BeMyEye and Kinetic join forces to tackle OOH billboard compliance issues

In the first 6 months of fortnightly compliance checks our Eyes found almost 10% of billboards were not displaying the correct advertisement.

The total number of billboards in Italy alone amounts to more than 100,000, and with the posters changing on a bi-weekly basis, this amounts to a circulation of 2.5 million posters every year. Compliance issues of the correct advertisement being displayed on these billboards within the industry is well know, resulting in a reluctance for some brands to invest. This well-known lack of compliance is what prompted BeMyEye and Kinetic to develop a combined strategy to address the issues.

Prior to forming the partnership with BeMyEye it was seen as operationally impossible for these issues to be highlighted at a billboard level due to the high costs and time needed to visit every site. This is where the compliance check from BeMyEye came in. Using our vast crowd of 3,000,000 on-demand workers, BeMyEye was able to visit the billboards in just 3 days.

The on-demand workers, know as’Eyes’, were able to verify their visit by checking in to the location in the BeMyEye app (using geo-location technology) and provide photographic evidence of the poster being displayed for Kinetic to review in a dedicated customer dashboard. Every single submission from the Eyes was verified for accuracy by a specialist quality assurance team at BeMyEye HQ, before being uploaded in real-time to the dashboard, allowing Kinetic to review the insights as the job was live in the app.

The insights didn’t finish there however. A partnership with ItoB, a company that transforms raw data into meaningful insights, meant that Kinetic were able to view the results in an interactive map, clearly highlighting non-compliant areas of the country, allowing Kinetic to raise their concerns with local representatives directly to improve overall compliance levels.

“The collaboration with BeMyEye allows us to provide a truly innovative service to our customers” says Alberto Cremaschi, CEO of Kinetic Italy. “Not only can we guarantee a granular level of control of billboards throughout Italy, an absolute novelty for this market, but we can make this information available quickly. In addition, the presentation platform makes them immediately accessible and easily understood by our clients.”

In the first six months of 2016 BeMyEye successfully completed 15 campaigns, totalling tens of thousands of checks, with a peak of 9,000 billboards checked in a short 3 day period. The results of the activity were quite staggering. Nationwide, almost 10% of the billboards were non-compliant. Regionally, non-compliance was at 8% in the North West, 10% in the North East, 6% in Central Italy and 12% in the South. Non-compliance peaked at 23%, while the best levels stood at 5%. BeMyEye was even able to segment the results into billboard types, revealing 12% non-compliance in bus shelters for example.

“Out of Home advertising needed a service that could fundamentally improve the credibility of the entire marketplace,” adds Cremaschi. “Kinetic, along with BeMyEye, has succeeded in identifying the most effective method that can bring tangible benefits to the brands, media agencies and billboard companies. Brands can optimise their investments, while agencies and billboard companies have the opportunity to intervene promptly and effectively in the event of problems. Our goal is to export this successful model into our other European markets.”

“The collaboration with Kinetic demonstrates, once more, the power of crowdsourced data in providing actionable change,” said Luca Pagano, CEO of BeMyEye. “Our network of agents ensures insights are delivered across the entire real-estate of billboards, providing a granular level of detail that until now has been unthinkable with traditional methods, and at a significantly lower cost. A more efficient system means a higher return on investment for companies and, therefore, the possibility for this field to attract new capital investment . A virtuous circle which benefits all players in this market”, says Pagano.