Out-of-home communications agency, Posterscope UK and free newspaper, Metro UK have collaborated on a research study to further understand the attitudes and behaviours of ‘urbanite’ audiences in relation to digital and interactive OOH and location based mobile and social media.

Metro’s national Urban Life panel of 1,000 readers were surveyed.

We asked them about their use of mobile phones for things other than text and phone calls. Usage of Facebook, Twitter, email, games, music, web browsing, online shopping and other apps were analysed.

• Patterns in major cities across the country are very similar to those of the London audience.

• The only significant difference is that Londoners are more likely to use email functionality (31% vs 18%), based on all respondents.

• Amongst active users of these smartphone features; travelling by bus, waiting at bus stops, travelling on trains and waiting at stations are all key times for using Facebook (44% do so), web browsing (32%) and emailing (32%).

• The features used while travelling on a bus are very similar to when audiences are travelling by train. Intuitively one might expect buses and bus stops to be more synonymous with Facebook and trains to be more synonymous with email and Twitter but in fact there is little difference.

• Gaming is much more prolific on the London Underground than any of the other OOH environments analysed with 65% doing so.

Just how well known and well used are the various location based social networks such as Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla ?

• Facebook places has the highest awareness (41%) with Foursquare at 30%.

• 48% have never heard of any of them.

• 18% have checked in to a location using such a service.

• Facebook places is relatively well known in major cities outside of London (38% vs 43% in London).

• Similarly Foursquare doesn’t suffer from a major London skew with 32% awareness in London vs other major cities at 28%.

How appealing are location based mobile games such as scavenger hunts and outdoor augmented reality challenges ?

• 36% of Urbanites would consider playing, rising to 63% if the prize or rewards were good enough.

Urbanites claim that posters and OOH screens do encourage them to do things.

• 45% have taken action as result of seeing an ad on a poster or advertising screen.

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• 28% have searched for an advertised product online.

In their opinion digital OOH screens ads should be dynamic.

• 62% favour screen ads that have animated/moving creative.

• 43% recommend that brands change elements of the creative very frequently.

• 40% recommend incorporating entertaining or useful information.

• 28% recommend including live content (e.g. from social networks, video streams, etc.).

Where would they be willing to interact with digital OOH screen installations ?

• Railway stations (48%).

• Shopping Malls (49%).

• Bus stops (41%).

These findings demonstrate that both OOH and the Metro newspaper can play some key roles in influencing the ‘digital and mobile behaviour’ of the important and large scale Urbanite demographic.

For more information please contact dominic.milan@posterscope.com

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