Measurement Part One: The Value Equation of Physical Media

Tim Rowe (00:00:00) - Multi part measurement series is here. It's the multi-part measurement series, and this is going to be part one. This is going to be really a well rounded, what I hope to be a well-rounded content experience. And a couple of episodes ago I kind of set the objective that this would be the most comprehensive measurement resource on out-of-home by the time it's done. So if you've been following along to the blog, thank you. If you haven't, I'll link to it in the show notes so you can kind of lock in some of the concepts. What I'm not going to do in this episode is read you the blogs. What I am going to do in this episode is give you context to both parts one and two in that series. The first part of that series is counting versus attribution, right? Measuring the effectiveness of out-of-home advertising. How do those two things fit together? And then part two of that is challenges in valuing the physical media moving beyond the impression counting. So it's going to be those two concepts that we talk about here today.

Tim Rowe (00:01:04) - Again, they'll be linked, the blogs will be linked in the show notes. So go back, read them, lock it in. This is your, you know, added perspective, if you will. So measurement as a as a concept and out of home. I think it's real heady just out of the box because it actually means two completely different things. Media owner, publisher perspective. That was a tongue twister. I didn't need to self-induced I suppose, but from a media owner publisher perspective, the thing that we care about most there is establishing a currency that everyone can agree to, right? That we're all on equal footing. And there are we're all playing by the same rules, right? That's measurement from, again, media owner publisher perspective, the tongue twister of the day that I've now managed to land three out of the last four times. So try it on for yourself. And then the other hand, that is attribution reporting, right? This is what my perspective is. And having worked with brands on a lot of this stuff directly is the attribution reporting piece.

Tim Rowe (00:02:05) - So impression counting, right? It's the number of times an ad is seen. We're potentially using some mobile data traffic data footfall data and putting it into this this measurement soup and getting a value assigned to a specific ad placement. From there, we can assign a value of the audience. We can look at a potential CPM, right, and start to estimate a value based on some established currency that is counting the number of impressions of our specific ad placement. From an agency standpoint, I'm looking at that from all of the formats I've selected, all of the markets and how I'm putting the campaign together, potentially building to an impression level or looking for a distribution of impressions across different formats to have a really truly full funnel out-of-home approach. So impression counting is really, really valuable on the front end, on the planning end and then could potentially be used from a from a post campaign reporting standpoint of, hey, this is how many impressions you delivered over that campaign duration, right? So impression counting really, really valuable for establishing values for pre planning and even some post planning use cases.

Tim Rowe (00:03:14) - On the flip side of that though, is attribution reporting, which involves a completely different set of data and expectations. And really it relates most specifically to to the brand and what the brand cares about, which is being able to quantify a return on their ads, better return on their investment. So this could be using geolocation data to track how many people were exposed to a specific ad placement or to the entire campaign using that data. Then to determine how many people visited my physical point of interest objective, how many people came to my arena, how many people visited my restaurant that were also exposed to this campaign, and then most specifically of the people who were exposed and took the key action that I cared most about, went to my website, converted, went to my app, uploaded a $200 deposit to to to wager on games this weekend Once they took that action, how does that compare? How does that compare across all of the formats? How does that compare within a format? If I'm looking at billboards versus gym media, how did those two formats perform relative to one another? How did they perform in concert with with one another? What key learnings can we extract from that so that we can create a feedback loop to continue to invest confidently and scale profitably? That's really the key concept here.

Tim Rowe (00:04:37) - Invest confidently, scale, profitably. That's attribution reporting. All right. So those are kind of the two first key concepts laying the groundwork in this measurement conversation impression, counting from attribution reporting. So impression and counting. But it's it's late in the afternoon start guess the impression counting piece is. Used to value the media. But I think that there's some challenges. I believe that there's challenges in that, in that there's a conflict of basing the value of the media on a pure impression basis, potentially assigning some sort of multiplier to it for the value of an audience. But when you really look at how out-of-home impacts a media mix, it should be valued as something completely different, right? The first challenge in really valuing physical media is in being able to gauge viewability. Viewability is slightly different than visibility. Visibility means the ability to be seen, right? Viewability means was it seen of a hundred people that walked by it? How many looked at it? How many viewed it? That's what viewability is. So unlike digital media, where you can you can track an impression to be one set of eyeballs.

Tim Rowe (00:05:58) - We're not going to talk about ad fraud here, but let's just say one impression equals one set of eyeballs on an online ad format, right? Physical media like billboards, posters, any sort of signage. In the real world, we can't guarantee that every person who passes by it will look at the ad, let alone see it. Right? So that challenge can be leading to a discrepancy in the number of impressions being counted, making it difficult to determine the true value. And if that weren't challenging enough, then you mix in the confusion of multiple currencies, jockeying for impression, counting supremacy. Right? So stealing a little bit of that from the blog because I think it was more simply stated in the blog than I would have I would have waxed poetic on. But that's kind of challenge one, right? Is just because it's up doesn't mean people looked at it right. And that could vary based on the creative that you ran the time of day that you ran it. If it's on a digital sign.

Tim Rowe (00:06:52) - Right. There's so many factors that go into did my ad get seen? So how do we solve for it? There's not necessarily a clean solution, but we need to solve for it. So take that take that first challenge into consideration. Second challenge is in the inability to track engagement, right? Impression counting is only solving for the number of times an ad is potentially seen, not the level of engagement likely to be had with the format or specifically with your ad campaign. So if the goal of the campaign is to drive a specific action or outcome impression counting is not going to solve for that. So that brings us to the third challenge. Third challenge is that impression counting does not solve for measuring ROI, right? That's not its job. No one's expectation is of impression counting to solve for attribution reporting. So I believe to establish the true value of out-of-home, it requires taking into consideration both the intrinsic and extrinsic value sets of the physical media itself. Right? So intrinsic value is referring to inherent qualities such as the size, the location, the visibility.

Tim Rowe (00:08:02) - It can be seen. It's not beyond a tree. It's not blocked by a building. Right. And out-of-home placement on a busy street corner in a high traffic area may have a higher intrinsic value than a placement in a less populated location. Flip that, though. If that less populated placement carries some sort of novelty or unique quality, it may be just as if not more valuable than the busy street corner. On the other side, you have extrinsic values and those are added by external factors, such as the context in which the ad is being experienced, the literal location, right? Being on the Sunset Strip versus being in Sunset, Arizona. Nothing against Sunset, Arizona. Just, you know, they're not the same, right? The use of build outs, extensions, dynamic digital capabilities. Right. The extrinsic value of physical media is referring to the value added by external factors, such as the context in which the ad is being displayed. Okay, that's it. That's part one in the in the blog to podcast measurement series.

Tim Rowe (00:09:06) - So if you again, if you've read part one and part two, I invite you to go back and do that. If you haven't read them yet, they're linked in the show notes. So stay tuned. Stay subscribed. Parts three, parts four, parts five. They are all scheduled and lined up. We've got some exciting partners that we're going to be bringing in. Craig Benner from Creative Media will be back to join us. Stay tuned for a special special announcement coming out in just a couple of weeks. We've got a lot of exciting things cooking over here that are going to help tie together the measurement conversation as we have it. So stay tuned, stay subscribed and help the podcast grow. A review is the best way to help the podcast grow. So wherever you're listening would mean the world to me if you took the time out today to do that. So next time.

Tim Rowe (00:09:55) - We'll see you.