World Out of Home Organization Launching New Audience Measurement Initiative
May 13, 2021 by Dave Haynes
Audience measurement is a huge factor in the out of home media business – both analog and digital – and the global volunteer body that’s trying to herd the media company cats has developed a set of guidelines designed to help more easily sell the mediums.
The World Out of Home Organization (or WOO) will unveil its Creating Global Guidelines for Out of Home Audience Measurement initiative at its European Forum next week (5/18).
The WOO project is being run by Neil Eddleston of Runor Data Consulting, an OOH audience measurement firm. Eddleston, says WOO in announcing the guidelines, chaired the original ESOMAR Technical Committee, that created the Global OOH guidelines in 2009. The updated guidelines will be developed on behalf of WOO by industry specialist Gideon Adey of the GUROOH consultancy.
WOO is the only global organization for the collaboration, development and promotion of OOH media. They have formed a Technical Committee to include the leading independent OOH audience measurement bodies from 13 countries, across six continents, alongside four leading international OOH businesses.
The new guidelines will update OOH Audience measurement for the current and future OOH marketplace; provide a framework for the measurement of digital OOH; address the creation of audience data for automated trading; and the development of cross-media measurement techniques.
“It’s vital that the OOH industry continues the development of world class audience measurement to compete with other data-heavy media for local and global ad spending,” says Eddleston. “Out of Home has an amazing record of delivering excellent results for advertisers but we need the up-to-date ammunition to make our case most effectively.”
The European Forum is free to WOO members. Non-members will also be able to register for €150 Euros.
Critically, the Media Rating Council in the US is also developing Standards for OOH Audience Measurement (all formats) having already released Standards for DOOH. Regrettably the latter were considered misguided by the global OOH research cognoscenti as they ignored existing OOH measurement principles, terminology and consequent comgruent metrics. As such, the MRC helped to underpin a separate and distinct currency for DOOH versus “traditional” OOH. This was not in the interests of advertisers or the media agencies for whom estimating unduplicated reach based on the SAME target audience ad exposure metric within and across any media platforms is pivotal. Establishing different media currencies – DOOH vs OOH vs social media vs Broadcast, etc. makes this calculation impossible at any level of validity. Hopefully the WOO and MRC will be collaborating.