In an average day someone will make eye contact with around 27 roadside posters, 14 bus adverts and by taking a trip on the tube, they will come across an average of 74 adverts, according to the largest piece of research conducted into the UK outdoor advertising sector.
Released today, the £19 million study by research body Route, has looked into how people across Britain come across outdoor advertising.
The research was commissioned in 2008 and undertaken by Ipsos MediaCT and MGE Data, while also including the largest GPS travel survey which tracked 28,000 people over a nine day period and resulted in 19 billion GPS records being made.
Eye tracking techniques were also adopted to realise what adverts participants saw while travelling, while including the measurements of 360,000 frames for road, bus and the tube.
James Whitmore, managing director of Route said: “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. The medium is changing rapidly and we must think from the point of view of the audience, not from the position of a poster. If we start with a deep knowledge of how people move about, we have the flexibility to decide what we put in their way in terms of communication opportunities. By defining the audience it will be possible to use the data to plan, trade or value the medium.”
Jeremy Male, chair of the Outdoor Media Centre, added: “The launch of Route is the culmination of years of investment and planning to provide our advertisers and agencies with a state of the art outdoor audience planning system. The investment is a testament to the health of the outdoor sector and a statement of confidence in its future success.”
It was also revealed that the average distance travelled out-of-home each week was 241km at an average speed of 19.94 km per hour with men found to travel faster and further than women.