#BigPic16: @KymFrank Enumerates TAB’s 4 Steps In A Year
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
It’s been a busy year for the TAB team, Kym Frank, president, said in her speech opening the 2016 TAB-OAAA Conference and Expo, themed as The Big Picture, in Boca Raton, Florida.
In the less-that-12 months since she joined TAB, she and the TAB team have taken four major steps:
- reorganized the company;
- moved the office;
- overhauled the measurement system;
- rebranded the organization
She also brought the entire TAB team to the conference, the first time that it has been done in more than 15 years, so that the attendees can learn who-is-who and can meet and mingle with them. (In fact, there’s a contest underway entitled The BIG Game where teams have to interact with the TAB staff members with the aim of winning an Apple Watch.)
TAB is a completely member-owned, funded, and governed organization.
“You as an industry determine our priorities, you determine our objectives, you have input into our pricing,” Frank said. “With for-profit companies, their agenda is to make themselves money. At the TAB, our agenda is to make YOU money.”
The first thing Frank did after taking on the presidency was to go on a listening tour across the country to meet with TAB members across the US, as well as conducting an online survey with over 230 members
.
She said, “The research pinpointed that work had to be done in two key areas: 1) improving outreach, training, and member services; and 2) enhancing measurement, integration, and technology, so that our OOH measurement and analytics are truly state of the art, future-proof, and deliver what our members need to win.”
In terms of the former, Frank discussed how TAB has been revamped: is developing new marketing programs and training initiatives to better educate and support its members (eg. a beefed up online presence; Out-of-Home Office Hours training sessions, and a ‘Geek Out’ help desk). There have been more than 100 meetings in 15 cities with TAB members and stakeholders. Membership has been increased with 40 new members.
And Frank said, “Yesterday, our Board of Directors unanimously approved a new membership category, Remarketers, to insure that we are being inclusive of new members working in the programmatic space.”
(TAB defines Remarketers as: Any person or business organization which, through their own proprietary software system, provides transactional based or programmatic advertising purchasing capabilities enabling the buying or placement of out-of-home media advertising shall be eligible for membership. Remarketer companies will be allowed similar access to TAB’s data as agency members.)
In regards to the measurement system, platforms, and IT infrastructure, TAB has introduced a number of new enhancements to its ratings, including:
- moving from quarterly to monthly updates;
- the release of O-Plan, a market-level planning software that is now available free to all of our members;
- measurement of new formats like transit and fleets;
- back-end investments to improve TAB’s infrastructure, systems and ability to support its constantly-growing list of members;
- M.O.R.E (Measurement Optimizations & Ratings Enhancement), the new measurement system itself, now in test mode.
“Operation MORE is truly the future of OOH measurement,” said Frank. “It delivers predictive ratings for every hour of every day, 365 days a year. It tracks audience impressions in near real-time. It uses a unified methodology across all formats to deliver more consistent, reliable, and trusted ratings. It provides much richer analytics and insights about the audiences being reached.
“Operation MORE is constructed using a comprehensive data stack built on a foundation of mobile phone and connected car data. These data sources provide us measurement in near-real time with the incredibly granular daypart measurement that will be required for OOH’s digital future. The result is that we moving from OOH ratings to the measurement of audience location.
“The nature of the Operation MORE data stack, provides us with unique connection points to help us integrate with first party data, other third party data sets, cross platform measurement systems, ROI models, and a host of automated platforms and systems” said Frank. ”We are building a measurement system that not only puts us on a level playing field with other media measurement methodologies, but actually ahead of it. No other media will offer more actionable and accurate measurement and insights about consumers than ours. And no other media owns its measurement system. It is state of the art, future proof, and you own it.
“When the results from our pilot are done this summer, we fully expect to invest in this new research approach and roll it out in 2017.”
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