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Nielsen Delivers Outdoor Ratings to Advisory Board, Responds to TAB’s RFP

Nielsen Outdoor has delivered its first outdoor ratings, tracked using a GPS-based ratings service, to its Global Outdoor Advisory Committee (GOAC) - a group of advertisers, agencies, and media owners who helped design and evaluate the service, Mediaweek reports. To measure exposure, Nielsen recruited 750 consumers to carry cell-phone sized GPS devices while they traveled on foot or in cars in the Chicago area. The travel log data was linked with the daily effective circulation figures from the Traffic Audit Bureau to give estimates for consumer exposure to about 13,000 outdoor faces in the Chicago market.

GOAC members, including Starcom MediaVest Group, Universal McCann, Mindshare, Mediacom, Clear Channel, JCDecaux, Lamar, Viacom, Van Wagner, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, and the Traffic Audit Bureau, will have immediate access to the data for planning and marketing. Nielsen will begin marketing the data to new subscribers after Nov. 21.

Arbitron conducted the first outdoor ratings test in Atlanta in 2002, but tabled its service last year. Nielsen, meanwhile, forged ahead with Chicago and hopes to roll out additional markets in the U.S.

While Nielsen is working on its survey-based outdoor ratings service, the Traffic Audit Bureau has a census-based outdoor ratings currency in the works, based on its daily effective circulation, or DEC, figures. The TAB has issued a request for proposals for a methodology to add demographic and reach and frequency data to DEC estimates, which Nielsen Outdoor said it will be responding to.

The new ratings data will be able to provide demographic information about what type of people were exposed to an outdoor ad, when, and for how long, putting outdoor on an even field with other media, Mediapost writes.

Audience estimates for newspapers and magazines derive circulation data in a similar two-step process, as does online media, which pulls together the equivalent of circulation data from site or server user log data, which is then combined with panel-based research.

The only major media that do not use a two-step process are radio and some TV.