Route Moving Forward: A new generation of out-of-home media modelling

The Route contract for an out-of-home audience measurement system for 2017 to 2023 was announced in the press several months ago. At the time. James Whitmore, the MD of Route published an article on Mediatel outlining the deliverables of the new contract.

This new contract officially began on 1st April, 2017. 

Since the first contract started in 2008, Ipsos, alongside our technology partners MGE Data, have developed innovative solutions for many environments. This began with roadside and was extended to include buses, London Underground, rail and Glasgow subway, indoor shopping centres, airports, cinema foyers, tube and rail car panels, precincts, supermarket car-parks, service stations and taxis. For each, we’ve delivered data that will allow reach and frequency planning on a number of data analysis systems.

Additionally, we have integrated the Route visibility algorithm that measures quality of contacts with a poster frame. We have also introduced methods for including digital frames and illumination. The algorithm developed for calculating reach and frequency for campaigns allows analysis between different environments, for varying time periods, for analysis by geographies and demographic subgroups.

So what is going to change?

Firstly, we will continue to deliver on these 15 environments and 398,000 poster frames that were measured in the last (and 22nd) data release of the previous contract. However, there will be changes throughout including the analysis functionality that Media Owners and Planners want to see in a competitive media world. We will be focusing on new technology and data science developments that weren’t possible in 2008. 

Over the next 3 years, we will introduce the following enhancements:

• In September 2016, we introduced a new generation of passive travel meters that work indoors. This now allows all environments to be measured via the same technology. The new Multi-Sensor Tracking (MST) passive meters collect a range of other information on top of GPS. This includes wi-fi, an accelerometer, barometer and gyroscope. Over the next three years these outputs will be fully integrated.
• We rely on a network of links (roadside and pedestrian routes) that underpins travel within GB, and to which our travel meter outputs are matched. In 2008, our network covered 2.8 million links. Due to improvements in road network mapping and the merging of pedestrian routes from other digitised environments, in 2017 this will increase to over 5 million and will allow much more detailed matching of contacts with advertising frames.
• The introduction of a new generation of indoor maps from HERE. This will create the equivalent of an external map infrastructure in these locations. Our work started in March 2017 for deployment in 2018.
• The development of a more granular set of weekly audiences with frames. Currently we produce 16. This will expand to more than 1000, based on a mixture of time, geographical and demographic counts. Work has already started and will be completed in mid-2018.
• The introduction of seasonality so planners can analyse campaigns for different times of the year. We will begin in April 2017 and finish by mid-2018.
• Developing the ability to look at local campaigns with the aim of providing reach and frequency analysis down to individual frames. Work here starts in August 2017.   
• Improved representation of dynamic frames to build more details into our measurement and modelling of digital audiences. We will begin work on this towards the end of 2017, with improvements to our model introduced by February 2019.

This promises to be an exciting contract for Ipsos Connect, for Route and the out-of-home industry, as we move into a new generation of out-of-home audience measurement.