Joint Industry Committee for Poster Audience Surveys (JICPAS)

Definition:
Wound up in 1989, this was the first of a series of Joint Industry Committees composed of representatives of the ADVERTISING MEDIA, ADVERTISING AGENCIES and ADVERTISERS, set up to commission and coordinate programmes of audience and readership research for the four largest media, established in 1967. During the 1960s it commissioned careful surveys of audience flows in specimen geographical areas, particularly Newport in South Wales. 'Re result was the 'poster audience model', based on pioneering research a decade earlier, a general formula for the COVERAGE of a given poster advertising campaign, measured in OPPORTUNITIES-TO-SEE: 100 AS/AS + b where: A is one of a set of figures to be published periodically by JICPAS, which can alternatively be calculated by a second formula logA = 0.6813 logP + 1.3304 in which P is the population in thousands of the town or area where the campaign would run; S is the number of posters comprising the campaign in the area in question; b is a constant, then set at 3.6 but susceptible to variation. Not surprisingly, application of the formula to the task of MEDIA PLANNING for poster campaigns was never truly widespread in practice. MEDIA BUYERS were more likely to take on trust the various package deals offered by the OUTDOOR ADVERTISING CONTRACTORS of the day. Eventually, in the mid- eighties, poster audience measurement was revolutionized by the establishment of the OUTDOOR SITE CLASSIFICATION AND AUDIENCE RESEARCH operation, known as OSCAR.

Cross-References:
[advertising media] [opportunities-to-see (OTS).] [advertising agency] [media planning] [media buyer] [outdoor advertising] [Outdoor Site Classification and Audience Research (OSCAR)] [coverage] [OSCAR] [advertiser]

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