Postar Becomes Route, Launches New Outdoor Measure

UK out-of-home measurement body Postar (Poster Audience Research) has been renamed 'Route', as it launches a new audience research system costing industry investors around £19m.

The new GPS-enabled currency, which was first announced last November, will demonstrate how many people see an ad campaign across a wide range of outdoor environments.

During the four years leading up to the launch, Ipsos MediaCT and MGE Data used a sample of 28,000 people who carried GPS devices to track their locations. The firms then matched this data with local geographic information and traffic patterns, with resulting data broken down by demographics such as age, class and lifestyle, to provide insight into the way people view outdoor advertising.

Using a 'Traffic Intensity Model', Route then calculated the likelihood of people seeing any of the UK's 450,000 outdoor ad 'frames', while also using eye-tracking to estimate whether pedestrians would notice a particular frame.

Route MD James Whitmore (pictured) comments: We now know who is travelling where, how, when and at what speed. The name, Route, is designed to reflect this. Increasingly, time spent out-of-home is about understanding the routes that people take. It is about knowing the pathways of the eye.'

Web site: www.route.org.uk .