Aggregrator and researcher team up; hopefully users share results

July 20, 2009 by Dave Haynes

This is smart …

Aimed at raising advertisers’ comfort level with the emerging digital out-of-home medium, reports MediaWeek, Adcentricity unveiled Monday (July 20) a suite of turnkey research services called Research Lite. Created via a limited partnership with Peoplecount, a subsidiary of Transearch Group, Research Lite is designed to help Adcentricity’s network advertisers measure the effectiveness of campaigns and evaluate the return on their digital out-of-home investment. 

The kids at Adcentricity and PeopleCount are getting lotsa press and blog love on this, so I don’t need to go on about it … except to say anything that helps get more research done to prove the efficacy of the medium is a good thing.

“There’s a lot of pushback on digital out-of-home in general because of the lack of research to quantify an advertiser’s return on investment,” said Rob Gorrie, CEO for Adcentricity, which aggregates inventory across 80 digital out-of-home networks. “Advertisers don’t necessarily have $100,000 to conduct research. We wanted to make Research Lite really consumable.”

The suite of five Research Lite packages are priced between $4,000 and $50,000, depending on the number of venues and markets required for Peoplecount’s on-site intercept surveys. 

Even better, as Gorrie would confirm, if the results that come out of the research are widely shared, even if they are not so good. Not enough companies are doing research and of those who do, not enough are willing to let the industry at large know what they found out. The more stories out there about positive impacts at retail and in public spaces, the better. And the more research confirming something didn’t work, the less chance of it being replicated.