How Are Out-of-Home Ads in NYC Measured for Performance?

When it comes to a tried-and-true advertising method, it’s hard to beat traditional Out Home Ads. Today we’re going to talk about Out of Home Ads in New York to elaborate a bit more on what precisely Out of Home Ads are and how it’s possible to be an exclusively visual medium.

Let’s get started with a bit of clarification on this classic form of advertising!

What are Out of Home Ads?

First off, let’s establish what ‘OOH’ ads encompass. It’s not so complicated, actually, so we’ll be brief. Most people think that OOHA’s simply consist of traditional billboards, but in reality, an out-of-home ad is any form of visual media that you see when you leave your home.

This includes signs (static or digital) on benches,   airports, cinemas… you get the idea.

Now, with online ads, you can measure how many people clicked an ad, and with television shows, you’ve got ratings, so these seem easy… but how do you measure physical ads, especially somewhere with a dense population like NYC?

It’s a little more complicated, but it breaks down into four components.

Estimated your OOHA ‘audience.’

To determine how much coverage an out-of-home ad is receiving, you have to get a little creative in obtaining approximations and focusing them as sharply as you can. With Out of Home Ads in New York or in any location, this is determined with the following factors:

• Demographics
• Digital
• Impressions
• Visibility Research

Demographics

Demographics is mostly derived through census data and projected paths of travel to get a basic breakdown of which groups of people are likely to be seeing your ads. This gives you a rough idea of the age range, ethnicity, gender, and other datum of this type are in a particular area and likely to see your ad.

Digital

Digital is another good way to determine where your ad is going. It is accomplished by utilizing promotional codes, social media, links… anything that ‘tempts’ your audience to connect and thus verify that they definitely see your ad. Of course, not everyone will respond, but every added metric that you can determine helps narrow down the numbers.

Impressions

Impressions help to further determine Out of Home advertisement coverage by attempting to determine how many people will see an OOH Ad at any particular place and time. Examples include traffic data that can guess how often your ad has the potential of being seen, though this has been upgraded a bit.  A non-profit company called Geopath wanted to get an idea of how many ads were being viewed.

To this effect, they found a way to modify how billboard views were determined by driving through the areas with special glasses on to assess how likely ads were actually viewed. This helped them to create a value that is most used today, known as VAI or ‘Visibility Audience Impact’ that is used with Out of Home advertising metrics today.

Visibility Research

Finally, to further sharpen up the statistics for Out of Home advertising, Visibility Research is added. This is just the ‘times’ when an OOHA is likely to be viewed. Examples include the time waiting in a subway or for a crosswalk light to change.

Conclusion

We hope you’ve enjoyed this breakdown of how Out of Home advertising is measured in NYC and beyond. While we know that the methods we have derived sound rough, you may be surprised at the results. We’ll close with a great example link where you can see some of the metrics derived for Out of Home Ads in New York:

Check it out, and you can see for yourself… the science is solid!