Kym Frank Keynote Speech at the GO2018

 

Geopath President Kym Frank delivered the keynote address on May 8 at the 2018 Geopath/OAAA Out of Home Media Conference & Expo in Austin, TX. We are running her speech below.

Hello everyone and thank you so much for joining us at the Geopath/OAAA conference in Weird Old Austin, TX!

This conference marks the end of my third year in this role, and in that time, I’ve gotten to know so many of you.  So, this conference always feels a bit like I’m coming home to family – people who laugh together, share successes, and truly care about one another – especially when it matters.  In my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to work across many media channels.  I can tell you – the people and relationships within the OOH community make it incredibly special.  Hold onto that.

So before we kick things off, I need to thank a few rock stars in the audience.

I want to extend my deepest gratitude to my chairperson, my Board of Directors and all of my committees who volunteer their time to make this organization the best that it can be.

Special thanks to the conference committee, the OAAA, all our amazing speakers, our generous sponsors and exhibitors, and everyone who came together to pull off this event.

Thank you to all our hundreds of members.  In the last year, we have gained more than 60 new members – this is thanks in part to the new lower tier we’ve added to our rate card, allowing our smallest members to have all of their inventory Geopath audited and measured for just over $200 a month.  Welcome to the team! We have a saying at Geopath that “We Are Our Members” – and we truly believe that.

And finally, thank you to all of the geeks at Geopath.  I’d like you all to stand up, along with Stacy, Matthew and Ryan from Intermx since you are as much a part of our team as anyone.

This lean team has managed to maintain the legacy TAB system, build and launch the new one and, on top of that, handle 1500 geekOUT requests since we launched our help service last year – all while maintaining a sense of humor that makes the office a great place to be. I am truly honored and humbled to work with you every day.

So with the thank yous out the way, let’s get this thing rolling. OOH MEASUREMENT – TODAY AND TOMORROW

I was recently going through our filing cabinet in the office and I stumbled across a hand-typed document that was prepared by the OAAA in 1958 entitled “A Brief History of the Traffic Audit Bureau.”

As I flipped through it, I realized that it would be an oversight to discuss OOH measurement today and tomorrow without first taking a look back at OOH measurement of yesterday.

So if you could indulge me, I’d like everyone to take a moment and imagine something.

The year is 1933.

The average new car costs $605

A pound of hamburger costs 11 cents.

The very first drive-in movie theater just opened in scenic Camden, NJ.

Prohibition is repealed.

And the Traffic Audit Bureau is born.

In the years leading up to the creation of the Traffic Audit Bureau – or TAB – many companies used their own methodologies for traffic sampling.  According to this document that I found, Hugh Agnew, author, historian and NYU marketing professor stated that

“by 1931, nearly everyone agreed that efforts to establish one system for estimating circulation had failed, not because of lack of accuracy, but because no one was willing to accept the results produced by an interested party, whether buyer or seller.”

It’s a problem that continues to plague other advertising channels to this day. Just last year, Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer, echoed a similar sentiment in speaking about the state of online advertising measurement.  He said,

“Every time a new technology gets developed, the case is made that ‘My platform is special’ or ‘My product needs a unique viewability metric’ or ‘My agency has a better standard for our unique clients.’ That means every publisher needs to measure different viewability approaches for dozens of platforms, agencies and clients — complexity, time and money we’re all paying for.”

Advertisers are demanding independent measurement.  They do not want to transact media based on a currency that is generated by an agency or publisher.

Fortunately for everyone in this room, the Out of Home industry recognized this issue decades ago and came up with a solution.

So let’s take a trip in the way back machine and see what OOH Measurement looked like when the TAB was established 85 years ago.

As you can see, our measurement system has evolved over time. For example, several years ago, the TAB replaced the twilight-zone-esque man in the trench coat with traffic counts from the Department of Transportation. As access to data evolved slowly, so did the core TAB methodology.

But data aren’t evolving slowly anymore…and Geopath has taken the biggest leap forward yet!

Before I joined this organization, the Board of Directors hired consultants to conduct an evaluation of the industry and of TAB methodologies. From this effort came the finding that the industry needed better data in order to grow.

So, following the conclusion of the study, the board generated a vision for a state of the art measurement system that could leverage the recent explosion of location data and change the game for the industry.  Last year at this conference, we had just kicked off development to pursue that vision. And now that vision has become reality.

THINGS ARE HAPPENING at Geopath folks!

Early this year, Geopath completed the first version of the new system.  At that time, we requested that each of our member organizations nominate a point person to help us.

Since then, Geopath has had more than 400 “Geopathfinders” working in the software, testing it, trying to break it and ultimately providing us feedback.  This ensures that our data, our APIs, and our platforms are exactly what the industry needs to thrive.  It is built by the industry for the industry.

So a big hearty thank you to all of our Geopathfinders out there.  I’m happy officially to announce that access to our beta software and data are now available to all of our members on our website! Access to the legacy data will continue to be available at least until the end of the year.

This new system accomplishes all of the objectives that were laid out in the vision by our Board of Directors.

First, it provides advanced audience segmentation.

While the legacy TAB system offered information on the demographics of people exposed to OOH such as age and income, the new system has thousands of audience segments, allowing advertisers and agencies to more easily buy audiences instead of locations. For example, we can show you the number of impressions delivered to people in the market for a new automobile within a 30 minute drive time of a local auto dealership or the reach of a campaign among people who drink vodka across the country. Finally we can truly answer the question “Who’s your data!”

The new system provides granular reporting by time and day throughout the year.

We know how incredibly important this is for advertisers who are using ROI models to determine their channel allocations. These data will help ensure that OOH is getting credit for its contribution to a campaign’s success.

The Insights Suite provides information for national plans as well as those that are hyperlocal.

Thanks to the robust data available from the 100s of millions of mobile devices in our system, we can also provide in-depth audience origin information to truly understand where audiences live – both inside and outside the market.

The new system provides us the ability to measure new formats.

We are completing a methodology to measure mobile fleet, including taxi tops, car wraps and mobile billboards.

We have 39 organizations currently participating in the development – many of whom are here today.

We just got preliminary data back on our place-based pilot. In partnership with 18 organizations, we are testing a variety of formats in 300 venues across the country.

The inclusion of new formats is something we are really excited about as we are working to create an even more comprehensive measurement system that will make it easier to plan, buy and sell OOH across all formats.

If you would like more information on these initiatives, there will be workshops focusing on Fleet and Place-based measurement later today.

Finally, the new platform harnesses the power of big data. Actually, that might even be a bit of an understatement. It harnesses the power of enormous data.

The new Geopath solution contains 387 billion structured data records per year.  Making it 3000 times larger than the TAB system.  So the size comparison would be TAB as the city of Waco, and Geopath as the entire state of Texas.

Or, the difference between a marshmallow and a keg of beer.

Believe it or not, with help from our partners at Streetlytics, Geopath has built the most comprehensive population movement simulation in the history of EVER!”

But why do data matter?

Very recently, I was honored to speak at the Local Online Advertising Conference, hosted by Gordon Borrell. If you were at our conference in Boca Raton a couple of years ago, you may remember Gordon was one of our speakers.

Anyway, at Gordon’s event, he presented the findings of a study that he conducted of more than 2000 local advertisers across the country where he asked them how much each of their channel decisions are based on gut versus data.  The finding on this slide really jumped out at me. In local markets, OOH is being bought based on gut intuition rather than data.

At first, this seemed like a bit of a buzz kill to me, but as I let the idea percolate, I realized that this is a fantastic opportunity for the industry.  It is really hard to convince someone’s gut that a channel works.  Seriously – have you ever heard someone say

“I just love our new banner ads? They make my gut feel good?”

…but we can certainly fix the data deficit! And now we are.

In fact, the insights from the new data are already helping our members to generate revenue.  I received the following email from one of our members just a couple of weeks ago:

“Dear Kym, I wanted to let you know that I closed a 1.8 Million dollar piece of business this week with an attorney, thanks to Geopath.  The client and agency were blown away with the insights that Geopath provided, strongly supporting the use of OOH for his business.”

That’s just one of many emails we have received so far proving that the data are changing the game for our members.

But with big data, come big responsibility.

So let’s talk about Responsible data.

Folks, our industry made a major investment in this new, state-of-the-art currency – a financial investment for sure, but this methodology wasn’t developed by Geopath alone.  Our members came together to build it with us.  It was fueled by the brain power of the best and the brightest in the industry.  That investment you have all made needs to be protected, from threats such as misuse of the industry’s data, methodologies and intellectual property, fragmentation of the industry’s currency, and also, the looming threat of changes in data privacy regulation.

At last year’s conference I spoke about Geopath’s dedication to the use of Responsible data.  In our development of the new measurement system, we spoke with data privacy experts and made a deliberate choice to not even come close to the line on existing data privacy policies.  Everything we have done is aggregated and anonymized.  In fact, we chose to have no unique identifiers being housed at Geopath.

Often this decision raised eyebrows – if you can have unique device ID data, why wouldn’t you? – but in light of GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulations in the EU, and now what happened at Facebook, there is a very real threat of regulatory backlash.  We feel even more strongly that this was the right decision for our industry.  We are using and storing data responsibly.

Getting back to the exciting stuff, I can tell you that another aspect of the new measurement system we are thrilled about is our new software!  While the TAB software was, shall we say, functional, it was not sufficient for an OOH industry that is growing more technologically savvy every day.  The old software certainly wasn’t convincing agencies across the country that OOH is a sexy, modern media channel.  And it certainly wasn’t encouraging adoption of the industry’s currency.

But things have changed.  Every time I open the new Geopath Insights Suite, I swear I can hear the voices of angels singing.

It’s intuitive, it’s gorgeous, it’s not vaporware – it actually works…and it continues to get better and better with the help of our Geopathfinders and our amazing development partners at Intermx. Access to our software is now available to all of our members via our website. If you would like a personal tour of our new software, please make sure to visit us at booth #42 in the Expo hall.

Last year at this conference, I shared a quote that I have taped to my wall in the office: “Change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.”

It was a quote that really resonated with me at the time because, boy, it sure felt messy in that middle.  As I was writing this speech, I looked up at that quote on my wall, and I realize it’s kind of bullshit.

The Geopath Insights Suite is now in the hands of our users and, though I may be biased, I do think the system is already gorgeous.  But I’ve also realized that there really is no end to the process.  If you sit around admiring your work for too long, your gorgeous “end” will quickly become obsolete.

We cannot afford to rest as an organization or as an industry.  We cannot afford to wait.  We have got to be courageous together in the face of great change and keep pushing the limits of what we can imagine.

You know the old saying, dress for the job that you want, not the one that you have?  I firmly believe that.

Much like dressing for the job we want rather than the one we have, we need to build the measurement system for the industry we want to be, not necessarily the one we are today.

So what does the measurement system of tomorrow look like? Let’s keep imagining together.  Working together to make it bigger, better, more comprehensive, smarter, sexier and more widely adopted.  Fragmentation only pushes the industry backward.  It’s unity that will help us grow.

One final word about Geopath – we are a not-for-profit organization that works on behalf of all of you.  But we do nothing on our own.  Our members loan us their brightest minds, their biggest thinkers, their geekiest data geeks and together, with buyers and sellers at the table, we develop the trusted, independent, state-of-the-art, universal currency that this industry needs to thrive.

Who knows what our industry and the measurement system will look like five, ten, twenty years from now?  Help us build the future of Out of Home Measurement together.

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