Attention measurement is coming to out-of-home (OOH) advertising.
Billups, a managed service agency that specializes in OOH and develops in-house ad tech, is making its attention measurement solution and a related analytics dashboard available for general use.
The solution, announced on Wednesday, measures attention for traditional OOH inventory, such as static billboards, as well as digital-out-of-home (DOOH) inventory, including video screens and digital kiosks.
The aim is to “bring out-of-home into the performance age,” said Stephanie Gutnik, global chief strategy officer at Billups, which eventually plans to offer advertisers apples-to-apples media quality comparisons between OOH inventory and other forms of media.
But more standardization still needs to happen before true cross-channel measurement is feasible, according to ad agency trade group the 4A’s, which has been working with Geopath, the MRC and others to standardize OOH measurement definitions.
OOH attention signals
Like many other approaches to measuring attention, the Billups solution combines signals derived from digital inputs and real-world panels to estimate the likelihood an audience both sees and pays attention to an ad, said Billups CTO Shawn Spooner.
It uses a zero to 100 scoring system, with zero being “neutral,” or the amount of attention an average, unobstructed OOH billboard or display can expect to receive.
Several factors can boost a placement’s attention score above zero, including physical metrics like the size of the billboard or screen, how optimal the viewing angle is, how many other OOH displays are nearby and the average dwell time of a person passing by on foot or in a car.
Billups also takes seasonality and time of day into account. For example, a billboard by the side of a highway would have a higher attention score during rush hour traffic.
Digital signals from DOOH displays factor in, too, such as a screen’s brightness and its ad refresh rate. And then there’s what’s known as an impression multiplier, a reach metric commonly used in OOH that’s calculated by tracking how many unique mobile devices pass by a display at different times throughout the day.
Billups then applies data from real-world panels of volunteers who answer survey questions about how well they recall the ads they’ve seen in different locations. This data gets fed into a machine-learning model to estimate probable attention scores across wider audiences.
It’s still early, but the results are promising. Cognitiv recently tested the solution in an OOH brand awareness campaign that saw a 650% boost in LinkedIn searches for Cognitiv in a particular region of New York after targeting high-attention inventory in that area.
Evolving viewability
Billups first began tracking many of the online and offline signals that factor into its attention scoring for a viewability score the agency introduced in 2020.
To gather information for its viewability scoring, Billups sometimes had to send team members to view OOH inventory in person, Spooner said. But today, Billups does most of its media quality assessment by examining satellite images of OOH inventory using tools like Google Street View, he said. These digital inputs are also easier to program into computer vision models.
Now, Billups is moving beyond viewability to assess how likely people are to actually engage with ads on individual billboards and screens, Spooner said.
For now, Billups is only measuring inventory on a client-by-client basis. Clients send in their OOH media plan and Billups evaluates the displays they plan to buy. But Billups will compile a database of attention scores as more clients use the solution, Spooner said. It’s starting with the US and Western Europe and will roll out support for Canada and APAC in Q4.
Today, Billups isn’t measuring how creative impacts attention, although it’s developing features to do that down the line.
Driving demand
The hope, according to Spooner, is that by focusing on attention and performance, Billups can help buyers discard their outdated perceptions of OOH.
Billups has heard all the usual advertiser complaints about OOH: that it feels antiquated compared to newer digital formats, and that even DOOH is harder to measure than other digital channels, which makes it difficult to optimize campaigns and prove ROAS.
“I don’t think it’s a secret that measurement in OOH has been lacking,” said Shannon Kast, VP of client services at ad agency Ovative. For example, she said, Ovative does plug OOH into its proprietary media mix modeling (MMM) solution, but it’s still “a harder medium to get the data for.”
Although Ovative, which works with Billups, hasn’t tested the new attention solution yet, it’s interested in integrating it with other attention metrics to weigh OOH against more performance-oriented mediums. “We’d love to use this data for an MMM model or cross-channel testing, because attention is a more equitable KPI across channels,” Kast said.
The solution should also increase the speed with which advertisers can derive insights from their OOH campaigns, said Anne Marie Courtney, media director at ad agency Levelwing.
Whereas Levelwing’s analytics team can examine the performance of digital native channels like social and display in nearly real time, it gets insights from traditional media channels like print and static OOH on closer to an annual basis, Courtney said.
Levelwing, also a Billups client, hasn’t tested its attention measurement yet but hopes to use the solution to optimize OOH campaigns on a quarterly basis, if not more frequently, Courtney said. This could encourage brands to have more patience with OOH campaigns, she added, rather than cutting their OOH ad spend after not seeing performance boosts within a few days of activating.
Both Ovative and Levelwing also want to test attention scoring from Billups as a buying standard, and possibly use it to curate high-attention pools of OOH inventory.
But before those cross-channel measurement and buying plans can come to fruition, attention measurement is in need of standardization, said Ashwini Karandikar, EVP of media, technology and data at the 4A’s.
“It’s possible that this new metric will encourage additional advertisers and brands to participate in OOH/DOOH,” Karandikar said. “Our view is that standardizing measurement will be the key driver for growth.”
