Coronavirus' (COVID-19) Impact on OOH Advertising: Weekly Insights From AdQuick

AdQuick is making it’s COVID-19 OOH Impact analysis publicly available to give buyers and sellers confidence in the current state of car and foot traffic by state and by DMA.

Coronavirus' (COVID-19) Impact on OOH Advertising: Weekly Insights From AdQuick

Last Updated: 6/5/2020

Nationwide, things are trending in a positive direction for OOH media owners, advertisers, and their agencies.

See below for updated OOH reach figures.

- Team AdQuick

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Original Post:

How much has foot and car traffic decreased in the last month as consumers stay indoors amid the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak?

What impact has it had on the reach of out-of-home advertising?

There are whispers of dramatic reductions in reach.

As a result, advertisers (and their agencies) are hesitant to invest without clarity on the current state of affairs.

Many out-of-home media owners are flying just as blind.

The lack of transparency in the out-of-home advertising industry has never been a greater impediment to liquidity as it is today.

To help solve this challenge, AdQuick is making its Coronavirus OOH Impact analysis publicly available to give buyers and sellers confidence in the current state of car and foot traffic by state and by DMA.

Good news first!

OOH reach has not fallen off a cliff.

During the first week of April (with stay at home orders in place for much of the country), we observed significant and varied nation-wide drops in out of home media's reach using car and foot traffic exposure data when compared to the pre-Coronavirus baseline.

% Change in reach from pre-COVID-19 Levels by Week & DMA

(week starting)

New Methodology

We’ve built out our methodology to better reflect what marketers should expect to see when examining individual units or packages around the country.

Previously, we were counting weekly unique mobile devices outside of the home (sampling approximately 10% of the population) over time, effectively measuring the change in number of people who leave their houses each day.

In the new methodology, we are now also accounting for the decline in the average length of each trip outside of the home.

Our new metric is a Weighted Average Unit Reach (WAUR) for each DMA.

To calculate this, we sum up the daily reach for each unit over each week, and compare to the average weekly baseline pre-COVID-19 (Jan 27 2020 - Mar 8 2020).

We then weight each unit’s relative change in reach based on that unit’s contribution to the total DMA reach.

We'll continue to update this post weekly as we obtain more recent data.

Learn more

If you're an advertiser (or an agency that represents one) looking to learn more about how AdQuick can help you plan with more certainty during COVID-19 counter-measures, please reach out to [email protected].

If you're a media operator and are interested to learn more about the impact in your markets, please send us a note at [email protected].