Delivering Certainty is What DYNAMiQ Does

As consumer behaviour changes, Digital Out-of-home (DOOH) audience measurement must too.  DYNAMiQ is delivering advertiser certainty in uncertain times for DOOH.

The events of 2020 have challenged marketers to rethink just about everything they do – whilst maintaining a real need to keep communicating. And as consumers, while our purchasing behaviours have changed, and we are thinking differently – we still want to live the best lives we can and look to brands for guidance and information.  Indeed, as consumers, the desire to have timely solutions to our needs and wants at our fingertips (whether it be for fruit juice or a motor vehicle) has only increased as the world becomes less certain.

Meanwhile, while 2020 hasn’t changed consumer habits beyond recognition, it has applied increased pressure on marketers’ advertising budgets and the associated scrutiny to ultimately deliver sales and a ROI. The most critical marketing output remains – communicating to consumers at the right time, in the right place and with the certainty that their media investment will deliver.

With consumer needs more pertinent, and access to traditional methods of shopping restricted, media with mass audience reach holds real value, and OOH remains one of the increasingly few advertising mediums that can effectively deliver this mass audience.

At QMS, we have been working with our mobility data platform, DYNAMiQ, since its launch in February. DYNAMiQ provides us with audience numbers down to an hourly basis. It has eradicated the old world tendency for speculative averages, and ‘ballpark’ audience reach estimates based on hypothetical best-case scenarios. With live data for DOOH, we can now let marketers know precisely what audience they can reach at any one time.  We can also tell them what audience they might miss, or have greater access to, depending on extenuating circumstances. If I told you years ago that I could commit to 100% delivery on audience, it might have been a tall order, now with the real time data that DYNAMiQ enables, it is a given.

For QMS, the launch could not have come at a better time, as we have seen fluctuations and changing behaviours in the Australian OOH audience. The Australian audience is returning – although at different speeds state to state and subject to various influences. For example, in Melbourne we have returned to a stage 3 lockdown. However, instead of this being a cause for considerable uncertainty as per the first lockdown phase, we now have DYNAMiQ data from that period to future predict what consumer behaviour and audience movements will be like this time around.  What is abundantly clear, is the need for a re-prioritisation of site selection based on the immediate market specific conditions.

It can also predict potential growth stories like the increased audience in Queensland as the region experiences an influx of holiday makers to that market over the last few days. And the latest data supports this, with the Gold Coast experiencing a 19% audience uplift on the first day of the school holidays.

Uncertainty of consumer behaviour is inevitable at this time, but uncertainty of audience delivery should not be a natural consequence.

Even during the current Stage 3 restrictions in Melbourne, OOH remains one the most effective mass reach mediums; with an average of over 900,000 contacts generated daily across our Melbourne large format digital sites. By providing specific location data, DYNAMiQ enables us to optimise campaigns, ensuring both exposure and audiences are maximised. Marketers can remain confident that the all important Melbourne audience is being reached with the certainty and reassurance of real time mobility data.

Nationally, the OOH audience has shifted substantially from traditional patterns and behaviours during the lockdown, as demonstrated in the graph below.

At the start of July, we saw that the national OOH audience was restored to 81% of its pre-COVID size – ahead of international markets such as the UK. We will continue to share these results as they change across the upcoming weeks and as we see variations by market.

The certainty QMS can offer during this period, is the unfailing delivery of any audience a marketer has bought, using DYNAMiQ to inform the optimal direction of a campaign and to confirm the results. In this way, the live data guides the effective delivery of the creative message – providing accuracy and certainty in uncertain times.

ROI has never been more critical, and with DYNAMiQ data, we can ensure this.