• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 3, 2009

To help advertisers, agencies and media sales organizations prepare for the first major change in the way audiences are measured for the centuries old out-of-home media industry, the Traffic Audit Bureau has launched an online training system that will answer many of their questions about how the new advertising currency will impact their media planning and buying decisions.

The new ratings data, which combines the TAB's out-of-home audience traffic audits with "visibility adjusted indices" to produce estimates for on the number of people who are actually looking at the medium's ads, as opposed the number that have a propensity to be exposed to them, will begin rolling out in the next couple of weeks.

The data, which is considered the ad industry's first "eyes on" ratings, will hit the market in stages, beginning with estimates for the Chicago market in two weeks, followed by data for all 200 U.S. out-of-home markets in March.

The new data, which will be accessible via the Web, and will eventually be ported into media planning systems offered by companies such as IMS and Telmar, will provide "eyes-on" ratings and impressions estimates on a "panel-by-panel basis," says Joe Philport, the president-CEO of the TAB.

To help the industry adjust, the TAB has created an e-learning program at eyesonratings.com.

"When other media have gone to new measurement systems, sometimes it has taken years for the industry to adjust. We hope this will take months," Philport notes, adding, "We would certainly feel like we have achieved success if by the end of the year, people have fully migrated to this data."