SXSW Sydney® is recognised as the preeminent event for learning, challenging and advancing creativity, film, interactive media and music. It has earned a reputation for revealing things that will matter. 

In our world of media and marketing, that would definitely include something that gets us closer to influencing a better ROI. That’s the crude bottom line to every media investment but it remains elusive – that delicious, sweet spot where “smarter” for agencies meets “more effective” for advertisers. It’s that seductive step closer to influencing outcomes which means it’s knowledge the entire industry is desperately seeking.

QMS spent the last two years getting closer to this place. And in what is effectively a global race for this learning and a way to make it accessible, QMS have done it for out of home (OOH). And make no mistake, this is a race and those who get there first get to the value faster. QMS has now wrapped up phase one of a rigorous human attention study. It’s a hell of a step and marks what will become a leap forward for the OOH sector, globally.

What strikes me first of all is that this significant investment has been made right at the time that OOH is enjoying a consistent growth trajectory. That is the textbook approach to maintaining a premium position. The stories of companies resting on their laurels or being slow to take the next big step are legendary. But QMS has effectively acknowledged that it’s not about the success the medium has had, but the success it will continue to enjoy because of the right decisions being made, right now. And at SXSW Sydney just a few weeks ago, QMS put a new stake in the ground that starts to redefine the role of OOH.

Right now, I’m at a global coalface more than an Australian one, and I see firsthand media owners, agencies and advertisers pushing for developments in data, measurement, sustainability, performance guarantees, and trust metrics, to name the leading “hot topics”.

Not all of these necessarily reflect a permanent path for the future, but measurement certainly does. In fact, measurement ranks at the top of the list according to advertisers and agencies because this is the means by which they can get closer to controlling their investment and quantifying their results.

So, no surprise that around the world most media channels are going hard to make progress on improved measurement. It represents the single biggest shift in media performance with payoff to agencies and advertisers and potentially, a recalibration for media channels.

A better metric system

That’s a big call but a realistic one as we observe industry global progress in just the last five years which has focussed on attention as the important new media metric. Work undertaken by Attention Council members has proven that attention correlates with mental availability, advertising effectiveness and the kicker, brand growth. The simple logic of registering eyeballs concentrated on an ad and measuring this as active or passive or non-attention, takes us far beyond where we have been in providing advertisers with the real-world impact of their campaign.

Great strides have been made in the last two years in the US, UK and Europe in charting this course for online digital channels, TV, video, print and cinema. And recently, even an AI version of attention for OOH was launched, which was a worthy effort at trying to bring this qualitative metric into play, but is still to overcome realities of real-world accuracy and cross channel comparison.

When you’re talking about really moving the dial you must be prepared to be judged by the rigour of your solution, degree of real-world human methodology, accessibility, reliability and generalisability. And the most challenging aspect would have to be doing this at a level of model uniformity that enables cross channel comparisons for advertisers. The elusive multi-channel metric.

QMS forged ahead against this formidable list of imperatives and taking two years has just delivered for the OOH sector, worldwide, the first human attention results. What this QMS phase one study has been able to produce are juicy nuggets of knowledge that will allow advertisers to stop having to rely solely on the limitations of reach or opportunities to see. These quantitative metrics provide rudimentary indications are but insufficient by any qualitative measure. They can’t tell us how much of an advertiser’s message was actually seen let alone for how long.

No longer only a fast glance medium

Historical measurement has demanded a leap of faith for advertisers and their hard-earned budgets. This attention study changes all that by providing planning data, based on real human behaviour, that proves OOH is actually different and “more” than what we had historically considered. So, there’s a headline.

More how? Well, it’s pretty explicit to understand the total attention seconds of your medium, and because of this study, which is based on pedestrians, we now know for OOH it is 12 seconds. We also now know that within these 12 seconds, there are an average of 5.5 seconds which are active attention. And we also know from the same methodology testing on other digital channels that the attention memory threshold is 2.5 seconds for an ad to potentially be committed to long term memory.

So, there is a new planning baseline which provides a qualitative audience assessment. In a consumer attention-challenged environment, do you accept 2.5 seconds of active attention when 5.5 seconds of active attention is possible and can make your message more effective? That’s a value opportunity.

Or what about the fact we now know that there is an inverse relationship evident when OOH is compared to other digital channels? 89 per cent of the tested OOH sites secured more than the 2.5 seconds attention memory baseline while only 15 per cent of other non-OOH digital channels tested using this same methodology secured the 2.5 seconds baseline result. Another value opportunity point.

And within that baseline we also now know that OOH has a slower attention decay than other high scroll digital formats. This medium thought of since forever as the “fleeting glance medium” as you walk or drive by, is in fact more sustaining in the attention it delivers than other digital formats. There’s more in this study, but that’s some high stakes starters.

This attention study for OOH has brought new knowledge to bear which necessitates looking at OOH with fresh eyes. It has presented the opportunity if not the imperative for advertisers to use OOH differently. To drive greater results. And in doing so, OOH becomes very capable of being more closely aligned with advertiser outcomes.

In any language these hard and fast human-based real world facts are the stuff that move the dial for OOH. But it’s very exciting and satisfying that the language this started in, is Aussie.