How Route Lost Direction and Showed the Way

admin OOH, RESEARCH

Launched in 2013, ROUTE had big ideas about big data. An ambitious project, attracting a £19m investment from the of members of both Outdoor Media Centre and IPA Outdoor, ROUTE sought to assimilate, analyse and extrapolate Out-of-Home (OOH) data from 28,000 GPS devices, tracking people in real-time over nine consecutive days. The resulting 19bn data records were then plotted against 450,000 UK outdoor advertising locations.

Although this groundbreaking project produced more enhanced data – and data crunching opportunities – than POSTAR, ROUTE has a number of vulnerabilities.

1. It doesn’t produce data in real time.
2. It’s reliant on repeat data capture ‘events’ to ensure data currenency..
3. The data itself isn’t sufficiently nuanced to take account of influencing factors such as variations in time spent outdoors.*
4. It doesn’t cover all OOH formats.
5. And, perhaps, for a medium so reliant on ‘locational’ influences the most significant omission is probably the lack of insight of environmental factors affecting the value and impact of panels insitu.

ROUTE’s limitations didn’t end there. The insistence on buying in a planning system, rather than developing its own, may have created further distance from other key players in the industry.

Talon uses ROUTE’s planning system although not in isolation, while Posterscope and WPP both decided to create their own to process raw data. Rapport is now said to be planning its own system as well.

The landscape is changing further.

The opportune emergence of Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) data could have a similar impact to that of disruptive technology on working practices. Just as m-commerce, SAAS (Software as a Service) and increased interconnectivity have made the technologist’s dream of ‘any time, any place, anywhere’ a reality (or at least a work in progress), the lesson is clear.

There are strategic advantages to becoming an early adopter.

The delivery of mobile-user data from EE, O2 and Vodafone has enabled agile players in the industry to capitalise on the synergy between m-commerce and OOH, or MOOH. Posterscope, for example, has already recognised the benefits to its campaigns of using EE mobile intelligence in combination with Route’s big data.

Both Blis and Weve are known advocates of greater integration between OOH and mobile, actively seeking the best of both worlds. The long-held advertisers’ vision of real-time, relevant, panoramic and intelligent data is steadily becoming a reality.

Site Audits is already part of this new order with the design and development of InSitu, a ‘location’ insight tool providing the critical planning detail that Route has omitted. Identifying and measuring key influences using a sixty-point reporting framework, InSitu gives Route the critical data it lacks and, for MOOH, it gives a context against which mobile-user data can be better interpreted and exploited.

Knowing what we know – and what the industry needs to know – why would you do anything else?