The UK Outdoor industry reached a milestone last week with the launch of a brand new audience measurement system called
Route. The system produces audience estimates for Out-of-Home advertising and the data captures how many people saw an advertisement, how often they saw it and the profile of those who have seen it.
Much of the excitement comes from the fact that
Route fundamentally changes the focus of Outdoor media planning from panels to audience. It has been designed around people's daily movements on a hyper-local level, making it possible now to plan by bespoke geographical areas and by day part.
The revolutionary research incorporated the largest GPS travel survey ever conducted, monitoring the movements of 28,000 people across road, bus and metro environments. Data will be extended to include airports, malls and railways later this year.
Postar was the forerunner of all modern audience measurement systems but with that came legacy issues making it difficult to develop the system to include other outdoor environments, which have expanded considerably in importance since
Postar was conceived. With
Route, the UK outdoor industry has the courage to completely reinvent the platform of Outdoor audience research, building a coherent system to measure all the outdoor formats and their communication effect collectively.
This has significant impact on the UK market, allowing Out-of-Home to compete more clearly with other traditional media and show value in conjunction with newer online media.
We believe that this initiative will allow genuine selling by audience across all outdoor platforms and make it simpler for planners and buyers to see the advantages of the outdoor medium.
JCDecaux UK is already developing tools for a more granular audience-selling approach, such as the innovative
VirtuoCity.
Learn more about the
Route system at the
Outdoor Media Centre or
Route websites, or contact us.
