Geopath Sets Out to Provide a Foundation for The OOH Industry
By Dylan Mabin, President, Geopath

Coming off two years of COVID-affected economic activity, the OOH industry has a massive opportunity to capitalize on unrestricted consumer movement. People are spending a lot of time shopping in person, and OOH, more than any other channel, provides advertisers the opportunity to reach the people closest to the point of purchase with captivating formats.

OOH advertisers, publishers, and technology providers face an ongoing challenge in today’s rapidly evolving media world: fragmentation and information overload. New data platforms and services appear every day. New inventory networks are being installed or upgraded. Everyone seems to be offering some sort of metric that has potential insight.

These are all very good problems to have. Innovation is everywhere in out-of-home; visionaries and entrepreneurs see opportunity in our industry, and brands are realizing the value of our unique and impactful media channel.

I believe the OOH industry can grow and thrive in this new period of change, but only if there is a solid foundation on which to build. Advertisers and publishers need a core foundation of truth for OOH media. They need one trusted resource to catalogue and verify the location of inventory and who it reaches.

How can we expect to connect all these new data points and prove the value of the media to brands and marketers if we are not all using the same map and referring to the same media locations?

This is what Geopath provides to its members and the media industry. We strive to be the rock-solid foundation, the “North Star” of the industry. Why us? As a tripartite trade organization, we are the entity through which buyers and sellers alike develop and unify around a trusted inventory auditing and audience measurement platform.

Geopath’s focused vision (developed alongside a diverse group of members and key industry leaders) aims to further strengthen this foundation and focuses on three core pillars:

• Provide comprehensive cataloging and inventory auditing across all OOH media formats
• Increase the precision and accuracy of planning and observed audience metrics
• Facilitate data interoperability across OOH and the larger media ecosystem

The foundation we are providing with this data is just one example of our effort to unify the OOH community and provide the foundation for others to communicate and innovate. In addition, we plan to:

1. Extend the coverage of our universal inventory database to include all formats of roadside, street furniture, place-based, transit, and fleet media
2. Expand the available information for audited media units to include audited viewsheds, opportunity-to-see exposures, audience exposure dwell times, audience impressions, and additional inventory properties
3. Provide seasonality within Geopath audience delivery estimates for planning purposes and provide updated audience delivery estimates on a rolling basis
4. Increase the accuracy and precision of observed audience metrics down to the individual media unit-level
5. Focus audience reporting on universal demographics and necessary audience segments that enable integration with first and third-party audience data
6. Explore strategic partnerships with additional best-in-class audience measurement and data providers to promptly deliver enhancements to the marketplace
7. Provide an interoperable data platform that can reconcile Reach and Frequency across all forms of OOH media and serve as a ground truth for calibration of first and third-party data

These strategic initiatives ensure that Geopath provides a transparent, accurate, user-friendly, and trustworthy data foundation for OOH advertising – one that media owners and advertisers alike can look to as the source of truth necessary for our industry’s continued evolution.