Nielsen: Outdoor Advertising Turns to Wireless To Measure Eyeballs

The second fastest growing advertising medium isn’t digital, doesn’t have anything to do with the Internet, and sure as heck isn’t mobile phones.

It’s outdoor.

As in billboards, signage and other real-world advertising you couldn’t tune out or turn off if you wanted to.

And Nielsen, Mediamark, Arbitron, Taylor Nelson Sofres and others are turning to digital age technologies to more accurately measure the audience for this age old medium.

It’s surprising to some to learn that marketers will spend $7.2 billion on outdoor ads this year, according to UniversalMcCann. That’s nothing compared to the $30 billion or so they’ll spend on TV ads, but it places outdoor just behind the Internet in terms of growth rate.

But it could do better – if only outdoor media companies like Clear Channel Outdoor, Lamar, and CBS could accurately tell marketers how many people actually see their ads.

Now, the race is on among audience research companies to nail down this information – fast.

Nielsen, for one, is using new GPS-enabled mobile technologies to measure advertising through a system it launched this last December in Chicago, and hopes to roll out this spring in Los Angeles.

Lorraine Hadfield, managing director for international audience measurement for Nielsen says in yesterday’s New York Times that the company is “targeting a roll-out to the top 10 markets in the US, where the most interest is” from marketers.

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I interview Hadfield about the amazing new system – which is one of the more innovative uses of mobile technologies to aid in marketing initiatives.

The system employs a small, cell phone-size device to provide highly accurate reach and frequency data for outdoor advertisements, complete with demographics.

During early tests in Chicago, Hadfield recruited 750 volunteers who agreed to carry the device, called the Npod, or Nielsen Personal Outdoor Device, everywhere they went for 10 days.

Participants, prescreened to establish demographic profiles, allowed their every movement to be tracked and recorded – like an automated digital version of those Nielsen diaries of old. Every 20 seconds, the Npod captured each user’s latitude and longitude, while a computer system compared the data with the coordinates of 12,000 “geo-coded” outdoor signs in Chicago, including bus shelters, standard posters, billboards and overhead signs.

To establish the user’s likely exposure to an outdoor advertisement, the system applies a mind-boggling number of variables – including driver speed, the angle of the display on the road, its distance from the curb, the distance from which the display is first visible, the height of the display, whether it’s illuminated or obstructed, and so on – as users enter “impact zones,” or the point of impression.

Nielsen knows that ¾ of the people who travel under a 200-square-foot sign above a highway overpass actually look at it, while only 30% of those who drive past a bus shelter actually see it.

The data is then compared to demographics from each user to give a very accurate view of the reach and frequency of an outdoor ad campaign.

The findings in Chicago could upend many assumptions we make about outdoor advertising. One example: More than 50% of all outdoor ad impressions among Chicago-area residents earning more than $100,000 a year occurred in low-income neighborhoods, contradicting the long-standing view that only the location of outdoor sites determines who is exposed to a message.

“Now we can tell you not just how many people saw a sign, but exactly how many and who they are,” Hadfield tells me in the book. “You know the age, the sex, the income, and how many times they are exposed to the ad.”

For the full scoop on new role for mobile in the future of outdoor advertising, pick up BRANDING UNBOUND the book today.

Quick Links:

BRANDING UNBOUND The Book
ADWEEK Magazines Excerpt
GENERATION WOW
Rick Mathieson .com

Comments

[Mac Amunjela]

i need to know how much it will cost me in US $ to buy and Set up wireless outdoor advertising boards like the one in the picture above.

urgent

[PODO]

Great info, thanks a lot!!! I wish I will have such a writing skills.