All animals are equal
James Whitmore, managing director of Postar, on the unintended consequences of measuring “quality”…
Quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is a subjective notion that can mean many things to many people. Of course in media we know better than that. It is something we measure, price and evaluate.
Definitions of quality are legion – the Shorter Oxford Dictionary lists thirty-five – but perhaps the two that are most often understood in our circles are firstly characteristics or attributes and secondly accomplishment or attainment.
If we take quality characteristics first, these are relatively easy to comprehend as they make intuitive sense – right-hand, outside back, first in break, above-the-fold, solus, longer, bigger and so on. A nominal value can be attributed to each of these aspects but it is a devilish job to prove a statistical case. Much of the pricing is based on previous practice, folklore even.
Audience metrics can be used to quantify the second, more measurable aspect of quality accomplishment. Here we can find statistics on audience profile, cover build, frequency distribution and so on. Schedules can be evaluated against a set of quality objectives and performance judged.
We tend not to conflate the two definitions. Lots of right hand pages will not enhance your coverage. The audience profile will not dramatically alter if an advertisement is first or second in break.
Except when you come to out-of-home.
Whilst every other medium measures “opportunity to see”, outdoor goes a step further with “likelihood to see”. To calculate this it is necessary to quantify the effect of some of the softer quality measures. This is both a blessing and a curse.
The first quantification is that the opportunity be realistic. Is the respondent moving in a direction that enables them to see the poster frame? Realistic opportunity to see qualifies the opportunity by making certain that the audience and the advertisement are oriented toward each other.
The next step is to identify the likelihood that someone will see something if it is in their line of sight. What governs this is not just the number of people with a realistic opportunity to see but also the size of the frame, its orientation, illumination, setback from the road, the distance from which it can be seen, and so on. For other media the more subjective aspects would not be calibrated but in this case they all affect the chance that something can or cannot be seen. Thus they form part of the core unit of the currency, the weekly adult impacts, or visibility adjusted contact (VAC).
I said earlier that this is a blessing as well as a curse. The advantage is that advertisers are given a much clearer idea of the likelihood that someone will cast an eye on their copy. It does not require an accident of circumstance for the orbits of ad and consumer to come into alignment. The outdoor opportunity is finely calibrated by referencing audience flows and eye-tracking data to produce a rigorous measure of likelihood to see.
The difficulty for the medium is that having such a sublime building block, one that is partly based on an understanding of the contribution of the qualitative aspects of the medium, can blind people to the broader context.
The temptation is that if there is an element of “quality” in the derivation of the weekly adult impacts or VAC, surely a big number is better than a small one? And if we know the weekly adult impacts for every single item of inventory then perhaps we can set an average against which we might benchmark? Thus all we need to do is make sure that we buy schedules where the average weekly impacts for each frame in the campaign are above that for the market as a whole.
The danger of using jargon that one’s parents would not understand is that you can lose sight of the meaning yourself. A VAC is only partly based on quality. By far the biggest factor governing whether something is seen is that it is on a busy thoroughfare. You can have the most enormous, illuminated, head-on spectacular known to man but if it is in the High Street of a provincial town it will have a lower VAC number than a more modest structure on an arterial road in a bigger city.
By focusing on what is in effect the spot audience, you tend to get campaigns that are clustered on busy roads in big cities and not evenly distributed to maximise the coverage of the target audience. In recent years the industry has gravitated more and more toward the cult of the VAC at the expense of other measures of the medium. Who is driving this – buyers, sellers or auditors – it is difficult to see but it is beyond doubt that it does everyone a disservice. It focuses solely on the characteristics of the constituent units and not on the campaign as a whole. It undervalues the communication and undersells the medium.
The new study from Postar offers the chance to move confidently to a more thoughtful approach; talking about audiences; planning campaigns against an audience; trading on the cost of reaching an audience and so on. It will provide metrics that are common to how other media are planned, bought and evaluated.
In preparation for this new world, the industry should think long and hard about how it values quality, both subjectively and objectively.