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Malaysia’s Moving Walls creates tool to measure efficacy of OOH advertising

Malaysian adtech firm Moving Walls has a strange inspiration for a new industry initiative to track the efficacy of out-of-home advertising — the Hollywood film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The Three Billboards analysis from Moving Walls thankfully doesn’t have anything to do with racism or unsolved murders, focusing instead on whether OOH advertising is living up to its potential.

Moving Walls founder and CEO Srikanth Ramachandran said: “How many people and whom are your billboards reaching? This is the fundamental question we are helping marketers address.

“Optimisation has become second nature for marketers in digital. So why can’t they do the same with their physical advertising? This will enable OOH to become more than a backdrop or drum-beating medium.”

Speaking about the methodology that enables this tracking, Moving Walls marketing and pre-sales manager Mehul Mandalia said: “We collect and enrich location-based data from multiple sources — vehicle movement, smartphone movement, social media and LAMPs (our IoT sensors that are placed on billboards).”

A reporting tool developed by the firm then helps marketers track the density of audiences reached by their billboards, reach and frequency analysis, daypart analysis, day-of-week analysis, and billboard benchmarking.

It also includes demographic details of the audience and how brands can connect with them online. Finally it helps attribute footfalls and store visits to OOH campaigns.

According to Moving Walls, nearly 100 brands have signed up for this analysis including Unilever, McDonald’s, BMW and Puma. The only input Moving Walls says it requires from marketers is the location of their billboards.

Speaking about how this technology was helping inform marketing strategy, Mandalia said: “Based on our interactions so far, brands will be using this data to modify their 2019 media buys. Our reporting tool allows them to add and compare any billboard location for them to make informed decisions that go beyond traffic and population data: the two main sources of offline audience data provided by OOH specialists.”

Moving Walls hopes this will eventually give OOH advertising its due. Quoting figures from Zenith, Moving Walls points out that while OOH is still growing, it commands a measly 6.7% of global ad spend.

The company is working with over 100 billboard media owners across the region and actively measuring billboards across Malaysia, Singapore, India, the Philippines and Indonesia.

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