Ask any Out Of Home (OOH) media planner how to calculate the target impressions of an outdoor campaign and you’ll get a squinty smirk.  That’s because every planner has different ways of discounting the Traffic Audit Bureau’s (TAB’s) circulation numbers.  OOH planners have been making adjustments to Daily Estimated Circulations (DECs) for decades.  We look at the size of the billboard, if it’s a right- or left-hand read for the driver, how far it is from the road, if it’s on a street or highway, the demographics of the people in the surrounding area and more.  In truth, we have counted a bit more on our gut expertise than we’d like to admit.  According to the TAB, DECs have been discounted 70-80% or more.

Thanks to new methodologies and standardized research, buyers and sellers of outdoor media can finally see the same numbers.  The TAB’s recent launch of Eyes On Impressions (EOIs) is a breakthrough in consistent discounting for buyers and sellers.  Fuzzy math is now replaced by a three-step process that builds EOIs using weekly counts of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, Visibility Adjustment Indices (VAIs) and travel survey demographics.  So how does this work?

Step one is getting a count of people who pass each OOH display and have an opportunity to see the advertising.  Although this sounds like DECs, it now includes drivers and pedestrians.  This data is collected on a weekly basis from each market’s department of transportation.

Step two is creating the VAIs through video simulation and eye-tracking tests for a sample of outdoor displays.  These tests measured how much people notice outdoor displays and the ads on them.  The results were then modeled to create Eyes On adjustments for all TAB displays.  VAIs adjust outdoor displays based on the format, display size, roadside position, angle to the road, street type and distance from the road.  Sound familiar?  Suddenly, the squinty smirks are replaced with wide-eyed smiles from planners who finally have research to support their gut decisions.

Step three is the integration of travel survey data from the Census Bureau and Mediamark Research that reports audience demographics and trip duplication data.

 

Source:  The Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB) Website

Wrap this all together and you’ll see smaller, more valuable numbers that are at less than half the size of the big, generic impressions.  As a result, CPMs will rise.  But, in relation to other media, Eyes On CPMs will still look attractive. 

While vendors are still figuring out how to change their sales models to adopt EOIs, Empower MediaMarketing recommends the use of EOIs in place of DECs as the new industry standard for outdoor measurement.

By: Natalie Dalton, Director OOH