOH with Mobile to begin an industry standard measurement and sales application?

Andy: We are thinking about that as a separate product release – a marriage of Mobile and OOH is a great opportunity as both mediums enable advertisers to reach audiences on the go.

Charlene: How did you get into research? What did you study in school?

Andy: I studied psychology. It is a scientific discipline to understand human behavior. Then upon graduation I did the usual consulting but nothing resonated until I found media. Once in media, I started out as an analyst crunching numbers and bought media on an impression basis. But from there I began to get more into the strategic side of the business. Increasingly, the line between research and marketing is becoming blurred. Marketing used to be more qualitative but we are now in a data driven world. I am a researcher but marketing now falls very close to what I do.

Charlene: What is the most important data point in digital measurement?

Andy: I don’t believe there is ever a single most important data point. It depends on the objectives of a campaign and who you are trying to reach. Advertising has become more sophisticated with more granular data that is available. Abandoning a shopping cart is a powerful signal and through data we are able to understand when and how that happens. That is why, when you abandon, ads pop up for things that you have already seen. Data delivers us an understanding of people’s behavior and buying patterns that drive their behavior. We get a more individualistic, more granular picture of the individual consumer.

Charlene: What is the most important data point in Out of Home?

Andy: Traditionally the most important data point is location as we are fundamentally a location-based medium. But this can be just a proxy to where and whom the ad is reaching. If an ad is on a billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike, we know it reaches commuters. The challenge is that it is manual, and requires in-depth knowledge of the market. It takes both art and science to presume motivation. The general point is that despite the size and impact of digital data, which is huge, only 15 percent of purchases take place online. Unlocking location and sales data is key.

Charlene: So with both digital and OOH, what about privacy amongst this granular data?

Andy: There are many areas where user data is used for more effective advertising; all forms of communication rely on consumer information. And there is nothing wrong with that as long as there’s no PII (personally identifiable information) – it is all reduced to a number and a clean link to the data with companies like Axciom, for example. And there are clear opt-out policies. We piggy-back off the mobile system and we are completely compliant, while benefitting from being location-based.

We’ve all seen Minority Report where customized ads address you by name. But I’m not sure it’s a great user experience and is a little creepy to be honest. With a mass-medium like OOH, a better use is to target general patterns of consumer groups, not the individual.

Charlene: Do you use beacons?

Andy: There are some really interesting uses for Beacons to help create customized mobile experiences in retail locations, hotels, sports grounds, etc.  However, we also need to be aware of the limitations of beacons on roadside inventory (of which the bulk of OOH inventory in the US is comprised) because they cannot connect to a device driving past them at speed.  As such, their applicability as a measurement tool is limited.

Charlene: Where do you see OOH going in the next three to five years?

Andy: I think that the location-based data ecosystem will see more consolidation in the same way we saw with behavioral data providers in the online space. Also, I see growth in programmatic OOH as advertisers use automated tools to plan and buy OOH ads.

Charlene: What advice would you give to a college student today regarding a career in research?

Andy: To my mind, the most important skill for an advertising researcher is to be able to interpret and tell a story about the data. Competence with numbers is table stakes but being able to make those numbers come alive for your client is the hardest bit. In starting out, get your foot in the door somehow. Ad agencies are flexible so don’t obsess about the title. Choose a good company and learn the basics of how media works.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com