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The long-awaited unified audience measurement system for outdoor advertising, RoadStar, is set for a launch that will allow it to be used universally.
Software developer Relu AI has addressed privacy issues through significant software upgrades over the past two months. The revised version of RoadStar has been distributed to leading agencies, including GroupM and Rapport, for pilot testing, e4m has learnt.
e4m was the first to report in May that RoadStar was ready to roll but agencies had then redflagged the tool due to privacy concerns.
If the pilots are successful, RoadStar could soon be adopted for widespread use by the Advertising Agencies
Association of India (AAAI). RoadStar, developed by Mumbai-based Relu AI, in collaboration with the Indian Outdoor Advertising Association (IOAA) was presented to India’s top media agencies on 8 May. However, some agencies have raised concerns about data privacy and other limitations of the OOH software.
Notably, after years of effort, the IOAA had come up with its first unified audience measurement system for
outdoor advertising. RoadStar uses GPS technology and was initially launched in 2020. It has been enhanced
over the past year with inputs from IOAA, and is currently being utilized by media owners like the Times Group
and Jagran.
On May 8, IOAA presented RoadStar to the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) for feedback and approval. While most agencies endorsed the tool, GroupM and Rapport raised red flags over data safety and legal agreements associated with deploying the tool.
RoadStar aims to standardise OOH media measurement, aligning it with other media types and potentially boosting the industry's share of advertising spend. RoadStar is expected to enhance the evaluation of OOH advertising and drive significant growth in the sector.
How does RoadStar work?
RoadStar covers over 800 markets in India, from metro cities to taluka levels, and tracks more than 60,000 media sites. It uses data from over 35 million mobile users to identify high-traffic areas and optimise ad placements. The platform maps consumer movements through 3 million places of interest across 120 categories, providing detailed metrics such as Unique Reach, Gross Reach, Frequency, and more.
With its expansive pan-India footprint, RoadStar delivers insights into the reach and frequency of exposure across all static media sites and retail establishments throughout India for advertisers, planners, and media owners alike.
RoadStar draws from four primary data sources:
1. Mobility Data: Aggregated from millions of mobile phones via various mobile apps, this anonymous GPS
data is provided by the third-party aggregator Unacast.
2. Census of India
3. Global Administrative Areas Maps: Open source shape files defining geographical boundaries at
various administrative levels across India.
4. Profile and POI Data: Mapping mobility data with places of interest to create behavioural mappings for
individuals.
Various Modules
RoadStar offers various product modules such as Client Module (manages client information), Project Module (Builds and manages campaigns), TG Definition Module (Defines target audiences using Boolean-based queries), Site Recommendation Engine, Plan Optimizer Module (Facilitates addition and deletion of media sites to campaigns), Campaign Reports Module ( Provides detailed pre-built reports on various metrics), Attribution Module (Assesses the impact of campaigns on footfall generation) and Sites Master Module that provides visibility to all sites included in RoadStar.
Data Processing and Reporting
The processing and reporting in RoadStar involve several steps such as Data Cleansing (removing dot logs, eliminating duplicates, and validating panel membership), Visibility Cone Creation (based on the first and last instances of visibility), Data Weighting and data aggregation at site, market, and campaign levels.
Campaign reporting
1. Reach by: Local Traffic Vs Transit Traffic.
2. Effective Reach - 1+ to 5+.
3. Count of sites exposed - explains the reasons for frequency.
4. Campaign reach quintiles - explains the time taken to reach 20% of the audience each.
5. Metrics at 3 different levels for all the campaigns- Campaign level, Market Level and Site Level.
For media planners
The software provides location-based identification of Target Audience - enabling selection of sites, Dynamic Visibility cone, a robust database of 60,000+ sites, search by latitude and longitude, site clusters within 100 m,250 m, 1 km linear stretch, Client and competition locations, different icons to identify different layers and auto
segregation of markets for reporting - from a single excel upload
