Moving Walls patents OOH measurement system

Moving Walls has patented a measurement system it has developed for out-of-home (OOH), which will collect data from passers-by using signals such as Bluetooth and Wifi in order to map how many individuals may have seen a campaign.

The OOH technology company has been awarded the patent by the US Patent and Trade Office, for "a system and method for viewership measurement of a particular location for digital out-of-home media networks".

The awarded patent is for a system of multiple sensors (see below) which are dispersed in a particular geographical location where an OOH media site is located. These sensors fetch information characterising the audience nearby. The sensors include Bluetooth sensors, WiFi-based sensors, camera-based sensors, traffic sensors, social media sensors, telco sensors, and smartphone location data sensors. The system maps this to movement information around individual media locations and uses the aggregated information to understand the audiences’ behaviour patterns. The information is normalised before being stored in a repository.

The system uses machine learning to identify the type of location and assigns weights for each individual type of signal collected.

Srikanth Ramachandran, founder and group CEO of Moving Walls believes the multi-sensor patent will serve to increase advertiser confidence in OOH media and accelerate adoption of programmatic digital OOH.

“Outdoor advertising has completely transformed—both physically and in terms of how it is being traded. However, the fundamental issue of audience currency has yet to be addressed in a scalable manner. There are many players who are implementing or adopting existing metrics - traffic counts or smartphone GPS signals - but these either address one type of environment or only represent a sample of the total audience,” he said.

Moving Walls is working with more than 200 media site owners, global media agencies, advertisers, and industry associations to develop measurement standards for outdoor advertising. It has deployed its products on more than 30,000 physical media sites globally across multiple markets including the US, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, India, and Nigeria and Mexico.