A Spanish ad company wants to standardize OOH traffic metrics using satellites

There’s a new player in traffic metrics in out-of-home media, and it’s using satellites to count cars passing billboards.

Spanish company Cuende, which specializes in OOH measurement, launched a platform in the U.S. on Monday called MetricOOH. The tool uses satellite imagery to assess all traffic in a given zone, of up to 3,500 square miles then feeds it into machine learning technology to count the number of vehicles passing a given billboard. It ultimately determines which billboard locations are most valuable based on the propensity of the vehicles going past.

Daniel Cuende, MetricOOH’s manager, said the company today is announcing its first American client, the Independent Billboard Operators, aka IBOUSA. IBO is a cooperative of small OOH companies that include 90,000 rural and regional signs (both digital and static) in 170 markets across the middle of the country.

Luckily for Cuende, IBO’s general manager Chris Cowlbeck, sits on the board of the Media Rating Council, the industry body that hands out accreditation to those measurement systems that meet its criteria. And Cuende is looking for that validation, having already completed a pre-assessment phase of the accreditation process.

“Our technology is sophisticated, but we make sure the methodology is simple to understand,” said Cuende, who added that the company operates some form of MetricOOH in countries including Spain, South Africa, Romania and Mexico. “We want to produce something that’s so basic, simple and trustworthy that it works in any place, in the middle of nowhere or New York or L.A. We have a standard denominator across any town, city or region, and even more important, across countries.”

Cuende noted that the first client in the U.S. to sign up happens to be one that doesn’t have as much access to sophisticated measurement tools — IBO.