Eyes On Impressions

Outdoor advertising has been measured using traffic counts and daily effective circulation in order to estimate reach. For years, these figures have been the only reliable counts available to measure the reach of an out-of-home advertising campaign. This outdoor measuring system has not lent itself to a seamless integration and comparison with broadcast and print media, making the job of media planners and buyers difficult in creating and implementing multi-media campaigns.

A new and improved system of audience measurement has been in development for several years. This system, Eyes On Impressions (EOIs) will be the new measurement standard in out-of-home.

Eyes on Impressions takes the focus from the number of consumers that could possibly see an advertisement and converts that figure to a more realistic one of the number of consumers who actually noticed it.

Eyes On Impressions (also referred to as Eyes On or EOIs) are derived from a variety of data, specifically: Daily Effective Circulations (DECs), Census Data, Travel Surveys, Data Modeling, Analytics, and statistical conversion factors, or Visibility Adjustment Indices (VAIs). Visibility Adjustment Indices take the physical characteristics into consideration when dealing with an outdoor structure. These physical attributes being: the placement of the unit, what side of the road it’s on when viewed, the distance from traffic when viewed, the type of road it’s placed on, whether the unit is illuminated, the size, it’s angle relative to oncoming traffic, who it’s viewed by (vehicular traffic, pedestrian traffic, or both).

In moving forward, it’s important to embrace Eyes On figures. In fact, as of December 31, 2011 DEC figures will no longer be available and EOI will be the only audited metric used to measure outdoor advertising.

Eyes On will help outdoor advertising become a media directly comparable with the three strongest media categories: radio, television, and print. Previously, radio, television, and print were all able to provide reach and frequency figures, as well as rating points that were directly comparable to one another. Out-of-home was often disregarded as an effective medium since it lacked the ability for the same cross comparison.

As you can see from the chart above. The previous system of DEC (yellow) was often inflated by agencies to allow for what they believed were better CPM comparisons with print and broadcast media (blue). This over inflation didn't portray an accurate comparible cost for outdoor media. The new EOI measurement is so concise that agencies should no longer feel the need to inflate outdoor figures. With the reliability of Eyes On, you can see that outdoor advertising is still the most cost effective media available.

For more information regarding Eyes On Impressions, visit the Eyes On website or OAAA.org.