New audience measurement for OOH, through newly formed council

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The structure of the JIC is based on the findings from the South African Audience Research Foundation (SAARF) Future Proofing exercise, conducted by Kuper Research in 2012, following the successful Route JIC structure (UK). It draws on international best practice where it is linked via data fusion to an establishment survey (ES), along with a variety of other dedicated media surveys.

Major participating OOH companies, supported by technical expertise from Kuper Research, will run and control the OMC JIC. Kuper Research will head the steering council that monitors the technical aspects of the research and will be involved in the marketing and analysis. This will ensure the independence, robustness and transparency of the research, which has been initially underwritten by Continental Outdoor Media and Primedia Outdoor. The OMC will participate in the development of the establishment survey.

Council's vision

The OMC's vision is to produce consolidated, inclusive and representative research covering the key OOH areas, including billboards, transit, airport, Gautrain, malls and digital OOH. Static roadside formats are being addressed first in the research, with further methodologies already being investigated to cover the diversity of OOH environments.

The innovative methodology includes the combination of traffic flows, satellite images, and travel patterns to create a comprehensive traffic model, which when combined with the location of all media owner billboard panels, creates an accurate representation of OOH audiences. These elements are modelled to create OOH ratings. Elements such as direction of traffic flow and visibility are taken into account as part of the model.

The new OOH currency will deliver reach, frequency, GRPs, duplication factors, impacts, CPM and will be comparable to other media metrics for the first time in South Africa.

The benefits of the new OOH currency are endless for media buyers, who will now have a consolidated, single view to access and plan from all media owner OOH inventory. State-of-the art, geo-spatial, sophisticated Quantum software will be available to buyers through Telmar, and will allow for ease of planning and purchase, and generate standardised and measurable plans.

Key players

• Kuper Research - Leaders of the Advisory and Technical panels
• User advisory panels - made up of key OOH buyers
• Cuende - a Spanish market research company, the 'rocket scientists of OOH research', providing groundbreaking and 'big-data' methodologies and models that have been introduced in a number of countries in Europe and South America
• Ask Afrika - fieldwork providers for the travel questionnaire, which provides the foundation for the demographic and traffic model
• Software: Telmar in partnership with Cuende's Quantum software

Memorandum of Incorporation due soon

The OMC JIC's Memorandum of Incorporation (MOI) is about to be lodged. This should be formalised within the next six weeks, after which the supplier contracts will be included into the OMC. In order to expedite the process, Continental Outdoor Media and Primedia Outdoor have contracted with all relevant suppliers, Ask Afrika, Cuende and Kuper Research, and provided the relevant funding.

Once the OMC is registered, it will be in a position to formalise other media owner participation in the JIC for the Static Roadside project. At this stage, ten media owners have committed to participate in the JIC. This roughly represents up to 90% of the Static Roadside media owner pie. The first results will be published in July/August 2015.