Historically, it has been sold on a square meter basis but how do we measure this impact more accurately?
“We need to relook at what customers are seeing at any given time while driving past any type of OOH advertising,” says Brad Fisher, CEO of ADreach. “To do this, I would like to suggest that we should be assessing impact based on the cost per square cm of windscreen space that the advert takes up and not the cost per square meter of the actual structure, which is actually irrelevant in this equation.”
The amount of windscreen space that an advert takes up at any point in time is a function of both the size of the structure as well as the distance of the consumer (in the vehicle) from the advertising structure.
If you can imagine driving and looking through your windscreen, something smaller but closer will usually take up more of your windscreen space, and attention, than something larger but further away.
To the naked eye, the amount of windscreen space that the advert takes up will determine the impact of the advert rather than its actual physical size. The value of the space should therefore be directly proportional to the windscreen space and not square meterage.
Essentially, a street pole advert, by virtue of being closer to you, will take up more space in your windscreen space than a large billboard that is far away, despite being vastly different in comparable square meter size.
“Just as readership figures completely turned the print industry on its head, so too should windscreen-space (t) lead to a major reassessment of how we value OOH. Costing OOH advertising should therefore be based on impact through proportionate windscreen space and not on the size of structure,” concludes Fisher.
