New Route analyses the ways people travel around the UK

Postar, the audience research body for outdoor advertising in Great Britain has relaunched as Route unveiling its new and highly anticipated out-of-home audience research system.

£19million was invested in the research which reveals fascinating stats about how Britain moves in the context of the opportunity to see outdoor ads.

In an average day, someone will make eye contact with around 27 roadside posters, 14 bus ads and every time they make a tube journey they will encounter an average of 74 ads.

The average distance travelled out-of-home is 241km per week and the speed increases with age reaching an average of 19.94 km/h. However, people start to slow down in their sixties. In regards to gender, the research shows that men travel faster and go further than women – 288 km vs. 197 km in a week.

Route produces audience estimates for out-of-home advertising and the data published tells subscribers how many people see an advertising campaign as well as how often they do so. The audience can be broken down in many typologies including age, class, lifestyle, shopping habits and so on. The information is used as the currency for planning, trading and evaluating advertising investment in the medium.

The successor to Postar, the previous currency that had been set up in 1996, encompasses all outdoor environments – airports, buses, London Underground, National Rail, pedestrian shopping precincts, shopping malls, supermarket exteriors and all roadside frames. These environments will be added in stages – the launch data includes 360,000 frames for road, bus and tube.

Route is a people-focussed measurement system, differing from previous systems that have taken advertising locations as their starting point.

The new research has been designed around hyper-local geography which makes it possible to plan by town, or create bespoke geography as well as to choose from 24 conurbations or the 14 BARB areas. In addition, it is now possible to plan and trade by day-part as the new study has been designed accordingly.

The research study, undertaken by Ipsos MediaCT and MGE Data, combines several elements:

• The largest ever GPS travel survey with a fieldwork sample of 28,000 people, who each carried a GPS meter for nine days reveals how people move around as they live day-to-day. In total 19 billion GPS records were read to date and will increase by 3.3 billion every year.

• A mapped network of all the pathways in the country (including tube stations, retail mall precincts, and all types of roads) to which traffic flows and audience numbers have been affixed – the Traffic Intensity Model (TIM)

• Also from the TIM, the realistic opportunity to see (ROTS) has been calculated

• Pioneering eye-tracking studies gauge the likelihood to see (LTS) factor of the various types of display. The research account for scale, orientation and distance. It also calibrates properties such as movement and illumination.

• The size, format and precise location of 360,000 advertising frames are supplied by the Outdoor Media Centre via their Inventory Mapping System (IMS).

Figures from all of these elements are combined in a mathematical model to produce the final audience data.

James Whitmore, managing director of Route said: “We now know who is travelling where, how, when and at what speed. The name, “Route”, is designed to reflect this. Increasingly, time spent out-of-home is about understanding the routes that people take. It is about knowing the pathways of the eye. The medium is changing rapidly and we must think from the point of view of the audience, not from the position of a poster. If we start with a deep knowledge of how people move about, we have the flexibility to decide what we put in their way in terms of communication opportunities. By defining the audience it will be possible to use the data to plan, trade or value the medium.”

Jeremy Male, chair of the Outdoor Media Centre said: “The launch of Route is the culmination of years of investment and planning to provide our advertisers and agencies with a state of the art outdoor audience planning system. The investment is a testament to the health of the outdoor sector and a statement of confidence in its future success.“

Gill Reid, Co-Chair of the IPAO said: “The launch of Route will allow us to take a great leap forward in proving what OOH delivers to clients across platforms and environments. Most importantly, it will for the first time put audience at the heart of OOH planning.”