Digital out-of-home company Dynamic Outdoor is introducing a new audience measurement technology called Dynamic Audience Intelligence (Dynamic Ai) that provides detailed metrics, analytics and audience profiling for its inventory across the country.
It represents a “huge shift” in how advertisers can plan and buy digital out-of-home, said Dynamic president Brandon Newman, enabling them to make data-driven digital purchases.
Newman has been an outspoken critic of the Canadian out-of-home industry since Toronto-based Dynamic launched in November, taking over representation of large-format digital boards owned by Allvision Canada.
He called the industry’s reliance on traditional metrics like GRPs and cost-per-point “head-shaking,” and said it has been “really slow” in adopting new audience measurement methodologies and techniques that better quantify and qualify audiences.
Existing audience measurement methodology, he said, fails to adequately reflect the nuances of digital out-of-home, which makes up all of Dynamic’s 24 large-format boards in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
“It’s a complete game-changer,” said Newman of the Dynamic Ai system. “There’s really been no granular look at who is passing by a location, who is actually seeing an ad, how effectively they’re seeing it and so on. That’s what this is.”
The new system gathers billions of anonymous location and time-stamped data from sources including mobile apps (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.), beacons, sensors and hotspots and real-time and historic social media data.
It then divides the country into 10 million 100 x 100 metre tiles to paint a detailed picture of traffic flow patterns and audience interactions as they enter and exit each tile.
The Dynamic Ai system enables the company to transform the data into what it described as “meaningful and actionable” audience demographic and lifestyle segments, along with data-driven impressions and traffic flow, for each of its various boards.
“It’s going to dispel a lot of myths,” said Newman, noting that preliminary data runs using Dynamic Ai have already disproved some long-held notions about the specific audience for certain geographic locations.
He said senior leaders among advertisers and agencies have already seen the potential for the to purchase digital out-of-home on a programmatic basis.
“There’s a huge wow factor, and a lot of people connect the dots right away to what it leads to, which is a potential programmatic element – being able to buy based solely on audience, which aligns it with online mobile,” he said.
Dynamic will begin offering clients data-drive post-campaign analysis based on audience segmentation this fall, said Newman
