Adcentricity, a North American aggregator and strategist for the buying of digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising, has announced the creation of the Research Lite [1] audience-research service to help individual brands and advertisers evaluate the effectiveness of their ad campaigns in the DOOH medium.
Adcentricity reports that Research Lite includes both pre-packaged and customized audience-research studies that are conducted across multiple DOOH networks and venues. “The key service provider for the Research Lite option is Peoplecount . . . an award-winning research firm and supplier of audited out-of-home circulation data,” Adcentricity said in its press release.
Five research packages are offered
According to an Adcentricity brochure provided with its press release, the five different pre-packaged services offered through its collaboration with Peoplecount range in price (for one local geographic market) from USD 4,200 up to USD 49,800.
At USD 4,200, the basic ‘Snap Shot’ pre-packaged service includes research at one venue in one local geographic market, with up to 15 survey questions to be asked of 100 consumers via intercept interviews.
At USD 49,800, the high-end ‘Acute’ pre-packaged service includes research at 10-20 venues in one local geographic market, with 20 survey questions to be asked of 2,000 consumers in intercept interviews.
To extend research beyond just one local geographic market, Adcentricity reports that additional local markets can be added to the research packages for an additional USD 3,500 for the basic Snap Shot package and USD 33,500 for the high-end Acute package.
Rob Gorrie, CEO of Adcentricity, said, “Research and ROI metrics are an essential element in any medium to garner widespread market adoption, especially in emerging mediums such as Digital out-of-home.” He added, “By offering an affordable service, we provide a certain level of accountability to the medium and an ROI solution that has traditionally been a challenge for advertisers to activate measures. We believe Research Lite will be a key service in driving the medium forward and getting brands comfortable with leveraging the true capabilities of Digital out-of-home in their campaigns.”
Audience research data for single brands across one medium is rare
In the press release, Adcentricity pointed out that the type of customized single-brand research packages which Research Lite offers across one medium (DOOH) is rare.
The press release stated, “Normally research initiatives are syndicated programs that involve several brands or are a major undertaking and investment by [one] brand across multiple disciplines. Being able to activate a research study on an individual medium [DOOH] . . . presents a complete solution for [advertising] agencies and brands to initiate and evaluate campaigns effectively and efficiently,”
Kelly McGillivray, president and chief methodologist of Toronto-based Peoplecount, said, “We . . . think this type of offering is an efficient way to help prove the value of the [DOOH] medium to the advertising community.” She said, “The campaign objectives that Research Lite addresses — from sales lifts to brand awareness and message recall — are the types of metrics advertisers are looking for to determine the success of their campaigns.” McGillivray added, “The largest challenge in this project was developing ‘off-the-shelf’ packages to bundle cost-effective services that provide accountable data for the advertiser.”
Verizon Wireless is Adcentricity’s first customer for Research Lite
Adcentricity reported that Verizon Wireless, a U.S. mobile-phone service provider, was the first client to utilize the new research service for Verizon Wireless’s new ‘Push to Talk’ service offering. The marketing/advertising agency Zenith Optimedia created the content for the Verizon Wireless DOOH campaign.
According to the Adcentricity press release, the Verizon Wireless research showed that “79% of consumers noticed the digital screen within the environment.” The press release also reported that “The Verizon Wireless campaign effectively reached the targeted consumer within each market and venue in which it ran. 46% of all respondents were within [the] occupation, age and household income target profile,”
The release added, “The study also provided a deeper scope of insight for Verizon Wireless including: consumer brand perception, competitive services, purchase intent, market opportunity, ad creative impact and more strategic findings specific to the service and initiative.”