Captive Message Time

As more commercial messages are put in front of the modern consumer, CBS Outdoor has conducted a study into just how much time people are spending with advertising messages, with some surprising results.

In the past, media planning was largely about achieving high numbers of impacts at the best rates possible, which was great for the Outdoor sector as a whole - offering large numbers of impacts at against all types of audiences is our bread and butter. Advertisers these days, though, are interested in more than just how many people might have seen their ads; they're demanding to know how their media channels are affording some sort of genuine communication with their consumers. It's up to us as a media owner to show now that we have something more than OTS to offer.

A combination of the growth of media choice, rising levels of ad avoidance and our increasingly busy lifestyles mean that advertisers aren't necessarily achieving the same results through the media they're used to buying.

"Our ratings count people who have the "opportunity to see" ads in the media we buy. This is not the same as people "seeing" advertising. Especially now that clutter and the remote encourage inattention and commercial avoidance."
Erwin Ephron, 'Want Engagement?', January 2006

So it's not just ratings we're after any more, it's something more than that. As commercial clutter increases, so our audience is becoming more discerning with what they will or won't engage with. Media that have something to offer back to the consumer may have a greater chance of connecting with those consumers. Our London Commuter research project (www.thelondoncommuter.com) has shown us that Bus and Underground advertising are capable of rising above the level of a simple poster - consumers actually welcome and appreciate their presence; not something usually said about advertising.

In addition to this, the Underground provides something that is increasingly demanding for advertisers to command a lot of: time. An environment which captures the attention of its audience for minutes at a time and where there is little else to distract the viewer.

But how much time, exactly, are advertisers able to gain access to by opting for high dwell time* sites on the Underground? We carried out a study, Captive Message Time, in order to find out the answer to this question and also to see how that answer compared to the rest of London's media**.

How to set about finding this out then? We already know how much advertising people are exposed to - we have POSTAR, BARB, RAJAR and NRS to tell us that. So from there, we're only one step away from finding out how much time they might spend looking at those ads. If we knew the duration of each impact, and we multiplied that by the number of impacts, then we could work out in total how much time was being spent consuming ads in a particular medium - what we've called Captive Message Time (CMT). Put more simply, it looks like this:

Total OTS x Duration per OTS = Total CMT

So the share of London's 269m hours of monthly CMT works out like this:

London's audience spends 269m hours in total consuming commercial messages in the average 4-week period. That's around 36.5 hours each per month, of which almost 12 hours are spent consuming high dwell time sites on the Underground.

So in a media landscape where we're constantly trying to achieve more for our clients, trying to reach audiences that are less conducive to actually being reached in the first place, we could do worse than trying to reckon how much time we might actually be able to capture consumers' attention for.

* Cross-track 48 & 16 sheets, Tube Car Panels.
** Terrestrial commercial TV, London commercial radio, all National press London readership, Evening Standard, Metro, Time Out, Big Issue, LITV region roadside 48 & 6 sheets.
+ Press impact durations based on average reading time (QRS) pro-rata to titles' advertising:editorial ratio, divided equally by number of display ads per issue (Nielsen MMS)
++ Cross-track 48 sheets 180", 16 sheets 60" and TCPs 195"
◊ Based on 7.355m Londoners (ONS 2005)