The Outdoor Advertising Industry Needs Its Own Traffic Count

MANILA, Philippines - With more billboards and LED screens coming up in the metropolis, there is an urgent need for the outdoor advertising industry to come up with its own traffic count of the main thoroughfares if it is to deliver effective measure to the primary stakeholders which are the advertisers and clients.

"The current traffic counts will no longer do", said Lloyd Tronco, Executive Director of the Philippine Center for Out-Of-Home Media Research and Science. 

"Most of these numbers used are from previous studies of the MMDA and Traffic Engineering Center", he added.  "Neither can we resort to the National Center for Transportation Studies in UP Diliman because the data is also culled from MMDA and TEC".

A more recent traffic count is needed as this is the basic building block to determine DNV (Daily Net Viewership) of an outdoor advertising medium, be it a static tarpaulin or an LED billboard.

Tronco adds, "Any OOH media agency can claim that they have some form of measurement of viewership for static or LED panels but the thing is, if you start off with the wrong traffic count, the 'measurement' is useless.  Down the line, as you compute for DNV, you can have a variance of as much as 15,000 eyeballs and that's a lot."

Likewise noted is that for a variance of even 10,000 in a billboard's DNV, a great difference can be brought about on other factors such as Cost Per Thousand.

Currently, the Philippine Center for Out-Of-Home Media Research and Science more commonly known in the industry as PhilCouRSe is talking to potential partners who will help in the completion of a long overdue method of measurement.