Solar audits

Out-of-home media do not audit comfortably says James Whitmore, managing director at Route – so he’d like to suggest a staging post to help the sector overcome some inherent problems. The first step is to imagine our solar system…

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of John F Kennedy brings to mind the speech that he made the year before he was assassinated. It was one of the most audacious statements of leadership of the last century. 1962 was also the year when the planets were last in approximate alignment.

Kennedy made no mention of cost/benefit analyses, KPIs, P1s, P2s, audits and so on. It took the Americans just under seven years to achieve the goal. Given the complexity of the task, it might well have taken them longer than that to “do the metrics” for the project. Certainly the present experience of HS2 would point that way.

Which got me thinking about how to apply numbers to multi-dimensional questions. Specifically, it brings to mind the problem of media audits of outdoor advertising campaigns. I wonder if the answer might not be in the solar system.

If you strip away extraneous puff and packaging, campaign evaluations are about a relationship between a measure of price and an opposing numerical assessment of quality. The second part of the equation might require a leap of faith but we are where we are. The two dimensions pull apart like a mediaeval ne’er-do-well on a rack.

Out-of-home media do not audit comfortably. This is partly because there is very little money in it for the auditors, if any. Clients tend to tuck the task into a bigger arrangement that focuses on TV. Consequently, auditors have little or no cost centre against which to resource their work on OOH evaluation. There is no incentive to innovate. The desire is for a tick in a box, no matter how little meaning it might have.

The trouble is that the ticks in the boxes count in the broader context of how advertisers use the medium and how the agencies and media owners choose to run their businesses and invest for the future.

In recent years, evaluation of OOH campaigns has rested on the dynamic of price per frame (cost) against the average adult frame rating (quality). Thus a “good” campaign returns an above average frame (or spot) rating at a competitive average cost per unit.

To extend this thinking to other media, it equates to the majority of the ads going into peak airtime or the highest circulating papers and magazines. In OOH, you ignore smaller population areas and flows. Inevitably, you lose control of audience composition, depress cover and increase frequency. Yet that has been assumed to be what quality means.

It would be unfair to lay all the blame at the feet of the advertisers and their auditors. The OOH world is also part of the problem in that it struggles to reconcile what it is and how it should act.

Is it a real estate business that focuses on location and presentation? Is the offer to a client a fortnight’s rental of a bijou plot? Or is it a medium that offers definable audiences in measureable volumes at specific times to advertisers? Or is it a bit of each?

There are yet further considerations. What is the value of scale? Presentation? Context? What about proximity and immediacy? Interaction? Many suggest that dwell time is an inherent property of the medium (and not a function of the creative work). How do you value these?

It is not an entanglement that promises an imminent solution. In the absence of a consensus, I’d like to suggest a staging post. Let’s think of it as a solar system.

At the outset, a client would decide if something like cost is to be their Jupiter or Mercury. In other words, you weight the various attributes of the medium and the relative importance of your objectives in each case. You determine how many planets there are in your system, agree the criteria against which each planet is to be judged and how big each planet should be. Then all you have to do is to align your planets somewhere above the median line.

In the example shown, the campaign has failed to deliver against the audience objectives. It is particularly bad news as this was considered to be the most important aspects of the activity.

The great thing about the solar approach to auditing is that you can get really detailed and give moons to each of your worlds – and try and align those too. Thus the audience globe might boast moons for cover, frequency distribution and profile. It can be as simple or as complex as you wish.

I suggest that by teasing out the various aspects of the medium in this way and by giving air to the claims of each of the attributes; in time advertisers, auditors, agencies and media owners, will edge closer to a better understanding of the relative values to be found in this multi-dimensional medium.

At the very least, it would be healthy to consider alternatives to the present approach. As JFK demonstrated, nothing is too difficult once you have decided to give it a shot.