Product Charter - Audience Measures & Insights [REVISED 10-7-22]

Encompasses data accessibility via API & UI for Geopath audience measures

Foundational Statements & Assumptions on Geopath’s Audience Measurement & Insights Data Accessibility:

Only Geopath members are allowed to search for and share information regarding estimated audience measures for Geopath OOH inventory to non-members, but non-Geopath members should still have the ability to access some basic sets of unit-level metadata for all Geopath inventory (i.e., enhanced publicly-facing Geopath ‘inventory explorer’ functionality)
All Geopath members share the same access rights to read audience measurements and inventory metadata available in Geopath’s database (either via UI or via Geopath’s API)
Only Geopath members who are registered API users have access to read audience measurements & inventory metadata available in Geopath’s database via API (a separate layer of access control is enforced)
Operators or authorized 3rd parties (working on behalf of Operators) who are Geopath members have the right to submit and validate metadata updates requested by others about their inventory, which are processed according to Geopath’s human resource capacity to validate changes to OOH/DOOH inventory in the near-term. In the intermediate-term, a mechanism to capture near-realtime updates from Geopath (e.g., changes to existing inventory pending audit, etc) will be provided to keep Operators, or authorized 3rd parties, informed of inventory metadata changes.

Problem Statements:

[Highest Priority] Users of Geopath’s Insights Suite may wait more than 30 seconds to see results on the screen, rendering the application practically unusable or ‘broken’
[High Priority] Users of Geopath’s API may wait for up to a minute for an API result to return, which often times-out automatically after 30 seconds or less due to some technologies (e.g., Heroku) disallowing ‘long running’ API queries
[High Priority] Agencies and Operators are provided with ‘best available’ data from Geopath’s Insights Suite and its corresponding API, regardless of historical trends, which may show wide variance for a single piece of inventory (or a single package) from one time period to another; users expect to easily view/retrieve a ‘side by side’ comparison of audience measures for a single inventory unit (or a set of units) against previous time periods (either for date ranges within a single calendar year or for date ranges across multiple years)
[High Priority] Operators and Agencies using Geopath’s Insights Suite cannot select audiences using crosstab selections (e.g., ‘Visited Applebees in the last 30 days who are very interested in College Football’) cannot be selected as a target audience; either age/gender segments or advanced psychographic, behavioral, and demographic segments can be selected as a target, but not both at the same time)
[High Priority] Operators and Agencies using Geopath’s Insights Suite cannot report on audience exposure metrics for one piece of inventory, or a set of inventory, using crosstab formats (e.g., ‘% and # of audiences P21+ who are very interested in College Football vs College Basketball’)
[High Priority] Agencies and Operators using Geopath’s Insights Suite cannot visualize how the other transacting party (on either the buy side or sell side) defines ‘packages’ of transit inventory for sale (either as sets of specific Geopath IDs, a set of inventory that meets target audience objectives, or a set of inventory that meets target audiences objectives and delivers a specific TRP goal or target impressions goal) [note: this priority is specific to transit inventory packages in particular, as these packages represent how transit inventory is sold]
[High priority] Agencies and Operators using Geopath’s Insights Suite cannot visualize audience measures for inventory or inventory sets that are not ‘published - measured’; ‘preliminary’ inventory metadata is available to API users, but only when certain non-standard request parameters are passed into the API.
[Moderately High Priority] Agencies and Operators using the Geopath Insights Suite and API would like the ability to understand (either visually or with data) the area within the geospatial viewshed of each inventory unit, depending upon its height, location, and orientation.
[Moderately High Priority] Operators and Agencies using Geopath’s Insights Suite may not be able to efficiently report on every fine-grained ‘advanced’ audience segments (e.g., ‘reach % of audiences that drank light beer within the last 30 days among P18-35', etc) without selecting a non-P0+ base audience (i.e. a non-default ‘alternate’ demographic base audience) [note: this is distinct from the inability to ‘bring your own’ customized base audience]
[Moderately High Priority] Operators and Agencies using Geopath’s Insights Suite may be unaware of what specific fields represent and/or what functionality can be applied in the system (i.e. users are often unable to obtain in-application ‘help’)
[Moderately High Priority] Operators and Agencies using Geopath’s Insights Suite are not given the option to mark which particular inventory audience measures and/or package/plan audience measures appear unrealistic (and require further Geopath insight to investigate)
[Medium Priority] Agencies and Operators using the Geopath Insights Suite do not currently have the ability to create user-uploadable ‘base audiences’ (i.e. base audiences beyond the ‘non-default’ base audiences already provided) for reach % computations and ‘total impression’ bases, resulting in difficulties quantifying the impact of OOH among specific cohorts. [Note: achieving this outcome is likely to be a dependency for Geopath data integration into the Nielsen Media Impact (NMI) solution]
[Medium Priority] Agencies and Operators using the Geopath Insights Suite and API do not have a method to explicitly highlight which audience targeting criteria are UNIONS ('and') with other criteria vs intersections ('or') with other criteria; only audience targeting ‘unions’ are possible today, and may substitute other criteria.
[Medium Priority] Agencies and Operators using the Geopath Insights Suite cannot currently visualize illustrated routes that fleet vehicles are taking, by garage, and therefore the geographic representation of reach/circulation of these fleet vehicles is not well understood by agency buyers.
[Low Priority] Operators and Agencies cannot automatically calculate the incremental reach delivered through the most logical combinations of inventory that extend an market plan with a certain TRP or target in-market impression goal (e.g., ‘to meet your plan goal of 150 TRPs for P18+ in the Palm Springs DMA with a higher confidence interval, consider augmenting your transit inventory plan with street furniture at X/Y/Z stations.’)
[Low Priority] Users of Geopath’s Insights Suite and API may be presented with Reach and Frequency metrics for specific inventory packages that don’t make sense given the real-world context of the inventory, even if the R/F model is perfect (i.e. because input data may be incorrect), and the root cause of the ‘nonsensical’ metrics is not highlighted to end-users
[Low Priority] Agencies and Operators using Geopath’s Insights Suite cannot visualize how the other transacting party (on either the buy side or sell side) defines ‘packages’ of non-transit inventory for sale (either as sets of specific Geopath IDs, a set of inventory that meets target audience objectives, or a set of inventory that meets target audiences objectives and delivers a specific TRP goal or target impressions goal)
[Low Priority] Agencies and Operators using the Geopath Insights Suite see field names often truncated due to the absence of word wrap (thereby rendering longer field descriptions ambiguous unless exported as Excel or CSV)
[Low Priority] When building a market plan, under media attributes, selections for other attributions do not automatically ‘filter down’ based on your selections (creating user frustration by allowing for attribute inconsistences and returning irrelevant results after running the plan).
[Lowest priority] Agencies and Operators using Geopath’s Insights Suite cannot manually or automatically track the progress, over time, of hypothetical OOH campaigns against the planning goals applied to a set of inventory originally assigned for the campaign (based on inventory availability, date range, etc); instead, goals are set for a set of inventory within a given time range and either ‘meets’ or ‘fails to meet’ the goal of the inventory plan within the given time range instead of allowing the time range to be a dynamic output given a specific TRP or reach % goal and a specific set of inventory

Goal & Objectives:

[Highest Priority] Improve API response time by 50%+ relative to v2.1 API performance, returning 95% of API calls in under 30 seconds
[High Priority] Improve UI response time by 50%+ relative to current performance, returning 95% of dialog boxes or screens in under 15 seconds (not including UI elements that require multiple API calls and can be rendered via ‘lazy loading’) while setting user expectations on % progress to completion
[High Priority] Highlight scenarios where submitted inventory or market plans are not practically feasible in circumstances where either the package-level reach ceiling is too low to deliver against the plan and/or the likely frequency limit of exposure is logically exceeded
[High Priority] Enforce a logical ‘cap’ of frequency exposures based on inventory type and circulation trends, then enforce these frequency ceilings when individual inventory metrics are being queried
[High Priority] Enforce a logical ‘cap’ of reach based on inventory type, likely frequency of exposure, and circulation trends, then enforce these reach ceilings when individual inventory are being queried
[High Priority] Enable Geopath Insights Suite users to select combinations of demographic and psychographic/behavioral audiences (e.g.,‘% and # of audiences P21+ who are very interested in College Football vs College Basketball’) as audience targets
[High Priority] Allow Insights Suite and API users easily view/retrieve a ‘side by side’ comparison of audience measures against previous, predefined time periods (either for date ranges within a single calendar year or for date ranges across multiple years) for a single unit or multiple units
[High Priority] Enable Geopath Insights Suite users to visualize audiences using crosstab selections (i.e. while keeping a single dimension like time period consistent, select specific attributes of data returned to be expressed as rows vs columns, like a Pivot Table, within the UI) [e.g.,‘Visited Applebees in the last 30 days who are very interested in College Football’]
[High Priority] Agencies and Operators using Geopath’s Insights Suite can visualize how other sellers or buyers of inventory define ‘packages’ of transit inventory (either as sets of specific Geopath IDs, a set of inventory that meets target audience objectives, or a set of inventory that meets target audiences objectives and delivers a specific TRP goal or target impressions goal). Achieving this outcome is envisioned in two phases: first, building the ability to create/edit ‘packages' of inventory that can be shared by users within a specific Geopath member organization (but not externally), second, building the ability to share/expose those shared packages publicly and/or with all Geopath users [note: this priority is specific to transit inventory packages in particular, as this represents how transit inventory is sold today (e.g., purchasing exterior bus ad inventory by ‘garage’, etc)]
[High priority] Enable Geopath’s Insights Suite users and API users to visualize measures for inventory that are not ‘published’ (i.e. ‘preliminary’ measures) if it is either exposed publicly or exposed ‘internally’ (to the user’s organization or authorized organizations) at the discretion of the inventory owner (or inventory owner’s authorized representative) [NOTE: this capability depends upon a comprehensive set of inventory metadata access controls that are configured at the ‘spot’ level by the inventory owner or its representatives]
[Moderately High Priority] Represent the ability to understand (either visually or with data) the area within the geospatial viewshed of each inventory unit, depending upon its height, location, and orientation (both in the Geopath Insights Suite and the API).
[Moderately High Priority] Allow users of Geopath’s Insights Suite to show what each field represents and/or what functionality can be applied in the system using tooltips (descriptions of fields that show upon ‘mouseOver’ actions)
[Moderately High Priority] Enable API users and Geopath Insights Suite users to ‘select their own demographic-specific base audiences’ and enable reporting on every fine-grained ‘advanced’ audience segments (e.g., reach % of audiences who drank light beer within the last 30 days among P21+ audiences) without selecting non-default ‘alternate’ base audiences manually (as Prizm Premier audience segments depend upon PopFacts as a base audience, which includes group quarters)
[Medium Priority] Enable users to upload their own ‘base audience’ via the API for use in calculating reach % computations and ‘total impression’ bases [Note: achieving this outcome is likely to be a dependency for Geopath data integration into the Nielsen Media Impact (NMI) solution]
[Medium Priority] Enable Geopath Insights Suite users to easily visualize/export the particular spots that are ‘best able’ to reach audiences in a specific zip code or a set of zip codes [as context: today, users can see what % of population in certain zip codes are reached by a specific spot, but not the other way around]
[Medium Priority] Enable advanced audience targeting criteria within the UI and API to support UNIONS ('and') with other criteria vs intersections ('or') with other criteria (note that: only audience targeting ‘unions’ are possible today, and may substitute other criteria)
[Medium Priority] Enable Geopath Insights Suite users to visualize illustrated routes that fleet vehicles are taking, by garage (enabling geographic representation of reach/circulation of these fleet vehicles to be understood by agency buyers)
[Medium Priority] Enable users of the Insights Suite to mark which particular inventory audience measures and/or package/plan audience measures appear unrealistic (and require further Geopath support personnel to investigate)
[Low Priority] Automatically suggest (and calculate) the incremental reach delivered through the logically highest-impact inventory that extends a market plan OR an inventory plan given a certain goal (e.g., ‘to meet your plan goal of 150 TRPs for P18+ in the Palm Springs DMA with a higher confidence interval, consider augmenting your transit inventory plan with street furniture at X/Y/Z stations.’) This should occur in two phases: 1) extend the ability of inventory plans to advise of similar inventory that achieves the goal, then 2) extend the ability of market plans to advise of other dimensional updates (e.g., expanding target inventory, audience, or time period) to achieve this goal. [NOTE: this should NOT be treated as a ‘recommendation engine’ as much as it is a conceptual calculator of ‘what other inventory of a similar type would need to be included in order to meet the plan’s goals’]
[Low Priority] Enable users of the Geopath Insights Suite to create and visualize ‘packages’ of inventory produced by other users so as to visualize how the other transacting party (on either the buy side or sell side) defines ‘packages’ of inventory for sale (either as sets of specific Geopath IDs, a set of inventory that meets target audience objectives, or a set of inventory that meets target audiences objectives and delivers a specific TRP goal or target impressions goal)
[Low Priority] Enable word wrap and/or scrolling on select screens in the Geopath Insights Suite that truncate words (to avoid field names getting truncated due to the absence of word wrap)
[Low priority] When building a market plan using the Insights Suite, automatically filter remaining criteria for selection in realtime based on attributes already selected so that users can limit selection inconsistences
[Lowest priority] Enable Geopath Insights Suite users to upload or select a ‘package’ of inventory and track the progress of hypothetical OOH/DOOH campaign progress against the planning goals applied to the campaign given input date ranges and finer-grain data outputs (e.g., quarterly, monthly, weekly) data

Use Cases:

An API user queries Geopath APIs and awaits for a response from Geopath (either as a synchronous API call or an asynchronous API call) within 30 seconds of sending the query
A Geopath Insights Suite user clicks on an icon to show data and waits for the screen to render the data requested while watching a ‘progress’ indicator show that the system is actively working on fulfilling the request for 15 seconds (or less) after clicking on the icon
A Geopath Insights Suite user clicks on a generates an inventory or market plan and the system alerts the user that the proposed dimensional inputs are not practically feasible to generate the intended target audience outcome (in circumstances where either the package-level reach ceiling is too low to deliver against the plan and/or the likely frequency limit of exposure is logically exceeded)
A Geopath Data Scientist defines and enforces a logical ‘cap’ of frequency exposures based on inventory type and circulation trends, as well as a logical ‘cap’ of reach based on inventory type, likely frequency of exposure, and circulation trends, then enforces these ‘caps’ when individual inventory are being queried via either inventory-level, package-level, or market-level requests throughout the APIs and Insights Suite
A Geopath Insights Suite user selects combinations of demographic and psychographic/behavioral audiences (e.g.,‘% and # of audiences P21+ who are very interested in College Football vs College Basketball’) as audience targets, then seeks to determine which available OOH inventory best reaches this audience (for the purpose of buying this ad space and/or reselling it to others)
A Geopath Insights Suite and API user views a ‘side by side’ comparison of a certain set of audience measures against previous, predefined time periods (either for date ranges within a single calendar year or for date ranges across multiple years) ,for multiple units, in order to determine the impacts of the latest Geopath data refresh/release on their expected inventory in 2023 (versus previous years)
A Geopath Insights Suite user visualizes audiences using crosstab selections (while keeping a single dimension like time period consistent), using ‘drag and drop’ capabilities to select specific attributes of data returned to be expressed as rows vs columns, like a Pivot Table, within the UI (e.g.,‘Visited Applebees in the last 30 days who are very interested in College Football’). This view allows the user to see how the total audience breaks down (by %) into specific attributes that are logically additive vs logically distinct.
A Geopath’s Insights Suite user at a large operator can visualize how sellers of OOH inventory define ‘packages’ of transit inventory (within their own organization).
A Geopath’s Insights Suite user at a large ad buying organization can visualize how sellers of OOH inventory define ‘packages’ of transit inventory available for sale (by transit line, etc).
An OOH inventory operator chooses to click on a setting and expose ‘preliminary’ metrics for specific inventory that is in the process of being audited to the public, then a Geopath Insights Suite user and API user may retrieve measures for that inventory that is not yet ‘published’ (i.e. ‘preliminary’ measures).
An OOH inventory operator chooses to click on a setting and expose ‘preliminary’ metrics for specific inventory that is in the process of being audited to internal (intra-company) users, then a Geopath Insights Suite user and API user from the same organization may retrieve measures for that inventory that is in the process of being audited but is not yet ‘published’ (i.e. not yet accessible to the general public).
An OOH media buyer or seller can see the area within the geospatial viewshed of each inventory unit, depending upon its height, location, and orientation (both in the Geopath Insights Suite and the API).
A Geopath’s Insights Suite user hovers over each search field description in the UI (e.g., define target, audience, etc) to learn what each field represents and/or what functionality can be applied in the system
API users and Geopath Insights Suite users can configure their own demographic-specific base audiences and enable reporting on every fine-grained ‘advanced’ audience segment (e.g., reach % of audiences who drank light beer within the last 30 days among P21+ audiences)
API users and Geopath Insights Suite users can upload their own ‘base audience’ via the API for use in calculating reach % computations and ‘total impression’ bases [Note: achieving this outcome is likely to be a dependency for Geopath data integration into the Nielsen Media Impact (NMI) solution]
API users and Geopath Insights Suite users can specify audience targets by zip code and return a sorted list of spots that are most exposed to audiences in that zip code in order to easily visualize/export the particular spots that are ‘best able’ to reach audiences in a specific zip code (or a set of zip codes)
Geopath Insights Suite and API Users set an audience target that can include Boolean syntax (i.e. using 'and' and 'or' clauses with other criteria) [note: only audience targeting ‘unions’ are possible today, and may substitute other criteria]
Geopath Insights Suite users can search for transit inventory and visualize illustrated routes that fleet vehicles are taking, by garage
API Users and Geopath Insights Suite users mark which particular inventory audience measures and/or package/plan audience measures appear unrealistic (and require further Geopath support personnel to investigate), which moves those inventory measures into a queue for subsequent Geopath investigation
Geopath Insights Suite users can receive automated advice to deliver incremental reach through the logically highest-impact inventory that extends an inventory plan given a certain goal (e.g., ‘to meet your plan goal of 150 TRPs for P18+ who live in the the Palm Springs DMA with a higher confidence interval, consider augmenting your transit inventory plan with street furniture at X/Y/Z stations.’)
Geopath Insights Suite users can receive automated advice to deliver incremental reach through the logically highest-impact inventory that extends a market plan given a certain goal (e.g., ‘to meet your plan goal of 150 TRPs for P18+ who live in the Palm Springs DMA with a higher confidence interval, consider augmenting your transit market plan with transit inventory from adjacent DMAs)
Geopath Insights Suite users view ‘packages’ of inventory produced by other users so as to visualize how the other transacting party (on either the buy side or sell side) defines ‘packages’ of inventory for sale
Geopath Insights Suite users see the current filtering criteria applied that matches their search parameters and cascades these filters to other available filtering criteria for selection in realtime so that users can limit selection inconsistences and prevent themselves from creating ‘no inventory’ scenarios
Geopath Insights Suite and API users upload or select a ‘package’ of inventory and track the progress of hypothetical OOH/DOOH campaign progress against the planning goals applied to the campaign, assuming that date ranges are input and finer-grain data outputs (e.g., quarterly, monthly, weekly) are available

Design Principles:

Geopath’s purview will not extend to capturing, reporting, and maintaining operator-provided data on spot-level OOH availability (i.e. # of spots per frame sold); instead, user inputs used in theoretical ‘reach/impression exposure to target audiences over time’ estimates will be used to deliver theoretical outcomes in the context of a specific inventory plan (i.e. where the selected inventory, target geography, target ‘start date’, and target audience are user-provided inputs and the duration of time necessary to complete the goal is the expected output)
Geopath’s data accessibility approach will seek to advance the ease of agencies and advertisers to leverage OOH inventory as an incremental media channel when planning for multi-channel campaigns to highly-targeted audiences, thereby seeking to increase the transparency and utility of OOH media in more complex multichannel transactions and ultimately drive increased spending within the OOH ecosystem.

Risks/Dependencies:

Advanced inventory access control (at the user-level and account-level), including the ability to ‘delegate’ the ability to expose/hide metadata, is necessary to define the basis for sharing both the concepts of a ‘package’ as well as the ability to allow for partial or full visibility to ‘preliminary’ audience measures for specific audiences. As such, business processes and delegation processes will need to be comprehensively defined and verified during functional design prior to implementing any specific type of ‘package’ or ‘visibility’ control within Geopath tools.
User-uploadable ‘base audiences’ may be a dependency on the ability to integrate Geopath data into the Nielsen Media Impact solution.
Complexity of data and infrastructure, as well as recurring spend in data & technical architecture (and associated refactoring), is directly proportional to the speed at which information may be retrieved from Geopath tools, thereby impacting end-user utility (in other words, allowing users to retrieve information quickly, both in the near & long term, will depend on defining and implementing the technical & data architecture vision up-front and creating the necessary building blocks for a lasting, usable solution).

Scope:

Enable the ability for campaign creators to design complex and large queries with less wait time for processing. Separate from the API, optimize Snowflake SQL calculation functions to perform optimally in order to return results within 30 seconds or outright reject the query and pass back error message/rationale to API. Performance target of 30s for ANY API query.
Retool the UI to leverage reduced request/response payloads from API for less wait time and ‘lazy loading’ for output rendering, if necessary. Performance target of 15s for ANY operation in the UI
Redesign Insights Suite UI/UX to be more intuitive and easier to use; Design and implement a more integrated, contextual help (including 'tooltips'/mouseover text)
Expose/integrate "opportunity to see" impressions, as well as traffic counts, circulation, and observed reach outputs into the Geopath UI/UX as well as the API
Redesign data architecture to enable time-series analysis over more than a 12-month period
Allow for the ability to join audience combinations across consumer profile targets, PRIZM segments, and age/gender/ethnicity/income combinations that use either 'AND' logic or 'OR' logic, depending on what the user needs (e.g., "(M18-24 with baseball interest) OR (F18-34 with sports hobby)")
Enable the ability to see the footprint of an asset's viewshed on a map. Also enable the ability to visualize bust & commuter train routes on a map.
Enable the ability, with custom inventory plans, to visualize the package itself on a map, as well as the summary statistics for the package (Reach, Freq., Audience Comp, etc.)
Enable the ability to visualize audiences composed of more than one criterion, e,g,, "BOTH 18-54 AND "works as an accountant". (The current UI only allows "18-54 OR 'works as an accountant'"
Allow Geopath Insights Suite & API Users to select alternative base audiences for reach/frequency % computations from existing set of demographics and consumer profiles
Allow Geopath users to use zip code-level residence of target audiences as input criteria to discovering inventory, then return inventory results matching the residence input (in order of share-of-reach per zip code or per zip code array)
Expose ‘preliminary' audience measures, configurable by media owners/operators, for select inventory (across API and UI); extend to include inventory both ‘pending audit’ as well as 'hypothetical’ inventory, including implementation of access controls to define what member classes can create/view these results
Compute the inventory incrementally required in order to meet/achieve a specific inventory plan, then extend to all dimensional inputs possible for a given inventory/market plan in order to shorten planning time and optimize inventory/market selection processes for given audiences across static & variable timeframes