Digital technology is revolutionizing the way advertisers and market researchers measure campaign effectiveness. But for out-of-home (OOH) ad measurements, data that accurately reflect consumer sentiment have been elusive. And that’s likely because there’s something important missing from today’s ad lift assessments: the human element in real time.

To get real answers you need to talk to real people. The good news is that advertisers and marketers can talk to them by harnessing smartphone GPS technology and true-mobile survey methodology. Talking to people who’ve actually passed in view of the billboards or other signage in your OOH campaign provides you with real insights. It’s a quantum leap from customary OOH measurements that are strictly a numbers game, substituting basic statistics such as traffic counts, average speeds, and viewing angles for what you really need: active opinions elicited from real people who’ve seen your signs.

The stats-only method is valuable, if you’re only looking to get a ballpark idea as to how many consumers are potentially exposed to your ads. But you won’t be able to ask the questions you really need answered, particularly those tricky and invaluable questions that can only be accurately assessed with qualitative responses. With $7.3 billion a year at stake – the amount advertisers spend on OOH campaigns according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America – it’s imperative to get the reliable data that are only available from real consumers.

So how do you get feedback from the people your campaign is targeting? Using MFour’s all-mobile panel, you can:  

• Create geofences around all the billboards or signs in your regional or national campaign

• Access a panel of more than one million active members, all of whom have downloaded the Surveys on the Go® mobile app, to send the right questions to the right consumers at the right time

• Locate panelists who fit within your demographic criteria and automatically send notifications to complete a survey once they cross a geofence

• Get a response to learn what they’ve noticed and how it’s impacting them while the experience is fresh in memory

An advanced, true-mobile OOH study also gives you the context you need. MFour’s standard practice is to run control surveys that measure awareness and sentiment among consumers who haven’t been exposed to a campaign. That gives you the comparative data you need to know what kind of lift your campaign is actually producing.

To learn how MFour’s OOH measurement solutions can solve your specific needs, just send a message to Alex at acolao@mfour.com.

The conversation in advertising and marketing has turned inevitably to how to reach consumers on the mobile devices that define the smartphone era.

But let’s not forget the traditional meaning of “mobile” – as in anyone or anything that moves. Old-fashioned mobility remains indispensably important in the advertising and marketing sphere – where it has played a vital role ever since the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt put up Western Civilization’s first outdoor ads on obelisks to express their power, accomplishments, and initiatives to the populace. Some good ideas never go out of fashion, and what we now call out-of-home advertising won’t lose its appeal and effectiveness so long as human beings walk or ride through their world.

The Outdoor Advertising Association of America has quantified the extent of out-of-home advertising in today’s U.S.A.: 2,246,714 signs – not counting untold numbers of additional signs in places such as bus benches, leisure venues, restaurants, and bars. Here’s the breakdown:

◊ 1,250,000 Digital Video Screens

◊ 49,082 Bus Shelter Ads

◊ 512,040 Transit Ads  

                    40% Buses

                    35.4% Subway & Rail

                    13.4% Airports

                    9% Taxis

                       0.7% Digital

◊ 368,539 Billboards

                    2% Digital   

                    43% Large (672 Square Feet)

                    54% Poster-Size (72 to 303 Square Feet)

◊ 66,354 Alternative Ads

                    2% Arenas & Stadiums

                    46.2% Shopping Malls

                    51.8% Cinemas

The takeaway is that while nearly all eyes are on mobile devices these days, the same is true for out-of-home signage. When an advertising channel reaches seemingly everyone in your target market, it’s vital for you to understand and measure the extent to which consumers notice and respond to it.

MFour has out-of-the-box mobile research solutions that let you locate and reach exactly the consumers your out-of-home ads seek to capture – in the very moment they’re in a position to see your ad. You can get insights into how many people are noticing your OOH ads, and more importantly, how each person feels about your ads the moment they see it.

To get the best advice on research that will help you maximize ROI from OOH, contact Alex at acolao@mfour.com.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you head into the weekend.

• 5 Ways to Filter Out Faulty Information

• 9 Insights into Holiday Shopping

• Why a Happy Panel Delivers Great Data

And here's a Friday tune to stoke your holiday spirits.

RetailMeNot, Inc. needs to know what shoppers want to buy, where they want to buy it, how much they want to spend, and what they think of their shopping experiences. That’s why it engaged MFour for an important study about deal-seeking consumers at 1,000 leading malls across the country during the five most crucial shopping days of the year – Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.

RetailMeNot stands in the middle of the relationship between millions of shoppers and untold numbers of retailers and brands. Through its website and mobile app, RetailMeNot matches consumers with discount offers – and in 2015, the deals it relayed to consumers helped drive $4.8 billion in retail sales. So it has an extremely large stake in gathering accurate insights into holiday shopping.

Using its own internal capabilities, RetailMeNot was able to collect an impressive aggregate of statistical data, revealing that mobile users accounted for 77% of the Black Friday traffic on the RetailMeNot website and 61% of Cyber Monday traffic. But it also needed to get inside consumers’ heads – and so it turned to MFour.

We supplied the most advanced, true-mobile technology available – technology that first located consumers who, without prompting, had gone shopping at one of the malls in the study, and then sent them a survey invitation on their smartphones just as they left the mall.

The study’s other key component was the human factor. The size, engagement, and diversity of the all-mobile panel that uses MFour’s Surveys on the Go® app provided a sample that would be fully representative of the U.S. population. The panel’s million-plus active members make it easy to connect with traditionally hard-to-reach consumers such as Millennials, Hispanics, African Americans, and parents of young children who are particularly focused on their mobile devices.

Fielding lasted from Nov. 24 (Thanksgiving) to Nov. 28 (Cyber Monday). MFour delivered  topline data from the 1,500 completed and validated responses on Nov. 30. On the following day, Dec. 1, RetailMeNot publicly announced key insights it had gained into holiday shopping trends and shoppers’ deal-seeking behaviors. The insights include:

• 82% of shoppers used a special promotion to make a purchase

• 78% of shoppers searched in advance for deals before heading to the mall

• 69% used an app to search for those bargains

• Nearly 70% who shopped in-store during the five days also shopped online

• 50% said that they’ll do most of their holiday shopping in stores rather than online

• 10% said they’ll use smartphones for the majority of their holiday shopping

• Users of the RetailMeNot discount app were most likely to have spent $101 to $250 over the five days, compared to less than $100 for users of other apps

One important takeaway, noted Marissa Tarleton, Chief Marketing Officer, North America, at RetailMeNot, is that consumers begin planning their holiday shopping well before Black Friday, and “the fact that retailers are following suit by optimizing deals…prior to Black Friday is a win for retailers and consumers alike.” It’s an example of consumer insights leading to smart business decisions.

To learn how MFour can put you in touch with today’s smartphone-centric consumers, just send a message to Alex at acolao@mfour.com. He’ll get you started on harnessing MFour’s true-mobile technology to help bring home the insights you need.

Tidings of comfort and joy? If only. That’s the takeaway from Forrester Research’s recently-issued predictions about what 2017 will hold for marketing — and particularly for marketing executives.

Here’s one cold, hard, bluntly-stated assertion from Forrester’s analysis of what’s ahead in the new year: “We predict that CEOs will exit at least 30% of their CMOs for not mustering the blended skill set needed to drive digital business transformation, design exceptional personalized experiences, and propel growth.”

All we can say to that is “Yikes!” However, the new insights go beyond giving marketing and market research professionals something to worry about for the sake of simply scaring them. The predictions may get them thinking about the kinds of actions needed to throw a life preserver around sales revenues amid today’s dizzying churn of technological change.

The report is “2017 Predictions: Dynamics That Will Shape The Future in the Age of the Customer." You can download it from Forrester’s website, but here are six of its key insights about how the speed of technology has changed the consumer expectations that marketers need to get ahead of — or else.

• Those crazy Millennials and their famous fickleness? They’ve been crazy like a fox. They keep their options open because it’s so easy to comparison shop for myriad brands and consumer experiences. It’s a completely rational and savvy consumer behavior, given how easy smartphones make it to compare competing products and services.

• Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are becoming more like Millennials in the ways they access and exploit information. They’re trusting their ability to browse for options instead of staying with brand loyalties that marketers previously took for granted. After all, they’ve got smartphones, too.

• Brands, products, and services have virtually no margin for error: “Today’s customers reward or punish companies based on a single experience — a single moment in time….Customers who experience disgust, anger, or a feeling of neglect during a brand interaction are about eight times more likely not to forgive that company.”

• With consumers holding so many cards, and their preferences so changeable, Forrester predicts brands will face up to 50% more “revenue risk” in 2017.

• The only choice, Forrester says, is for businesses to change rapidly to keep up with consumer expectations. It recommends experimentation to harness new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality to enrich the consumer experience. On the management side, Forrester says new approaches will demand rapid changes in corporate structures and company cultures.

• Forrester sums up its message with this: “In 2017, a few companies will make important inroads on what drives consumer decisions. This is a first step in understanding emotion as both a descriptive and predictive measure to guide experience design and govern operations.”

Scary? Yes, but change is always scary. The thing is to allow it to get you going, instead of scaring you stiff.

The Martians invaded Earth on Oct. 30, 1938, landing in New Jersey, then wreaking destruction as they advanced on New York City. At least that’s what many a panicked listener thought after tuning in to Orson Welles’s radio drama of H.G. Wells's ‘“The War of the Worlds.” Welles used a newscast format to dramatize the classic science fiction story, but some people automatically associated “news” with reality. The power of mass media to misinform – in this case, inadvertently – was clearly established.

Today the battle continues. On one side, authenticated fact. On the other, rumor, supposition, and deliberate deceit. The biggest battlefield is social media, where two New York Times headlines, “Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites” and “Twitter Adds New Ways to Curb Abuse and Hate Speech” suggest that defending the reliability of information and sifting through what’s useful from what’s toxic takes constant vigilance. With that in mind, here are tips for your own use in assessing the reliability of information that turns up in your web searches or social media feeds.

• Government websites: Even if you don’t trust government to get policy right, state and federal websites are the best source for information about the overall economy – such as income, demographics, export/import revenues, expenditures, and much more. It’s worth adding .gov to your search terms when looking for demographic breakdowns or macro data on product categories or economic sectors.

• Be your own fact-checker: When aggregators pass along information without linking to a source, use terms or phrases from their reports in fact-check searches of your own.

• Be wary of “scoops”: Scientific experiments must be replicable to be verified as accurate. By the same token, don’t take news and information on face value when they come from just one source, unless it’s a source you really trust.

• Separate opinion from fact: A great deal – perhaps the vast majority – of web content is opinion, not reported fact. Seek out straight news-reporting first. Then, armed with a factual basis, you’re in a good position to decide whether analysis and commentary make sense to you.

• Don’t over-distrust the mainstream media: While there’s competitive pressure on legacy news organizations and serious information websites to post news as fast as they can – sometimes to the detriment of good reporting – their main value proposition continues to be accuracy and accountability (although that's no longer a guarantee). Go with information from organizations that have a financial incentive to get it right.

Authentication and reliability are crucial in the business world. Market research rises or falls with the authenticity of survey data. Digital advertisers need trustworthy authentication to be confident their messages are reaching targeted audiences. Moral of the story? Like anything else, if you want good value in information, you have to proceed with healthy skepticism and shop around. And if you hear that the Martians have landed, don’t run – verify!

'Tis the season to be spending, and when shoppers are feeling comfort and joy about their economic circumstances, brands and retailers tend to benefit.  To this end, let’s look at a few interesting insights from the National Retail Federation on how this holiday shopping season is shaping up for retailers nationwide.

• U.S. retail sales, including e-commerce and mail order, are expected to reach $655.8 billion for November and December, up 3.6% from 2015.

• That would mark the 14^th year of growth for holiday sales in the past 15 – the only exception being 2008, as the economy fell into a deep recession.

• Despite certain predictions that brick and mortar stores are on the way out, 82.2% of expected 2016 holiday sales will take place in-store. But e-commerce is indeed coming on as the NRF expects combined online and mail order sales to make up 17.8% of holiday expenditures, with e-commerce growing 7% to 10% over 2015.

• The retail sectors that are most dependent on holiday sales, based on 2015 results, are jewelry stores (27.4% of annual revenues are crammed into the two months); department stores (24.2%), sporting goods/hobby/books/music (23.2%); and discount department stores (23%).

• Other categories doing 20% or more of their annual business during the two holiday months are electronics/appliance stores, clothing stores, and shoe stores.

• e-commerce and mail orders are expected to reap 22.5% of their annual sales during November and December.

•  As a benchmark, note that November and December account for only 16.3% of the year’s 362 shopping days – leaving out Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.

• The NRF found that the average shopper expects to spend $935.58 on holiday purchases this year – a 1.8% downtick from last year’s record  of $952.58. Where will those shopping dollars go?

Gifts: 62.94%

Non-gift purchases driven by holiday discounts: 14.96%                                  

Candy and food: 11.18%

Decorations: 5.85%

Greeting cards and postage: 2.93%

Flowers and potted plants: 2.18%

• Those who buy gifts also receive them – and this year’s most preferred items are gift cards, favored by 61% of the NRF’s respondents; clothing/clothing accessories, 51%; and entertainment content (books, CDs, DVDs, videos and video games), 40%.

The story is not just in the numbers. Holiday shoppers aren’t simply looking to buy; they’re looking to buy for people they care about. This affords marketers and researchers a special opportunity to gain insights into consumers’ deepest emotions about brands, products, and the shopping experience. Research, in particular, can benefit by looking at the holidays not as a time to wind things down, but as an opportunity to gain insights when shoppers are most engaged in the shopping experience.

An ideal way to get an immediate jump on holiday consumer research opportunities is with MFourDIY ™ -- the nation's only all-mobile, DIY survey-building platform.  You can program and field a survey in less than an hour, allowing you to start reaping insights in time for Black Friday, and then on through the holiday season.

To learn more, email the most solutions-focused person in DIY mobile market research (his name is Chris) at ctyau@mfour.com.

Pundits were predicting that the Hispanic vote would put Hillary Clinton over the top and into the White House. While that didn’t happen, Hispanic Americans continue to be a growing force, both in the electorate and in consumer markets. How many reasons are there for marketers and researchers to make understanding Hispanics a top priority? The answer is 57 million – the nation’s Hispanic population. With this in mind, MediaPost columnist Lee Vann looked at voter statistics to frame a few broader insights.

• Nationally, Hispanics made up 12% of eligible voters – 27.3 million total.
• With nearly one million Hispanics in Florida casting ballots in early voting, “this year’s election clearly showed that Latinos can be united, motivated, and mobilized by clear and relevant messages.”
• Accounting for 10% of registered voters in Connecticut and Illinois – and more than 7% in Massachusetts, Idaho, Rhode Island, and Hawaii – Hispanics have become a major presence all across the United States.
• Hispanics are avid mobile adopters, so when marketers and market researchers think about sending those “clear and relevant messages,” they need to think about sending them via smartphone.

If you’re looking to appeal to Hispanic Americans, it’s important that you keep them top-of-mind as you develop your market research strategy. Once you’re able to develop the right message for this growing voter and consumer group, you also need to make sure you’re presenting your value proposition through the right marketing channels. And that’s true whether you’re trying to sell a candidate or a product.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you head into this pre-Thanksgiving weekend:

• 4 Surprise Insights: Deciding What to Watch on TV 

• Pinpoint Respondents By the Apps They Use

• Understanding Mobile Gives Legacy Media a Chance

And here's a Friday tune to send you into your weekend rocking out thankfully.