• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 5, 2021

Accretive Media, a programmatic digital out-of-home (OOH) and mobile advertising company, has built a platform specifically to measure OOH media and increase performance. Launch partners include Electra Meccanica, The Richards Group, and Vistar Media.

“The behavior of consuming an out-of-home ad is very different than in digital, where it is one on one with a consumer in front of a laptop, mobile device, or CTV ad,” Accretive Media CEO Craig Benner wrote in an email to Search & Performance Marketing Daily. “The physical world has to consider a much more dynamic set of factors.”

This includes factors such as screen location, orientation, size, bearing, direction, any potential obstructions, dwell time of consumer, speed of travel of consumer, movement patterns of consumers, and more.

OOH has historically been viewed purely "as a vanity play" based on a dearth of metrics, Benner said, but Accretive Media aims to change that perception. Several clients use the platform to transform their OOH spend into a performance channel or a brand-response channel, he says.

Benner says it is important to build a method to understand the individual relationship between screen and consumer, which he said is difficult to do correctly. It took several years for the company to understand the consumer movement and OOH boards.

The technology connects web visitations with foot traffic through an OOH graph. Mobile devices are identified in front of the OOH boards based on Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) best practices.

Only mobile devices that the technology can identify as being in front of the screen at the time the ad serves up on the OOH screen within a specific view are collected. It is all done through opt-in mobile location data from app software development kits.

Accretive Media can observe more than 100 million of these mobile devices with high-fidelity location data monthly. The mobile devices exposed are translated into identities, what Benner explains as being “Accretive IDs, IP addresses, other characteristics.” 

At the same time, consumers who visit the brand’s website and/or exhibit any other site-level activity such as sales or leads are captured using a pixel. These are also turned into digital identities. 

The technology measures the Accretive IDs exposed to the OOH ads that end up on the site, or in a purchase, creating a lead or taking some sort of action. 

Based on attribution rules, this produces an OOH ad conversion rate.

Accretive Media then builds control groups of similar consumers the technology knows were not exposed to the OOH ads based on the same location data. They are turned into Accretive IDs. 

The conversion rates of those consumers are also measured as a baseline and compared with exposed and unexposed rates, helping the company to determine the lift caused by the OOH ads.