Billups Unveils New Attention Metrics For Out-Of-Home Media Buys
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, October 2, 2024
At a time when advertisers and agencies are vetting a slew of new and emerging new audience attention metrics for a variety of electronic media – principally digital and TV – independent out-of-home media-buying agency Billups this morning unveiled its own new “quantifiable” attention metrics of both conventional and digital out-of-home media ads.
The move is noteworthy, because out-of-home media has long had a higher standard of proxies for attention, utilizing a variety of visibility adjustments to calculate the likelihood of consumers to actually see out-of-home advertising, vs. thie historic “opportunity-to-see” standards used by most other media to date.
Not surprisingly, Billups is touting artificial intelligence as a component of its new attention metrics, describing them as “AI-based analytics” and rolling out its own proprietary dashboard for advertisers to access them.
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“The AI-based Billups Analytics Attention Dashboard is a privacy-compliant platform that provides depth to the quality of out-of-home impressions,” the company states in this morning’s announcement, adding that it enables advertisers to evaluate and adjust “for site-specific features that may impact a viewer’s ability to see and recall an ad.”
Importantly, Billups methodology factors both the physical media, as well as the creative execution of out-of-home ads it measures.
“Using environmental and contextual conditions to evaluate the individual units, the offering includes metrics like reach, frequency, audience demographics, and dwell-time analysis estimating how fast a person or vehicle is moving or resting near the unit,” the company says, adding, “The resulting attention score shows how much more effective the board is at securing attention than others in the market, whereby lower percentages indicate normal performance and higher percentages showcase outstanding attention-grabbing opportunities.”
The agency says the new attention dashboard is available in beta to its clients and media and agency partners in the U.S. and Europe with rollouts to Canada and parts of Asia-Pacific planned later this year.
Interesting---but how is it determined that the person passing by the sign or poster actually looked at the ad---and what portion of the ad was seen for how long? Without some sort of observational device---a "camera"? - you may be assuming attentiveness ---based on certain conditions and assumptions about their impact---but not really establishing that it took place. Just curious.
As OOH JICs worldwide generally follow the WOO Guidelines for OOH Audience Measurement, May 2022 (which MRC chose to completely ignore!!!), the question is does Billups subscribe to these services which provide an Eyes-On audience estimate including geo-demographic campaign reach and frequency? If they do not why not? If they do how much does their proprietary approach addis it valid and at what cost?
Ed and Tony, when we created MOVE for OOH (back in the static billboard age of the 2000s) we mapped all the billboards of the major OOH companies in the major cities. We measured each billboard (e.g. height, width, angle from the road side, offset from the road, elevation, illumination, obstruction etc.). The measurements taken of the sites generated an algorithm that provided the OTS (Opportunity to See)
It was then supplemented with eye-tracking with people who wore glasses that looked at their eye as they moved around ... in cars, buses, trains, roads, footpaths, malls, etc. They were unknowing of what we were doing so there was no bias. Clearly, not everyone sees everything. This resulted in the LTS (Likelihood To See).
When you put all that together you get a pretty accurate measure of 'the audience'. To simplify ... 100,000 cars go past on a busy section of a major road. The OTS would 'rank' the likelihood of a billboard to be seeable. A beaut location would be the 100,000 while a small set-back billboard might just be reduced to (say) 65,000.
Then with the 'eye' glasses we can review the video and find that only half of then saw the billboard ... e.g. the 100,000 cars would be 50,000 stes of eyes, while the small one would be 32,500. That is a very simplified explanation, but an important part of how MOVE works.