Driving the data bus all the way to the advertiser

By Edmund Tadros
November 2, 2004
APN Outdoor chief executive officer Richard Herring used SMS to garner a direct response from Transit TV's audience. Photo: Angela Brkic


When the management of Transit TV wanted to find out who was watching the TV screens they'd installed in 220 of Sydney's buses, they bribed passengers into telling them.

Passengers were offered the chance to win prizes, like an iPod or a hi-fi system, if they sent a short message service (SMS) message with their age, sex and bus route number to a competition hotline.

"The aim of the promotion was to gauge the ability of Transit TV to provide a direct response from its audience," says Richard Herring, CEO of APN Outdoor, the company that runs the Transit TV service. "Given the environment and the timing of the responses we required, SMS was the most instant and measurable form of communication that we could have used (and) it also provided us demographic information."

The target for the promotion was the 500,000 "boardings" on Transit TV-equipped buses each week. The company estimates the average Sydney bus ride takes 28 minutes. Ads for the eight-week promotion were played twice an hour on the TV screens, says Herring, in between Transit TV's regular content of advertising, news, sport, weather, trivia and music videos.

The SMS data was managed by web design company MassMedia Studios, using its Traction marketing system.

Each SMS received by Traction was automatically sent a confirmation SMS. Then Traction extracted the relevant fields from the SMS message. Thus, an SMS reading "24M380" was decoded by the program as being a 24-year-old male on route 380.

The system also recorded the traveller's phone number and the time and date of entry. SMS entries with incorrect syntax were appended to a spare field.

Leon Young, MassMedia's business development manager, estimates that about 10 per cent of Transit TV's SMS data was invalid.

Young says Traction could have been configured to return a message to the entrant, asking them to re-enter using the right syntax, but this was not done.

"Some massaging of the data was done to correct obvious mistakes but it was not an issue if not every entry was perfectly formatted," Young says.

Transit TV management could access Traction via the internet and generate reports on the data at any stage of the promotion. "The reporting system within Traction allowed (the Transit TV SMS) data to be reported upon in the ways you might expect. For example (you could) list messages by day, see the number of messages each day or report by any of the data fields collected," Young says.

The data could also be exported in formats as diverse as Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) or Comma Separated Variable (CSV).

Transit TV staff used the simple CSV format for their data, which they imported into Microsoft Excel to view and manipulate. The prize list was also automatically generated by MassMedia's system.

"The (SMSs) were entered into the (government-approved) prize management system in Traction and once the promotion was closed, it drew the winners," says Young. "Winners were notified by SMS."

The promotion received more than 4000 SMS entries but the resulting data didn't reveal "anything dramatically different", following known SMS usage patterns, says Herring. "There were more (entries) in the 15-24 age group, declining as ages increased."

Transit TV will now use the data to show advertisers the demographic breakdown of passengers and as a demonstration of a successful SMS promotion using Transit TV.

Next Lessons


Transit TV wanted to track passenger numbers on buses with installed TV screens.


A promotion was run encouraging passengers to SMS their age, sex and bus route number for the chance to win a prize.


Transit TV management have more information about their viewers, which they can use to sell advertising, and advertisers can run their own SMS promotions.

Next Speak

SMS (Short Message Service): A text message that can be sent from a mobile phone.

CSV (Comma Separated Variable): A file format that stores data, with each piece of data separated by a comma. The file can be viewed and manipulated in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel.

XML (Extensible Mark-up Language): A language designed for web documents with customised tags that describes the data within the document and allows it to be exchanged with other applications.