Quividi marries up reporting with OVAB guides

January 16, 2009 by Dave Haynes

French audience measurement firm Quividi has issued a really good white paper on how it has lined up its own reporting with the guidelines laid down last fall by the Out-of-home Video Advertising Bureau.

It’s one thing to do some marketing spin, which we’ve all seen, announcing your pots and pans are OVAB-compliant.

It’s another, entirely, to put out a paper that in considerable detail walks through the numbers, the process and the results.

The paper uses the measurements gathered up at a pharmacy in June, 2009, where a screen was located behind the cashier and a webcam mounted to do the biometric gaze tracking.

The gross headcount was 37,014 people who passed within vicinity of the screen. That was then broken down by counting the percentages of people “whose face turned at least once toward the vehicle (the screen.)” On average that was 40 per cent or so, so the audience count was reduced to 15,104 people.

Then this number was used against the average amount of time in which viewers actually look at the vehicle. That turned out to be 17.4 seconds.

Finally, that was worked against the actual length of the advertising/content rotation, also known as “the loop”. That was three minutes.

What spat out of that was Quividi’s version of the OVAB Average Unit Audience. The AUA, you may recall from my OVAB Guidelines for Dummies, is defined this way:

Average Unit Audience should be the standard measurement used for digital screen networks. That means a common way of defining how many people had an opportunity to see the ads on screens installed in network venues, and how many of those people were around those screens long enough to see all the ads that were scheduled to run. Ideally, the average amount of dwell time around the screens is equal to the length of the ad loop.  If not, the average unit audience may be larger or smaller depending on that dwell time and loop length.

So we have:

Actual Audience who noticed screen – 15,104 

Multiplied by the 17.4 seconds of average dwell time 

Divided by 180 seconds of the content loop.

The result: 1,464 ad units for the month.

Assuming the OVAB guidelines start to take hold in the planning community and some expectaion builds around seeing media kits and pitches that reflect these metrics, this dramatically changes the way ad-driven networks go to market.

And if the ad and brand communities start to expect the sort of biometrics measurement that guys like Quividi, Trumedia and Cognovision do, there’s a positive of having very high quality measurement but the negative of being held to a much higher level of accountability than mainstream media.