Blue Billboard delivers OOH advertising to shopping malls along the south coast of England

Blue Billboard was founded by entrepreneurs Justin Howard and David Godding in 2020 in Worthing, England, south of London.  Blue Billboard’s mission has been to provide highly effective, affordable advertising to businesses across the South Coast. They started with just two screens in West Sussex. Since then, their network has grown quickly, and their screens reach an audience of over 7 million impressions every month.

Challenge

Small cities along the south coast of England offer vibrant commercial centers, both along high streets and in local malls. Steady consumer foot traffic makes these sites ideal for out-of-home advertising.

Co-founder Justin Howard explains that “Digital out-of-home (dOOH) advertising is a perfect fit for local businesses because the advertising targets their specific locality. Advertising campaigns targeting consumers in Worthing do not waste impressions on consumers in London.

Still, accurately measuring the numbers of impressions delivered is required to set fair pricing for each of BlueBillboard’s venues. While cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPMs) is determined by the locale, it is the specific number of impressions at each site that determines the value to and/or price paid by advertisers.

Solution

Two primary technologies are available for measuring these impressions delivered:  video cameras and passive Wi-Fi sensors.

Video cameras offer good accuracy when counts are low, but when counts are high, cameras undercount because one person can obscure another. Cameras are expensive because local video processing to protect consumer privacy requires expensive video processors at each camera. Because the units run hot, they have short lifetimes, making them still more expensive.

Passive Wi-Fi sensors are not as precise as cameras at low impression counts (<10), but equally accurate at mid-range, with much better accuracy at high impression counts (>25) because individuals do not interfere with one another.

Passive Wi-Fi sensor hardware is also much less expensive because most computer processing can be performed in the cloud, where processing is cheaper. Finally, because passive Wi-Fi sensors are indeed passive, they run at very low temperatures and offer long lifetimes.

Result

Blue Billboard sees two uses of its 24×7 impression counts. First, advertisers must be able to quantify the reach of their advertising programs. While “more” impressions are better than “fewer”, BlueZoo can precisely quantify measurements at a fine temporal grain. Second, the operators of malls also find value in understanding foot traffic in their facilities.

Measurements are important both for purposes of scheduling maintenance staff and for quantifying foot traffic for prospective tenants. BlueZoo can email different daily, weekly, or monthly reports to each constituency, keeping low the cost of communicating relevant analytics.

Blue Billboard, now with offices in Worthing, is helping local businesses along the South Coast grow, by promoting the goods and services of local merchants to local markets. With the growth of their customers, Blue Billboard is growing too, delivering an advertising product whose benefits are precisely tracked by BlueZoo’s foot traffic measurement solution.