The UK audience research body for outdoor advertising, Postar, relaunched itself as Route on February 26th – taking the opportunity to unveil its new and highly anticipated out-of-home (OOH) audience research system.
Around £19 million has been invested in the research, which offers fascinating statistics about how Britain moves in the context of the opportunity to see outdoor ads. It’s also the largest ever GPS travel survey with a fieldwork sample of 28,000 people, each carrying special meters for nine days to record how people move around as they live day-to-day. In total, about 19 billion GPS records have been read to date – a figure that is set to increase by 3.3 billion every year.
The move marks the foundation for fundamental change in the way OOH media is approached and signifies revolutionary developments from media to audience planning.
As the successor to Postar, which was set up in 1996 to cover all outdoor environments including airports, public transport hubs, shopping centres and roadside frames, Route offers data that is credible, robust, comprehensive, granular and accurate. Individual environments such as those mentioned will be added in stages – with launch data focused on roadside and bus activity, with tube figures to follow shortly.
Route measures and models all human interactions with OOH media and estimates out-of-home advertising engagement with data published that tells subscribers how many people have seen an advertising campaign and how often. Audiences can be broken down into many typologies including age, class, lifestyle, shopping habits and so on with information used as currency for planning, trading and evaluating advertising investment. A new film has been posted online which also details the new Route offering.
In an average day, it is estimated that individuals make eye contact with around 27 roadside posters and 14 bus ads. Every time they make a tube journey, it is though that they’ll encounter an average of 74 ads. Average distances travelled out-of-home is 241km per week and the speed increases with age reaching an average of 19.94 km/h. However, it seems people start to slow down in their sixties. In regards to gender, the research shows that men travel faster and go further than women – 288 km vs. 197 km in a week.
MEC opinion: With the right technology, developed by our sister agency Kinetic, there is a great amount of potential for the new Route system. Data can be used to measure all human interaction with OOH and looked at by geography from postcode sector up, as well as by demography, lifestyle, day part and day of week. This kind of incredibly accurate measurement gives us a great too for tracking and measuring the effect of ROI, action and impact across environments and formats. Kinetic Route Planner will use the new data to provide cover and frequency by audience, by postcode, by town and by region.