Calibre: Creating a single source of truth for OOH

After many years of asking, New Zealand media agencies now have a single Out of Home (OOH) planning and measurement platform – Calibre. But what exactly is it and what does it mean for the industry? 

Created in 2017 specifically for the New Zealand market by JCDecaux with MediaWorks and oOh!media as shareholders, Calibre offers OOH a unified audience measurement currency so advertisers can quantify the audience ROI that their investment delivers and compare it with other channels.

Media5, Advantage Media, Bekon and Vast are also onboarding as licensees into the platform.

Nick Vile, General Manager at oOh!media, says the number one thing clients say they want from the OOH industry both directly and in client benchmark surveys, is unified audience measurement.

“For a channel like OOH whose core purpose for many clients is to deliver broadcast reach this is especially important. The objective of Calibre is to deliver just that.”

In June this year, Calibre integrated a new insights partnership with Landmarks ID to offer unique and actionable insights for OOH planners and advertisers. This single source, mobility model offers a range of benefits to enable extensive development of Calibre capability over the next 12-18 months.

Vile says the data enhancement and switchover to Landmarks ID represents an industry leading solution to unify OOH audience measurement under one platform.

“The use of mobile data sourced from over 300k+ mobile devices will enable Calibre to deliver accurate audience insights for advertisers across all OOH platforms, while also laying the foundation for more in-depth audience reporting. In the short term the data enhancement allows us to go beyond just roadside OOH formats and enables us to develop audience measurement insights for place-based OOH assets such as retail centres and Airports.

“With the change we have also onboarded MediaWorks as the latest Calibre partner. So, while the day-to-day platform remains relatively the same for agencies, there will be a number of significant enhancements coming out to market later this year.”

Calibre will have a significant impact on client’s ability to plan and buy Out of Home cross format says Kurt Malcolm, Head of Programmatic and Trading at JCDecaux.

“Our clients have been telling us they want one source of measurement truth. Calibre will incorporate static, digital, airports, retail and transit formats to create efficiencies in the planning and buying process.”

Angus Swainson, MediaWorks Outdoor Director, says their clients have already been enjoying the benefit of reach and frequency planning through Datalab for many years but Calibre is bringing together the best of the existing audience measurement capabilities into one unified platform.

“At the same time, we are able to evolve the offering with even better foundational data (Landmarks ID) to give clients confidence that when they are planning campaigns using multiple out of home publishers, they have an industry leading common currency to use. It is a giant leap forward.”

So, what does Calibre mean for the OOH industry as a whole?

While the industry has been growing steadily for the past decade, minus Covid lockdowns, Vile says Calibre will prove the broadcast reach that OOH can deliver versus the other channels.

“As traditional media fragments advertisers have increasingly turned to OOH as one of the few remaining broadcast channels. Audience measurement through Calibre will only accelerate this trend.”

It will also provide a platform for much broader collaboration across the sector and Vile says this is already being seen with the recent progress that we have made collectively around Calibre.

“This includes higher order initiatives and issues that face both the sector and our agency clients for example verification, where we are looking to engage with the market collectively to develop the key principles and guidelines to ensure verification delivers the benefits it is designed/intended to.”

During this transitional phase, Ooh!media will be supporting a sector based relaunch of Calibre, (“More to come on that,” Vile says) and will continue to offer support to agencies in conjunction with the standard platform training that is provided by Calibre.

Malcolm says that having one endorsed AMS is critical to the future success of the Out of Home market in New Zealand.

“We want to drop all barriers that make it harder to plan and buy Out of Home. Calibre is a giant step in the right direction to deliver a trusted marketplace for our clients.”

To support advertisers’ understanding of the system, the Calibre ownership group is organising a roadshow in October to re-educate the market on how Calibre  can streamline the planning process across all formats.

 “Calibre is a dynamic AMS platform that will continue to push forward with new developments,” Malcolm says.

“Expect to see airports and retail measurement made available in Calibre by Q4 2022. We’re also in negotiation to bring on new Calibre members giving us the majority of the New Zealand OOH market. Calibre now has the critical mass to deliver on all OOH planning requirements.”

For big reach broadcast media campaigns Calibre is simply unbeatable when it comes to viewability and impact, which will drive significant engagement for the industry as a whole, Swainson says.

“Worldwide trends show Out of Home will take a growing share of the advertisers’ wallets as other mediums fragment, and the convenience and efficiency of having the majority of the out of home market available to plan in one place in Calibre will give the industry as a whole an uplift.”

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