Audience measurement: The key to OOH championship

Common currency for measurement is among the key factors fueling the fast growth of OOH as a medium across the world. In an interesting session that drew up the analogy of cricket, Charles Parry-Okeden, Co-Founder & Global CEO, Executive Channel Network & Independent Chair, OMA & MOVE Australia, spoke on the theme ‘How the currency journey takes OOH to growth destination’ on day 1 of the 18^th edition of Out of Home Advertising Convention (OAC). 

Charles instantly broke the ice by touching on an area of common interest to Australia and India  – cricket! He literally used a cricket bat to drive home his point – “There are some lessons we can learn from our cricketers that I think we can apply to our OOH industry.” He then went on to highlight attributes that create champions.  The crux of it was the need for the industry to work as a team. “Cricketers are individually competing to make the national side, but once there, they need to perform as a team to win. Much like media owners in the OOH sector.  We can compete for advertising dollars, but if we want to win as a sector, we are all better off playing as a team when it comes to applying common standards and audience currency,” said Charles.

Having set the broad context, Charles took the audience through a detailed overview of MOVE, Australia’s OOH industry measurement currency, owned and operated by the OMA and its members.  He highlighted how MOVE catalysed OOH business growth in Australia, the steps that contributed to the widescale adoption of the common currency, how media owners individually see a correlation between adoption of MOVE and revenue growth, how the MOVE project was funded and how continuous improvement is sustained. The most important point to be noted was that MOVE had become intrinsic to Media Agency Planning and Buying.

Charles then used the MOVE model to demonstrate the way forward for Indian OOH. Reinforcing the point he said, “The steps in the process speak for themselves. The first step is alignment of mind across the industry as this will drive market share increase for the sector. What’s needed next is for the quorum of leaders across both sellers and buyers to work together with a common belief (the evidence exists) and for one source of data for buyers and sellers.”

Circling back to the analogy with which Charles began his presentation the moot point is this  – ‘A champion team will beat a team of champions.’ And a champion team for OOH would mean a common currency.