Market Plan Tool - Business Requirements

Owned by Chris Luken
Last updated: Jul 14, 2023 by Tim Garton
8 min read

Document Overview

This document seeks to achieve three objectives:

  1. Outline the specific capabilities and end-user usage rationales that currently drive the usage of Geopath's "Market Plan” tool among OOH industry stakeholders today,

  2. Examine existing capabilities to capture areas where there may be room for improvement of existing capabilities, and

  3. Categorize and prioritize capabilities that the Market Plan tool does not yet explicitly support (so as to serve as a record of what this tool should provide for the OOH industry).

Once these business needs and rationales are comprehensively defined and priorities are aligned, Geopath will design incremental enhancements that achieve the highest-value capabilities and then improve the tool.

Definitions

Market Plan – A summarization of inventory measures for a set of OOH ad units required to meet a goal. The goal can be either a quantified marketing objective or a user supplied number of ad units for a given market(s), target audience(s), media type(s), and time period(s). The goal can be achieved using a user supplied ordered list of ad units or the goal can be achieved by allowing the market plan to select ad units that meet the specified inventory criteria and are an ordered list of “average” (as determined by the market plan algorithm) ad units for the specified criteria.

Inventory Plan - A summarization of inventory that outlines aggregate audience measurements for a specific selection of OOH ad units given a specific market(s), target audience(s), and time period(s). An inventory plan provides a summarization of what specific OOH inventory units can achieve (+/- 5%) to reach a specific audience within an ‘average’ set of weeks over the course of a year.

Stakeholder Personas

  • OOH Operator (owns or manages OOH ad units; sells ad units)

  • Advertising Agency (represents Advertisers; purchases or negotiates purchases of OOH ad units)

  • Advertiser (sells goods or services; seeks to maximize ad exposure via OOH & other channels)

  • Data Analysts (uses data to rigorously answer fact based questions about OOH inventory)

  • Geopath (measures OOH ad units; provides forecasts about OOH ad unit exposure)

Goals of Market Plan

  1. It is a hard requirement for Market Plans to support all media classification types noting that in particular transit OOH classifications heavily depend on market plans.

  2. Market plans are designed to support multiple inventory sets that meet different criteria. Market plan calls the different groups “Media Type Groups”. Market plan currently supports an equal distribution of the goal across each “media type group”. It is currently possible to select Media Type Groups from differing “classifications”, (i.e., Roadside, Place-based, or Fleet Exterior - Scheduled) in the Insights Suite User Interface and/or the Insights API. If media type groups from multiple different media classification types are chosen as input to a Market Plan there are limitations on the result, i.e.,

    1. Reach deduplication across media classification types is an estimate that likely over estimates reach, possibly significantly depending on the number of ad units required by each media type group.

    1. Compute time is increased with different media classification types and thus the maximum spot limits currently supported by Market Plans may be reduced with mixed media classification type plans.

  3. Enable media planners (at agencies and advertisers) to understand what audience exposure outcomes are reasonably possible (via a complete set of Geopath OOH inventory measures) in any given market with a certain type of OOH inventory, so as to demonstrate the value of adding OOH inventory into national & local media plans. When providing a snapshot into what is reasonably possible, abide by the following rules:

    1. If the user does not limit the plans request to specific operator’s inventory, do not influence the decision of the user to select inventory from specific operators, so as to remain seller-agnostic when outlining the potential ad value of OOH within a specific market.

    2. Any inventory selected by the Market Plan must be constrained to the target audience segment and target geography.

  4. Provide media operators the ability to estimate the audience exposure potential of ‘typical’ inventory offered by their competitors within a specific market, for the purpose of informing their competitive positioning

  5. Indicate the 'average’ amount of advertising inventory required to achieve the advertiser’s goal for the purpose of starting buyer/seller negotiations for OOH ad space

  6. Provide Operators and Advertisers with information regarding the amount of inventory indicated by the Market Plan that is easily purchasable such that:

    1. The parameters of the inventory and the plan’s advertising goal must be easily communicated from the advertiser to the operator, such that the operator can reproduce the plan’s estimated audience exposure results. 

    2. There must be multiple potential (non-overlapping) sets of spots that achieve the advertiser’s goal so that multiple agencies/advertisers could easily achieve the outcomes the plan generates if they purchased the ad units specified.

  7. Provide Operators and Advertisers with information regarding the number of spots required to achieve a goal that reflect a “reasonable” use of inventory so as to demonstrate the value of an educated buyer in media planning and the value of an advantaged seller with uniquely valuable inventory, such that:

    1. A human selecting spots for the purpose of minimizing inventory required to achieve the goal should not be able to easily & significantly reduce the number of spots and still meet the advertiser’s goal

    2. The algorithm that drives the spot selection should not select so few spots to deliver the goal that a human could not easily replicate the outcome when attempting to select spots that meet the criteria provided

    3. The algorithm that drives the spot selection should seek to assume exposure of the ad unit to all targeted people, equally prioritizing reach and frequency when given either a reach goal, impressions goal, or a TRP goal (without specifying a specific frequency goal)

    4. The number of spots required to achieve a specific reach percent goal should be understandable to both operators and advertisers, such that when the number of spots estimated to achieve the goal may not be intuitive at first glance it can be confirmed by a salesperson, with data, to be reasonable & explainable.

    5. Outputs for general audience targets (e.g., P0+, P18+) should be reasonably useful for operators to establish OOH ‘rate cards’ for typical inventory selection in each market, per operator, to reasonably price their inventory according to key metrics (e.g., CPM, Reach, Frequency, etc)

    6. Outputs for general audience targets (e.g., P0+, P18+) should be reasonably useful for Operators, Agencies, and Advertisers to discover high-value media packages across various OOH media classes (which may be priced per media class/type today, such as ‘roadside static bulletins’, but are more efficient when paired with other media classes/types)

  8. Enable Advertisers and Operators to be able to create and communicate plans with minimal user effort so as to expedite the buyer/seller negotiation process.

 

Market Plan User Stories [with relative priorities]

[Must have] As Geopath, I must not influence in any way the decision of which operator’s inventory is used to satisfy a market plan.

[Must have] As an Advertising Agency or an OOH Operator, I need a Market Plan to return the amount of inventory required to achieve a goal based on one of the following:

… so that I can advise my advertiser client if their agreed-upon marketing objectives can reasonably be achieved in their target market.

[Must have] As an Advertising Agency, I need to be able to communicate all or part of my market plan (at the aggregate level) to one or more operators so that I can book inventory to execute my market plan.

[Must have] As an Advertising Agency or OOH Operator I would like to be able to determine the ordered list of spots used to create a specific market plan when the operator is given as a filter criteria in the plan so that I can evaluate changes to the given list of spots to achieve my goals.

[Must have] As an Advertising Agency or OOH Operator I need to be able to exclude spots from the plan calculation so that I can account for unavailable inventory in my plan or test removing a portion of inventory to see the resulting impact to Market Plans.

[Must have] As an OOH Operator I need to be able to supply an ordered list of spots to be included as the first spots selected in a Market Plan so that I can evaluate the impact of different spot prioritization on Market Plans and/or modify the selection order.

[Really ought-to-have] As an Advertising Agency, I need to be able to determine a budgetary cost (using a $-per-unit average rate card for specific media types, provided by operators) based on the number of advertising units of OOH advertising inventory required to achieve a reach percentage goal for a specific audience segment in one or more audience geographical regions so that I can confirm that I can achieve my advertising campaign objectives within my budget.

[Really ought-to-have] As an OOH Operator, I need there to be an inventory solution capable of satisfying a market plan reach goal even when approximately half of my ad units is reserved by other advertising customers so that I have a solution for all advertising customers.

[Really ought-to-have] As an Advertising Agency, I need to be able to define a market plan without specifying the network operator’s specific inventory for fulfilling the market plan, so that I can acquire inventory for my market plan from any operator with available inventory while still requiring the inventory counts to be accurate within +/- 20% (so that the plan will fall within the range of typical budgetary flexibility).

[Really ought-to-have] As an OOH Operator, I need advertising agencies to be able to create a market plan that requires no more of my inventory than necessary to achieve a reach goal so that my OOH inventory competes favorably with other non-OOH advertising channels and thus advertisers initiate a purchase conversation with me.

[Ought-to-have] As an Advertising Agency, I need to know the point of diminishing returns on the reach percent as incremental ad units are added for a given type of inventory, given audience segment, and a given audience geography (and other criteria like operator/media type/etc) so that I can adjust the media types necessary to achieve my advertising campaign objectives within my budgetary constraints and so that I can minimize the amount of time required to determine the media mix to achieve my goals.

[Nice-to-have] As an Advertising Agency, I need to be able to specify my market plan has more than one media type component (e.g., place-based digital posters vs scheduled fleet kings vs roadside bulletins, etc) and be able to determine a budgetary cost of OOH advertising inventory based on the number of advertising units required for each component of my market plan so that I can maximize the return on advertising investments within my budget and demonstrate value as a media planner to my clients.