Postar re-launches as Route with new out-of-home audience research
Postar has re-launched as ‘Route’ as it unveils its new out-of-home audience research system.
The audience research body for outdoor advertising in Great Britain invested £19 million into investigating how Britain moves when it comes to seeing outdoor ads.
The research study, undertaken by Ipsos MediaCT and MGE Data, used a fieldwork sample of 28,000 people to conduct the study, recording a total of 19 billion GPS records; the largest GPS travel survey to ever take place.
The new research has been designed around hyper-local geography which makes it possible to plan by town, or create bespoke geography as well as to choose from 24 conurbations or the 14 BARB areas. In addition, it is now possible to plan and trade by day-part as the new study has been designed accordingly.
Route encompassed a range of outdoor environments when conducting the study, including airports, buses, the underground and shopping centres, revealing that in an average day, a person will see approximately 27 roadside posters, 14 bus advertisements and 74 ads with each tube journey that they take.
It was also revealed that the average distance that a person will travel out of home per week is 241km at an average of 19.94 km/h. Men both travel farther and faster than women.
The research can be broken down into demographics, including age, class and lifestyle, giving a greater insight into the way in which people view and are affected by outdoor advertising.
“We now know who is travelling where, how, when and at what speed,” said James Whitmore, Managing Director of Route. “The name, “Route”, is designed to reflect this. Increasingly, time spent out-of-home is about understanding the routes that people take. It is about knowing the pathways of the eye.”
Jeremy Male, Chair of the Outdoor Media Centre added that the launch of Route is the result of years of rigorous planning and investment that set out to provide advertisers and agencies with a “state of the art outdoor audience planning system.”
Mungo Knott, the Marketing and Insight Director at Primesight said: “All this data means that advertisers can understand a lot more about their customers’ behaviour in the active space outside their home or workplace and use this information to select advertising opportunities which will target them most effectively.
“This level of insight is invaluable to agencies whose need is to ensure that their advertising campaigns are effective and their media investments are efficient.”
Video: How the new Route data was collected
Asked how Route will change outdoor media, Glen Wilson, Managing Director at Posterscope, said It will lead to “innovative approaches to outdoor planning and to new tools; better accountability and more sophisticated auditing,” suggesting that data that can now be remixed with other data sources, both industry and proprietary, and day-parts data too – and that plays to digital out-of-home.
“Route opens the door to trading by audience in the future,” he said, “if that’s what we want.”
Road, bus and tube data is available immediately, with rail and retail coming soon and airports ready by the end of the year.
James Whitmore writes exclusively on Newsline today. You can read his article – that examines in detail what today’s news will mean for outdoor media – here.
A round-up of industry reaction – including opinion from Primesight, MEC and MediaVest UK – can be found here.