AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST

In Audience Measurement Outdoor appears to be leading the Way

By Erwin Ephron

When the apostle Matthew said, The last shall be first, he wasn’t thinking about Outdoor. But it’s a good fit.

Outdoor’s plan to use “visibility” adjustments, called VAI, to measure the number of consumers who actually see a billboard, shames all of the other media exposure numbers we plan and buy with.

In every audience measurement there’s a big difference between what we are trying to measure and how we are forced to measure it.

For example, we buy TV to reach viewers with commercials, but we use pushed a button on a peoplemeter as our behavioral proxy; although we know pushed a button does not mean viewing. And it certainly doesn’t mean viewing a commercial.

The agreed-upon surrogate measure for commercial exposure is called OTS, or Opportunity to see an ad carried by the medium.

Now, Outdoor has a serious OTS problem. Its current audience estimates are based on estimates of passengers in cars passing by Outdoor locations. These traffic counts are much higher than actual ad exposures.

In the UK and overseas an OTS adjustment, based on other measurements has been introduced to make the Outdoor numbers a better measure of ad exposures and media value.

The total system is called Visibility Adjusted Impacts or VAI.

VAI reduces OTS for an Outdoor display based upon the likelihood that a driver or passenger passing by will see it.

The adjustment has two elements:

1) The physical attributes of the Outdoor unit, including display size, impairment of view, angle to the road and average speed of vehicles passing. These are obtained by survey.

2) Discount factors estimating how much the physical attributes (above) in combination, diminish the probability of the display being seen. These discount factors are modeled from field- and laboratory-perception studies.

VAI modifies the count of potential exposure (OTS) by the probability that the ad will be seen (VAI factors). It is a major advance in our thinking.

This idea is applicable not only to Outdoor but to all media.

An adjustment for unit size, for example, works across all media, not just Outdoor, why not use it? The idea that we do not adjust Print OTS for the use of fractional units is puzzling. The idea that we do not adjust TV OTS for length of message, 15’s versus 30’s, is inexcusable.

TV measurements use average-minute instead of commercial-minute, they do not factor-in commercial avoidance, distractions or leaving the room, and as a result they produce an audience number much larger than a count of “viewers probably seeing the commercial” would be.

Carrying it further, think of pod length, location of set, presence of others in room, presence of children in the room.

All of these are recorded by Nielsen. And all of these attributes of viewing affect whether a commercial will be seen.

We simply have to determine which variables are most important and measure by how much each affects the probability that a commercial will be seen and we have what’s needed to model VAI for TV.

Why is this important?

Falling commercial recall scores reinforce the idea that the difference between OTS, the measurement, and sees my commercial, the goal, is getting larger every year.

With VAI’s we can generate far more realistic estimates of campaign delivery. These would likely show selective decreases of 25-to-40% in audience, create new price elasticities between day parts and media, and, take a deep breath, a different notion of what is reach and what is frequency.

Redefining
Reach and Frequency

Let’s look at the reach-frequency transformation using television.

If the Nielsen-reported Male 18-to-34 average minute viewers of CSI, for example, have a VAI adjustment of 25%, which is reasonable, the probability that the average young male viewer will see the average commercial is 0.75.

That means it takes actually takes two exposures to CSI for the average young male viewer to be reached with a commercial message.

This shifts the reach qualifier from a frequency of one to a frequency of 1.5 and dramatically changes the reach of most low-TRP schedules, along with the value of frequency and way we plan media.

But the even bigger issue is in the future of TV measurement.

Low response and media fragmentation continue to increase survey error. A clear example is the growing cable understatement in diaries.

The only way to control this by moving to a measurement that doesn’t rely on respondent memory or their active cooperation. A so-called “passive” system such as the Arbitron Personal, Portable Meter (PPM).

But we pay a price.

The more passive the measurement, the less it is able to measure what we want it to measure. A passive system measures proximity, “in the presence of” not “viewing, listening or reading.”

A passive measurement turns all media into Outdoor.

Passive systems require VAI adjustments to give us counts of persons seeing the advertising. Passive plus VAI is the best measurement system we can construct today for most media.

I began by suggesting that when it comes to better audience measurement, Outdoor will lead the way.

Have you stopped laughing?

- July 1, 2004 -

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