OUT DOOR BOUNTY

Outdoor may be the oldest – and one of the most traditionally static – advertising mediums. However, with the addition of digital formats, its slice of the industry pie is growing. But are the innovations in measurement systems enough to keep up and is so

The out- of- home (OOH) industry has been going from strength- to-strength, growing at a pace that nearly equals that of digital advertising over the last year. In the latest Standard Media Index insights, outdoor grew 22.2 percent over the previous year, compared to digital’s 22.6 percent growth. Of course, digital is at the heart of the industry’s renewed vigour, but that’s the result of more than just the obvious appearance of a plethora of large and small format digital billboards in recent years.

It’s also down to steadfast investment and innovation in the digital back- end, including bringing digital tools to bear on one of the biggest challenges for the New Zealand industry: audience measurement. In totality, these improvements have been recognised and rewarded by the market, with spend growing healthily.

New Zealand advertisers spent $ 118 million on OOH advertising in 2016, according to the most recent ASA statistics, up from $ 95 million the year before. More importantly, the industry has gained market share. While television and newspapers lost ground, OOH grew its slice of the media pie to 4.6 percent, which is close to industry body OMANZ’S five percent target. Chairman Wayne Chapman says it’s looking at shifting the goal posts further out.

The first factor in OOH’S renaissance is digital outdoor; the engine primarily driving growth in the industry thanks to advertiser interest piqued by the new formats on offer. As an example of that, Brendon Cook, CEO of Australia- based ooh! Media, says he expects digital to contribute to half of all the company’s revenues within the next few years and in New Zealand, “we see this number being significantly higher”.

Part of the promise is the flexibility of digital – creative can be responsive to the time of day, weather conditions, physical location or even current news events, and if neccessary, it can be changed out in seconds after an operator receives creative. It’s also a medium that dovetails nicely with mobile advertising and opportunities for the two to interact (although this is true whether the outdoor asset is digital or static), as we’ve seen with campaigns that make use

of technology such as near field communications (NFC) and brands like Snapchat and Shazam.

Phil Clemas, the former general manager of APN Outdoor (APNO) who co- founded the digital- only boutique outdoor operation Lumo Digital last year, explains advertiser attraction: “[Advertisers] also see there is no need to print skins anymore, and also to go through the trouble and the time to install them on static billboards. So that saves not only money, but also time.” He also notes that the immediacy of content changes is also a plus. “In other words, I could take a piece of content emailed to me by my client today, right now, and within 10 seconds we can upload it onto the billboard.”

That flexibility, for the most part, outweighs any advertiser hesitancy around having to share ad space with others. “I think everybody understood the value exchange between giving up sole display rights with the extra benefit that digital could bring,” says Chapman, who in addition to chairing OMANZ is chief executive of the transit-focused outdoor operator, QMS. “There are a couple of advertisers who still prefer to have sole display rights, and that’s fine, because not every solution is a digital one. My own view is that digital and other formats are part of a broader, out-of-home proposition.”

And that’s a good point. While digital may be the jewel in the crown of OOH at the moment, it’s still a small part of the overall picture. Clemas estimates that there are around 30-40 large format digital billboards in New Zealand out of a couple of thousand overall. “I can’t see that getting into the hundreds, to be honest,” he says. Of course, smaller formats such as those found on bus shelters and inside malls and workplaces bump up that number, but with both cost and council permitting acting as limiting factors, we’re not heading for a digital-only outdoor landscape anytime soon.

The non- obsolescence of print is good news for operators like Phantom Billstickers, whose business has been seeing steady growth – despite the lack of digital formats on the books – thanks to a resurgence of the touring industry, says managing partner Robin Mcdonnell.

But where digital formats might not be the right fit for a company like Phantom right now, it doesn’t mean it never will be – they’re keeping an eye on the tech for sure – but its real promise has been on the back- end. The company has digitised its entire inventory to create an automated booking and inventory management system that will soon see realtime reporting on installation progress rolled out, to the point that advertisers will be able to pinpoint, “with absolute certainty”, the street corner, day and time that a poster will go up.

All this effort helps the business remain competitive now, but it also lays the foundation for the future and projects that might move towards more automated ways of buying, selling and reporting on inventory.

Measuring up

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the New Zealand outdoor industry, though, is audience measurement. Although there’s been talk for a few years about introducing an industrywide standard to measuring viewership on OOH, as Australia did in 2010, there’s been little progress since the last time

NZ Marketing broached the issue with operators in 2014. There was talk of following the Aussies’ lead, but Chapman says the rapid changes in technology made it difficult to assess potential solutions when OMANZ tackled it a couple of years ago.

“We didn’t know what we didn’t know, if that makes sense. Our concern was, are we committing ourselves to a program that ultimately is going to be anything but future-proof?” he says. “Even in the last couple of years, there have been more enhancements and more developments of various technologies and methodologies that will assist us to get a better read and therefore get a better product at the end of this process.”

There are other reasons too— not the least being the difficulty of unifying a group of operators that, as Mcdonnell diplomatically says, “doesn’t necessarily play that well together.” But by appointing Derek Lindsay to the general manager role, OMANZ hopes to change that, and Lindsay has been given a mandate to get the ball rolling.

He hopes that his years of familiarity with operators on the client side will aid him in gaining buy- in to an industry-wide metric, one that both he and OMANZ consider a priority.

One difficulty, he explains, is in finding an approach that caters to the large variety of outdoor formats – adshells, billboards, mall, transit, etc – the differing locations and markets that OOH serves. Lindsay hopes to move fairly quickly on this effort, aiming to have made reasonable progress by the end of this year.

Boiling it down, Lindsay’s approach will be to take what’s working best in Australia and further abroad, what individual operators in New Zealand have already developed, factor in cost, suitability and local adaptability to work towards a solution OMANZ members can get behind.

And despite the sometimes tenuous relationships between operators, Lindsay says he has seen a broad agreement that a unified approach is a necessary way forward to earn credibility for the industry as a whole. “Taking everyone along with me at the same time, and getting that agreement, is quite critical,” he says.

Adshel general manager Nick Vile agrees Lindsay is driving real impetus and says Adhel has “always been supportive of a unified approach to audience measurement, and although this is often listed as a key priority for the sector, there have been plenty of other initiatives to focus on”.

“It seems that with digital well established after a core period of investment that there is a window now to focus on an audience measurement solution that meets both current and future requirements,” says Vile.

He adds a unified approach will provide an AMS that delivers base level measurement to deliver reach and frequency and CPM comparison against other media.

“No matter how sophisticated audience profiling tools are, clients still want to understand what is the cost, and how effective that spend is versus what other media can deliver.”

In the meantime, many operators have taken to developing their own solutions – all of which, reflecting the wide variety that OOH encompasses, come at the audience measurement challenge from a different angle. For example, transit- focused operator isite ( now QMS), one of the early leaders in the space, created a system around mapping bus routes, travel times, traffic flows, points of interest and mesh block census data.

ooh! Media, whose Australian parent just had a merger proposal with APNO batted down by regulators, has developed a retail audience metric based on geo- mapping and multiple data sources which, says CEO Brendon Cook, “was designed specifically for the New Zealand retail market.”

Some operators supplement the existing day traffic visual ( DTV) metric, others do away with it all together. APNO’S newly launched Calibre is one of the former, adding to the DTV by establishing geo- fenced areas in front of billboards that allow it to capture mobile data and cross reference with third- party data to not only measure reach and frequency for any given asset, but to infer socio- economics, demographics and purchasing behaviour.

It’s a solution that APNO is so confident in, that it’s hoping other operators will utilise it as well, as smaller operators Gomedia and Media5 have already signed on to do. “What we’re trying to do with this system is bring a high level of data into a system, which will give transparency across the board and can be utilised across the board,” says Mike Watkins, APNO’S New Zealand general manager. “It’ll become, hopefully, the default solution for the out- of- home industry.”

Others, like Lumo Digital, fall into the latter category having dispensed with DTV, a metric that uses council and NZTA data, overlaid with census information, to provide an estimate of audience. “There’s no way of actually measuring the change in those numbers over a period of time, nor is there any measure of volume changes or trends during the day,” explains Clemas.

Lumo has solved this by placing cameras capable of counting traffic and speed as it moves towards a billboard, and analysing license plates to understand both the frequency of exposure and the flow of traffic – in terms of volume and average speed – past different outdoor sites. Clemas says this gives Lumo the ability to report on real- time traffic flows and frequency, while a Wi- Fi sniffer will identify mobile devices within the vicinity and allow the company to perform more advanced analytics. Like APNO, it’s a model they hope other operators will adopt.

OOH operators like Val Morgan Outdoor, whose New Zealand inventory is largely comprised of digital screens in office buildings in main centres, has taken another tack with its audience metric platform, DART.

“Each of our screens have what’s called an AMD, an audience metric device, built into it, and that device takes a scan of the face and tracks the eyeball movement,” explains Anthony Deeble, VMO’S managing director. “[That] allows us to determine not just the age and gender, but also what content they’re looking at, and when they’re not looking at content.”

“What we’re able to do in the office environment, is optimise campaigns to the audience that’s being targeted or desired by any of our clients. We’re able to highly target the particular demographic group in a very precise way.”

The creep factor

All of this digitisation on screens and in how advertisers plan, buy and measure their OOH