Poster buyers slam Postar outdoor study

Postar, the new research system for the outdoor advertising industry, has come under fire from poster specialists for not providing full audience information for each poster site.

The 1.6m research project is to be launched to agencies and advertisers on April 30.

Each site will have audience size figures but data on the audience profile of each poster – including its hinterland, or where the people seeing the poster come from – is not yet available.

Instead, buyers will only get the audience profile of a site by TV region. For example, all the posters in the Granada TV region will be deemed to have the same ABC1 and C2D audience profiles.

“The new system gives exactly the same audience profile for any group of 48-sheets as it does for a handpicked six-sheet campaign targeted at teenagers,” says Steve Wilson, managing director at poster buying specialist Blade. “It seems to need about another 18 months work.”

The Outdoor Advertising Association, which commissioned the research, is also understood to be in dispute with NOP, Postar’s research company.

NOP wanted to create the computer system that will be sold to agencies who use the data, but the OAA has contracted research company Telmar to create the software.