Jones Road Beauty Uses A Fixed Geo Test to Measure Their Big Apple OOH Campaign

Out-of-home (OOH) campaigns face unique measurement challenges that set them apart from digital advertising. After all, there’s no immediate way to track how many people saw your OOH campaign on their way to work, or what action they took after seeing it. So when cosmetics brand Jones Road Beauty planned on launching a digital billboard campaign in New York City this spring, they knew they would need a thoughtful approach to measuring incremental impact. 

While the JRB team had run plenty of Haus holdout tests before, this regional OOH campaign was a good candidate for a Fixed Geo Test, which makes it easier for brands to rigorously measure hard-to-measure tests. 

The JRB team ran a four-week 2-cell Fixed Geo Test. In a Fixed Geo Test, the marketer selects specific geographic areas (in JRB’s case, New York City) for campaign exposure. Performance in this exposed region is then compared to a synthetic control model constructed from the remaining DMAs in the US. For this test, the JRB team chose New Orders and Repeat Orders as their KPIs.

The test results showed a 9% lift in New Orders, and no lift in Repeat Orders. “This was a great readout,” says Jones Road Beauty CEO Cody Plofker. “It’s the first channel where we’ve seen 100% lift on New Orders.” 

But there was one drawback: The campaign wasn’t profitable. The team calculated that to reach profitability, the CPIA would need to decrease by 40%.  

While this activation had a higher CPIA than desired, the JRB team was excited by the results and is eager to establish OOH activation baselines in different regions.