Route Research's CEO, Robert Ray states the case for industry-wide investment in independent OOH data

I’ve had the privilege and, most of the time, pleasure to have worked in and around the media industry for over 30 years. Those who know me well will know I do like to pick up a few anecdotes and quotes along the way.

One of my favourites is from the account director on a well-known American beer brand that I also worked on at an agency called DMB&B (which would later become D’Arcy and out of which we set up The Media Centre, which later became MediaVest and is now Spark Foundry).

This chap was from St. Louis in the U.S and had a great Midwest lexicon which included “You can’t make a chicken salad out of chicken sh*t” to describe trying to do things either insufficiently funded or on the cheap.

Fast forward and I now find myself  working at Route Research, which delivers Great Britain’s audience currency for the out-of- home (OOH) industry.

As a JIC (Joint Industry Currency), we provide an independent measure of reach and impacts across multiple environments and formats.

These include both ‘classic’ posters and digital OOH formats on roadside, in shopping malls and retail outlets, airports, the London Underground, Glasgow subway, taxis, buses, railway stations, motorway service stations and in train/tubes.

Unlike any other channel, Route provides audience data that is actually viewed. To this end, we talk about Impacts and not simply Impressions.

In simple terms, this means that in buying OOH, advertisers are buying those who have seen the ads and not just a potential impression. This is a big USP for the OOH medium in an era where transparency and accountability are critical.

In April 2020, a few days after we were all locked down for the first time, Route launched digital spot ratings. This was a true global first.

Route measures not just the posters and screens, but individual ads broadcast on them.

It covers ads of any duration, from 1 to 604,800 seconds (that’s a week). Plus, it’s capable of measuring ad play-outs in 15-minute periods – so, for example, if you book a five-second ad on a bus shelter in Tring at 9:06 on a Tuesday, you will have a different audience than were you to have booked it at 9:26.

Measuring OOH advertising is complicated at the best of times. Unlike any other audience currency, we have the task of measuring people on the move. Raising the stakes to cover circa. 400,000 sites, then to go from measuring people seeing screens to those seeing the ads broadcast on them, while accounting for differences for every quarter hour period was, and still is a massive data task.

In developing this digital measurement we pushed Ipsos’ (which has the main research contract with Route) data processing capabilities to the edge and it has successfully delivered against the industry’s needs.

The Route team worked with software suppliers who rebuilt delivery systems to cope with a 50-fold increase in data sizes – this represents something like 16Tb a year.

Route data – OOH impacts and reach – continues to be successfully layered over with other data sets to provide advertisers and agencies with even greater insight.

For example, during the last year, both OOH specialists and OOH vendors have used various mobile SDK data sets to moderate Route data in a time where travel patterns have continually shifted. Whilst other data sets, such as weather and purchase behaviours, are also used by both buyers and sellers to add further bespoke ‘contextually relevant’ insight.

Route data is also included within the IPA’s TouchPoints and will shortly be fused with Kantar’s TGI data.

Route has been likened as a key culinary ingredient. And one where quality is paramount to the overall dish’s success. The yeast for bread, the stock for soup and so on. It’s an essential quality ingredient and one which then allows OOH buyers and sellers to build their own bespoke recipe.

Unsurprisingly, all of this doesn’t come cheap.

The OOH industry has collectively invested over £20 million into Route’s development to date. And the industry will continue to invest in Route to ensure that the OOH medium in Great Britain has the world’s most rigorous measure of reach and impacts.

However, and I might be biased here, the industry at large must also continue to invest in Route if we are to continue to provide a quality JIC.

New entrants to the OOH market – be they buyers, sellers or platforms – should embrace the need to invest in Route data.

Think of it like paying for quality chicken to make a chicken salad. And I don’t think anyone here would want their chicken salad made from chicken sh*t.