The use of modern AI technologies provides effective tools to determine the viewing time of drivers passing by the billboards, and to deliver maximum amount of advertising messages to the viewers, as well as to optimize OOH advertising rental rates and price schedules.
The progress in AI traffic data collection technologies presents a unique opportunity for billboard advertisers to grab the attention of a wider audience. Vice president of sales and sales operations for Lamar Advertising stated, “We are all about eyeballs on billboards, and the increased amount of traffic is helping us.” But it’s not just about increased traffic demand. The latest Big data technologies make the most of drivers' viewing time and, last but not the least - allow billboard providers to maximize their benefits from viewing time increase caused by factual traffic patterns.
Currently there’s a lot of attempts in the industry to solve the challenges of selection and efficiency evaluation of OOH sites through use of cell phones and/or LBS data. Unfortunately, use of these methods causes substantial errors and does not assure the adequate comparison of various sites.
Using Big Data for billboard optimization is a key to success. New Ticon product based on 24/7/365 traffic observation of the road section of your interest helps billboard companies to:
- Identify the hours of high demand
- Know for how long drivers were looking at the board at different time of the day
- Explore how fast cars are passing by
- Get true values of average intra-day, daily, and monthly traffic
- Know what the demographics of drivers are
Finding the busy arterial routes serving lots of towns and cities is only an initial step in building a strong OOH advertising campaign. Our technology allows evaluating and setting the price schedules for specific time intervals, based on the number of “eyes” on the billboard, as indicated by the viewing time length and traffic speed/volume variables. This information is based on Ticon analysis of driver behavior along the road section, which considers speed distribution (Figure 1) to understand the exact time that each driver looks at the billboard during each 15-min time interval. Of course, Ticon reports provide aggregated numbers ready for your decision making.
Figure 1. Speed distribution chart
In other words, you will know exactly how many drivers are passing by the billboard, at what speed, and what is the average viewing time for each number of drivers. These insights will help you to find the most attractive time slots during the day and don’t lose the opportunity to build a cost-effective way to boost your advertising efforts.
Figure 2 presents the aggregated values of viewing time distribution during the day in a specific area. It becomes obvious that for this particular section of the road (we took I-84 in Hartford CT as an example) most of the drivers (95%) have more than 15 seconds to absorb the message from the billboard. Considering the fact that the timing of digital billboard ads is a standard 8 seconds before the message changes, drivers have a chance to gather the information from at least two advertisers at one viewing interval.
Figure 2. Viewing time by time of the day
In addition, the chart shows that the time slot from 2 pm to 6 pm is the period with the most intense traffic during the day, and during this period at least 75% of drivers have more than 25 seconds to absorb the message from the billboard. It means, that from 2 pm to 6 pm it is reasonable to use at least 3 different messages in a row, or - maybe - develop a message that can attract drivers’ attention not for 8 but for 12 seconds. In addition, the traffic will be the most intense during this period of time so it is fair to increase the charge for advertisement (Table 1). These insights on hours of high demand in parallel with data on viewing time will help OOH-advertisers to optimize billboard rental rates and increase ROI.
Table 1. Suggested price ratio by hours, per dollar of advertising fee
Ticon’s B-Site InsightTM intelligence report can help you get precise, verified, up-to-date information on any billboard location of your interest. We have a variety of data available upon your request, from traffic patterns to demographics, to points of interest (POI), and more.
Download a Sample Report from our web-site and set up a video call and we’ll show you what “meaningful data” looks like.
Reserences:
1. Digital Data Gives Billboard Owners More Reason to ‘Love a Good Traffic Jam’
2. LED versus Static: Why Digital Billboards
