Global Guidelines on Out-of-Home Audience Measurement

Out-of-home advertising is one of the oldest advertising media in the world. It is all around us on a day to day basis. The lack of a defined platform has made it difficult in the past for media researchers to provide measures of the audience which are comparable to audience measurements for other media. But this is now changing.
Recent advances in technology mean that it is possible to get more accurate measurements of individuals´ mobility and therefore make more reliable estimates of the number of people potentially exposed to out-of-home advertising campaigns.
Advances in understanding the psychology of perception have also allowed audience researchers to go beyond taking a "simple measurement" of the number of people passing a panel to developing a rigorous measurement of the number of people who will look at "a poster", i.e. a measure of ad exposure. These guidelines have been developed to exploit the opportunity created by this changing technology to introduce consistent and realistic measurement of audiences for out-of-home advertising around the world and to promote best practice at the national level. These guidelines:

• provide a consistent set of definitions for key elements of the measurement
• recommend minimum data which should be provided to users
• provide a clear statement of operating principles and describe best practice
• encourage international harmonisation and methodological consistency