Traffic Intensity Model

A key challenge in the measurement of OOH ads, is to calculate how many people drive, cycle, walk or otherwise travel along every public pathway in the country. ‘Public pathways’ include not just major roads and city streets, but the corridors inside underground and overground stations, the escalators inside shopping centres, the inside and outside of airports and the interiors of trains. In short anywhere people go and could be exposed to OOH advertising.

The solution is the creation of the traffic intensity model. This uses a combination of limited traffic counts, sets of attributes for each kind of road / path and a modelling process to create volumetric estimates for outdoor environments along routes where people pass in view of a poster. Different approaches were later added to cover indoor environments.

The Traffic Intensity Model (TIM) enables the following:

• Traffic flow estimates for each link in the network;

• An assessment of the reliability of each estimate – used in the modelling process;

• The ability to update the estimate when new or updated data is available;

The TIM is powered by a wide range of volumetric count data which are modelled to apportion the number of vehicles and pedestrians travelling on all links around Great Britain. This is used to then calculate the volumes travelling within areas from where it is possible to see OOH advertising.