Foundational Statements on Geopath’s Mission:
Geopath will proceed to help define, and continuously refine, the moving media standards for permanent OOH/DOOH ad unit audience forecasting and delivery (collaborating with the MRC) today and over the next 12-18 months.
Geopath aspires to pursue ‘as-delivered’ audience reporting (to complement the existing forecasting measurements, leveraging 1st party and 3rd party data, and create temporal consistency regarding planning-to-campaign measures) as part of this effort. The scope of this verification effort is not currently envisioned to include campaign delivery and campaign validation data; it focuses on measuring the permanent ad units displayed on moving media (both scheduled, such as for public transit systems, and unscheduled, such as taxi cabs and fleet vehicles) where advertisers are demanding ‘as delivered’ impression estimates, given similar data has been received through alternative vendors (e.g., StreetMetrics, Reveal Mobile, etc)
In the near term (over the next 6-12 months), Geopath’s constituents expect that the reach/frequency and audience impression calculations generated for OOH signage on moving media should be extended to support various fixed-duration ad rotation configurations, including audience targeting by frequently-used audience segments, then proceeding to address audience forecasts for signage with dynamic/complex DOOH ad rotation logic.
Geopath will focus on applying both likely-to-see (LTS) impressions and opportunity-to-see (OTS) impressions (a.k.a. ‘viewable impressions') as the first stage of this exercise, expecting that delivery of reach and frequency measurement (while important) will be a secondary objective in the intermediate-term (12-24 months)
Geopath will not focus on forecasting nor measuring the performance of the advertising campaign in terms of lift for recall, favorability, sales, or brand/product affinity regarding any ad unit measured; instead, Geopath will focus on measuring the audience exposure to specific ad units within a defined time period in a defined market for a defined person-level audience (which can be utilized by alternative vendors or third parties seeking to quantify lift or conversion metrics).
Geopath will seek to capture information about the specific vehicles and routes traveled from moving media operators in such a way as to avoid capturing or transmitting personally identifiable information (PII) and safeguard the privacy of the individual vehicle passengers and individual vehicle operators measured
Problem Statements:
[Highest priority]: There is no third-party measurement solution for moving OOH media that is accepted as the ‘standard’ for audience measurement beyond Geopath (and therefore, for larger brands, the absence of Geopath measurement for dynamic fleet media is often a blocker to the sales process).
[High priority]: OOH audience measurement metrics that quantify opportunities to see a fully-dynamic (i.e. unscheduled) moving media ad are unavailable from more than 1-2 vendors with limited input data coverage (e.g., Reveal, StreetMetrics), raising concerns about statistical significance and accuracy of the measurement.
[Medium priority]: ‘Impression multiplier’ values for moving media inventory are often so volatile as to be questionable (from the agency/buy side perspective), leading many agencies to request references that defend the ‘real-world’ basis of Operator-provided or third-party platform-provided impression multipliers.
[Medium priority]: OOH audience measurement metrics for a fully-dynamic (i.e. unscheduled) moving media ad are not typically offered on a ‘forecasted’ basis that are fully comparable against ‘as delivered’ metrics (thereby adding complexity when reconciling what was sold and what was delivered from an advertiser’s perspective).
[Medium priority]: For dynamic fleet OOH/DOOH media, Operators may provide ‘home grown’ ad exposure & audience measurement outputs that currently differ from what Geopath reports for scheduled fleet operators which run along similar routes/roadways, raising concerns about measurement objectivity and continuity.
[Medium priority]: OOH audience measurement metrics provided to buyers today do not always adjust for the viewability and visibility of the ad units reported (instead, they represent opportunities for ad visibility rather than likely ad exposures).
[Medium Priority]: Agencies (and their clients) require extensive demographic audience targeting options to deliver superior outcomes for efficient spend, particularly for moving media (which can be positioned in specific neighborhoods for maximum impact against a target segment), but the volume of use for these high-precision targeting options varies widely by agency while the cost to produce these extensive demographic targeting options is a significant up-front cost today.
[Low priority]: For moving media media, Agencies do not currently have a good way to compute the incremental reach and impression counts delivered when moving media is combined with roadside, place-based, or transit OOH ad units
[Low priority]: Agencies cannot currently track the progress of moving media OOH/DOOH campaigns in near-realtime which are currently running on signage that has been audited by Geopath, thereby preventing the ability for OOH/DOOH campaign delivery commitments (in TRPs or audience impressions) to be independently verified.
[Lowest priority]: Proof of performance data, when available by OOH operators, is not captured by Geopath as an input that is automatically & independently used as an input to improve measurement precision.
Business Requirements for Dynamic Fleet-Based Measurement Solution:
[High priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, weekly audience measures must represent actual, ‘as-delivered’ opportunity-to-see impression estimates of an ad’s exposure within a particular location, so as to demonstrate what OOH exposures are possible from moving media vehicles occurred during a specific time period for a specific audience.
[High priority]: For dynamic fleet measurement, extended demography at the person-level (specifically, by age/gender/household income) must be reportable to be comparable with digital/mobile phone ads
[High priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, OOH audience measures (both forecasted and actual/as-delivered) should be consumable as a “flat file” (i.e. comma-separated value or CSV file) for specific selections of audience home geographic markets, within a particular fleet network, within a specific time period
[High priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, OOH audience measures should be compatible with OOH audience measures used for other classes of OOH media (e.g., roadside media such as billboards, scheduled fleet media such as bus exterior ads, etc)
[High priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, weekly audience measurement of ‘as delivered’ exposure is the minimum viable basis for reporting (hourly, by day, would be ideal), because advertisers are seeking to quantify the number of people and number of ad exposures, per unit (as well as ‘per network’, since fleets of vehicles used to expose ad units can change over time)
[Medium priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, both forecasted and actual/as-delivered OOH audience measures should be consumable via an application protocol interface (i.e. an API) that is available to programmatic OOH platforms (e.g., Hivestack, Vistar, Place Exchange, etc) for the purpose of socializing the audience exposure potential of dynamic fleet-based OOH inventory in national and local media buys and near-realtime tracking the OOH campaign’s progress against the stated objective as it is delivered over time
[Medium priority]: For dynamic fleet-based, extended targeting at the person-level (specifically, by high-value consumer behaviors, such as ‘used tobacco in the last 30 days’, ‘visited a quick serve restaurant in the last 6 months’, etc) must be reportable to be comparable with digital/mobile ad measurement
[Medium priority]: For dynamic fleet-based, the potential for ad exposures and the likely ad exposures must be reportable such that impressions served metrics, opportunity-to-see metrics, and likelihood-to-see metrics can be compared by campaign, by vehicle fleet (i.e. collections of screens), and by neighborhood (including by zip code), in order to provide a variety of success measures that can be used to demonstrate the top-funnel metrics for an ad campaign
[Low priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, audience measures should include the reach and frequency (at the person-level) for audiences who are likely to see an OOH ad within a specific place
[Low priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, forecasted OOH audience measures should be consumable via an application protocol interface (i.e. an API) and a graphical user interface (GUI) that are available to both potential OOH buyers (for the purpose of socializing the audience exposure potential of place-based OOH inventory in national and local media buys) and other OOH sellers (for the purpose of evaluating the competitive landscape for a particular media type)
[Low priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, the geographic homes of the audiences exposed to OOH ads (i.e. where the exposed audience lives) must be reportable by DMA and by County, so as to be compatible with local and national omni-channel ad campaigns that incorporate other forms of media
[Low priority]: For dynamic fleet-based measurement, weekly audience measures should be available as future-oriented forecasts within a particular location so as to inform likely ad delivery outcomes for future ad campaigns
Design Principles:
Application of advanced audience targets and corresponding measures must use a standardized methodology for computing their projected confidence intervals for the inventory provided
The measurement methodology for moving media must include both passengers and drivers in other vehicles that are exposed to the moving media as well as pedestrians who are exposed to the moving media as it traverses the roadways
The measurement methodology for moving media must account for potential ad exposure to both vehicle occupants and pedestrians that are exposed to the moving media when it is moving as well as when it is positioned in a stationary location for an extended period (e.g., parked or ‘idling’ vehicles)
The mechanism for data output anomaly detection must not prevent transacting on audience measures if data inputs remain within a tolerable range (such as more than one standard deviation difference than comparable roadway circulation ranges); instead, it must warn Geopath members of possible discrepancies relative to previous trends
The mechanism for data ingestion anomaly detection must not prevent the synthesis of new audience measures; instead, it must warn Geopath admins and/or the data input providers
The mechanisms to facilitate operator-provided proof-of-play data must capture different inputs with different cadences of transmission, based on DOOH vendor standards already established as technical paradigms for ‘proof of play’ (e.g., Broadsign) and using a standard Geopath format
The mechanisms to facilitate operator-provided geolocation data must support capturing requisite inputs with different levels of granularity from different vendors due to privacy concerns, some without precise geolocation information by route (e.g., # of traversals of a particular road segment in a certain direction in a 7-day window), and some with precise minute-by-minute GPS geolocation information
Risks/Dependencies:
Opportunity-to-see impression metrics and their inferred cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM rates) may result in dynamic fleet operators being perceived as unfavorable and/or not cost competitive with traditional OOH media formats (such as roadside, place-based, or scheduled fleet media).
Syndicated data generated via a dynamic fleet measurement product may result in some dynamic fleet media operators showing much lower potential audiences than other dynamic fleet operators (and possibly even lower audiences for dynamic fleet media compared to scheduled fleet media operators).
Incomplete knowledge about the unique value proposition for ad units in the dynamic/mobile OOH ecosystem (e.g., the ability to place physical ads where the target audience works/lives/plays, the ability to change ad rotations dynamically in different neighborhoods depending on changing target audiences, etc) may result in inaccurate buyer comparisons between the ‘quality’ of mobile OOH media impressions and traditional/stationary OOH media impressions
Sources of near-real-time mobile location data will evolve and likely change in its location precision and its scope of authorized use cases will likely change as well. Geopath must maintain a fault-tolerant method for reporting audience impressions, both forecasted and historical (with appropriate precision)
Operator-provided scope of transmittable GPS data will likely change due to local, regional, and federal legislation, thereby requiring dynamic fleet operators to prepare for multiple methods of fleet data transmission (with appropriate precision)
‘As delivered’ impression data may not be instantly available upon campaign conclusion, requiring a several day period between the end of a campaign and the availability of a detailed audience exposure report for the dynamic fleet outcomes
Data refreshes frequently have a deleterious impact on caching systems that are capturing audience measurement updates on a periodic/batched basis, creating complexity when ‘rolling 12+ month forecasts’ supersede previously-cached months at an unscheduled/intermittent data refresh cadence
Scope:
[Near-term] Enable weekly and monthly aggregations of OOH/DOOH opportunity-to-see media measurement forecasts (derived from the previous year’s roadway & pedestrian trends)
[Near-term] Enable programmatic exchanges to view ‘forecasted’ ‘opportunity to see’ impressions estimated within specific fleet networks and for specific ad units within those fleet networks (aggregated by fleet network, ad unit type, audience target, and audience geography)
[Near-term] Enable Geopath members to access a comprehensive description of methodology
[Intermediate-term] Enable weekly and monthly aggregations of OOH/DOOH opportunity-to-see media measures on a rolling basis, both forecasted and ‘as delivered’ outcomes (as input data becomes available)
[Long-term] Enable Geopath members to view forecasts of ‘opportunity to see’ impressions and ‘audience impressions' as well as media operator-provided ‘served impressions’ estimated within specific fleet networks and for specific ad units within those fleet networks (aggregated by fleet network, ad unit type, audience target, and audience geography)
[Long-term] Enable programmatic exchanges to view both ‘forecasted’ and ‘as delivered’ estimates of ‘opportunity to see’ impressions and ‘audience impressions' as well as ‘served impressions’ estimated within specific fleet networks and for specific ad units within those fleet networks (aggregated by fleet network, ad unit type, audience target, and audience geography)
[Long-term] Enable Geopath Insights Suite users to views delivered reach/impression estimates for OOH/DOOH media (based upon known trends/metrics that represent the ‘source of truth’ upon which the statistical model is based)
[Long-term] Enable OOH/DOOH operators to accelerate the creation of their ad campaign constructs (and proof-of-play constructs) within the Geopath database as well as its corresponding API and User Interface (the Geopath Insights Suite).
Add Comment