The Out-of-Home industry’s long-promised holy grail, MOVE (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure), launched today.

MOVE is the first national audience measurement for outdoor media. According to the Outdoor Media Association (OMA), MOVE is globally unique in that it measures all major formats and environments. The system introduces ‘Likelihood To See’ as measurement currency – the probability that someone will see outdoor media.

The development of the system came about over three years with the fiscal cooperation of the OMA, Federal Government’s Industry Co-operative Innovation Program and the five major OOH companies: APN Outdoor, EYE, Adshel, JCDecaux and oOh!media.

According to the OMA, MOVE’s key features are:

• Outdoor media inventory measured across the five markets of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth (same primary coverage areas as OzTAM television ratings)
• A cross-format planning tool that will produce audience measurement results forany combination of formats and/or markets against more than 110 demographics
• A comprehensive data base comprising:
  – Site characteristics of 60,000 advertising faces across the four categories of Roadside – billboards; Roadside – other; Transport and Retail/Lifestyle
  – Australian Bureau of Statistics Census population statistics
  – Travel information of 600,000 individual person trips sourced from 68,000 Government Household Travel Surveys
  – Land use information of each market – schools, shopping centres, workplaces etc.
  – Road, public transport and pedestrian networks of each of the five markets
  – Survey results of 15,000 respondents used to determine movement within airports and shopping centres, as well as trip variability over time
  – Eye tracking studies covering 15 years global research
• Data stored on a cluster of 32 computers from which audience measurement results are generated, and
• Mapping technology to clearly show geographic distribution of outdoor media campaigns.

“The outdoor media industry has taken a giant leap forward today by delivering upon its promise to provide a fully transparent and accountable audience measurement tool that will be directly available to media agencies, advertisers and OMA members,” said MOVE chairman Steve O’Connor. “Users of the system will need to enter Access Agreements with MOVE which will be provided free-of-charge to media agencies until 1 September 2010 after which a payment system will be introduced to cover new outdoor media contracts.”