Measuring OOH Advertising
Published: Mar 09, 2011
Singapore – With outdoor advertising increasing in prominence and proving itself as a competent medium, should the out-of-home (OOH) industry embrace audience measurement as a gauge of effectiveness?
Unlike other cities like London and Sydney, Singapore has not established a common standard of audience measurement for OOH. Thomas Ang, vice president of OOH Media at MediaCorp says it is difficult to derive at a standard measurement and methodology for each of the different OOH platforms due to their diversity.
Over the years, there are available tracking technologies in the market that have the capability of measuring OOH viewership, recognising genders and analysing “dwell time” and other factors. However, Adam Butterworth, managing director of Clear Channel believes that while these technologies may be effective, they are also costly and time-consuming.
Edward Tang, general manager of SPH MediaBoxOffice adds that media owners in Singapore may have difficulty coming to terms with a proper audience measurement system.
“The greater obstacle that has to be overcome is to get the agreement of OOH media owners to cooperate and invest in a common system,” he says.
Ang believes having an audience measurement system will allow media agencies and clients to have a single set of data for a comprehensive coverage of findings.
“Rather than looking at various findings with different sample size and methodology, audience measurement will be able to provide a good source of information on all the OOH market data,” he says.
With the rise of digital and the increasing number of new formats, Butterworth believes audience measurement will allow media owners to demonstrate their value against more traditional and online media.
Measurement may also encourage better creative, according to Butterworth. With a proper delivery of reach and frequency, he feels the message cut through is actually down to the advertising, and the medium may be less blamed for a bad campaign result.
Once termed the underdog of advertising mediums, OOH emerged from 2010 with an ad spend of SGD 221 million.
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