Measured in the sky
Outdoor Advertising: A pilot project by APG and Clear Channel Plakanda shows that satellite technology and electronics can be used to measure the exposure potential of billboard locations. Initial results are now available.
Outdoor advertising A pilot project by APG and Clear Channel Plakanda shows: Thanks to satellite and electronics, the contact opportunities of poster sites can be determined. The fact that half of advertising investments are thrown out the window was already known to car king Henry Ford - it was (and still is) only unclear which half. However, this problem has now also been clarified - but only for billboard advertising and, for the time being, only for Winterthur. There, 30 percent of the B12 and B200 poster sites (PS) are positioned in such a way that they generate 50 percent of the contact opportunities of all Winterthur PS. What's more, it is possible to specify exactly which PSs are among the top sites.321 test persons on the roadThis information is possible thanks to Swiss Poster Research (SPR), a poster research project developed by Lausanne professor Martial Pasquier on behalf of and in collaboration with the outdoor advertising companies Allgemeine Plakatgesellschaft (APG) and Clear Channel Plakanda (CCP). It uses satellite technology to measure PS contact opportunities. A pilot project in Winterthur showed that the method works, with a total of 321 people each carrying a device for a week that stored their locations every second using GPS (Geographical Positioning System). These were then transferred to a map that also contained the positions of the Winterthur PS. This made it possible to determine when each of these people living in the Winterthur conurbation passed which PS and at what angle - or how high the chances of contact are for each individual PS. As a result, it can now be precisely determined that only the data from 268 of the 321 test subjects could be used - due to device defects or incorrect behavior on the part of some test subjects. A total of 93122 contact opportunities were counted, of which 24633 were from pedestrians and 68489 from motorists. 35 percent of the contact opportunities took place between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. 8.9 percent of all PS passages took place at night with unlit billboards and were therefore not counted as contact opportunities. And 20 percent of the test subjects accounted for half of all contact opportunities.
The SPR does not show how many posters were actually seen. However, the term media contact was defined so narrowly in this project that CCP CEO Beat Roeschlin and APG CEO Christian Kauter spoke of the "hardest media currency in Switzerland" when presenting the results. Just how hard it is can be seen from the criteria that are taken into account: If a person approaches at an angle of 45 degrees, this counts as frontal contact and is weighted more heavily than an angle between 45 and 150 degrees (parallel contact). At more than 150 degrees, the person moves away from the poster, which is not counted as contact. A passage at a distance of more than 80 meters also does not count as contact. In addition, a passage in unlit PS only counts as a contact between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., and contacts made by people moving faster than at
The weighting of the posters of people traveling at ten kilometers per hour is only half as high as that of people traveling more slowly. In addition, a PS with more than one surface is weighted less heavily than a stand-alone billboard.
What happens next with the SPR is only partially clear: because the pilot project does not yet provide a large enough sample for Winterthur, it will be extended by 300 test weeks in the summer. The city of Zurich will then follow. However, this will require more than 1200 test weeks, additional GPS devices and a correspondingly larger budget. While APG has already pledged its share, CCP CEO Roeschlin still has to apply for his in London. He even spoke of "going to Canossa". If necessary, however, Kauter hinted that APG would go it alone with the SPR. The costs to date have amounted to a total of two million Swiss francs, but several times that amount will have to be raised to collect the data in Zurich and eight other Swiss conurbations (by the end of 2006).
At the presentation, Stephan Küng (Initiative Media) and specialist journalist Ueli Custer praised the fact that out-of-home advertisers had managed to find an industry solution for poster research. This is not a matter of course: the project almost failed a year ago due to a dispute between the competitors had it not been for the mediation of the Swiss Advertisers Association.
The working group (see box) wants to set up a standardized database and a planning tool that takes into account the different marketing approaches of APG and CCP (network vs. individual point philosophy).
Only at night did the GPS not provide any data on the satellite: Poster sites in Winterthur were recorded electronically 50 percent of the time.
The SPR does not show how many posters were actually seen. However, the term media contact was defined so narrowly in this project that CCP CEO Beat Roeschlin and APG CEO Christian Kauter spoke of the "hardest media currency in Switzerland" when presenting the results. Just how hard it is can be seen from the criteria that are taken into account: If a person approaches at an angle of 45 degrees, this counts as frontal contact and is weighted more heavily than an angle between 45 and 150 degrees (parallel contact). At more than 150 degrees, the person moves away from the poster, which is not counted as contact. A passage at a distance of more than 80 meters also does not count as contact. In addition, a passage in unlit PS only counts as a contact between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., and contacts made by people moving faster than at
The weighting of the posters of people traveling at ten kilometers per hour is only half as high as that of people traveling more slowly. In addition, a PS with more than one surface is weighted less heavily than a stand-alone billboard.
What happens next with the SPR is only partially clear: because the pilot project does not yet provide a large enough sample for Winterthur, it will be extended by 300 test weeks in the summer. The city of Zurich will then follow. However, this will require more than 1200 test weeks, additional GPS devices and a correspondingly larger budget. While APG has already pledged its share, CCP CEO Roeschlin still has to apply for his in London. He even spoke of "going to Canossa". If necessary, however, Kauter hinted that APG would go it alone with the SPR. The costs to date have amounted to a total of two million Swiss francs, but several times that amount will have to be raised to collect the data in Zurich and eight other Swiss conurbations (by the end of 2006).
At the presentation, Stephan Küng (Initiative Media) and specialist journalist Ueli Custer praised the fact that out-of-home advertisers had managed to find an industry solution for poster research. This is not a matter of course: the project almost failed a year ago due to a dispute between the competitors had it not been for the mediation of the Swiss Advertisers Association.
The working group (see box) wants to set up a standardized database and a planning tool that takes into account the different marketing approaches of APG and CCP (network vs. individual point philosophy).
Only at night did the GPS not provide any data on the satellite: Poster sites in Winterthur were recorded electronically 50 percent of the time.
Stored the locations of the test persons and calculated the chances of contact: Mobility Meter.
These people work in the Swiss Poster Research working group:
Chair: Martial Pasquier, Professor in Lausanne;
APG: Rolf Chiarini, Marketing Director; Christof Hotz, Marketing;
CCP: Beat Roeschlin, CEO; Urs Zeier, Zeier Consultants;
Project management and office: Patrick Pfäffli, Felix Mende, Input Zurich
User CommissionThe SPR project is being pursued by a User Commission whose members include Stephan Küng (Initiative Media), Ueli Custer (specialist journalist), SWA Director Jürg Siegrist and various representatives of out-of-home advertising clients. (mk)
Markus Knöpfli
