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Foot traffic and out-of-home advertising
Out-of-home is the only advertising medium whose audience is literally people walking and driving past a fixed point — which makes foot (and vehicle) traffic not just an input to OOH planning but its entire currency. When a billboard, a transit panel or a mall screen quotes you an audience, that number is a traffic count wearing a media-kit suit. So the working skill for anyone buying or selling OOH is the same as everywhere else on this site: knowing how the count was made, and what got assumed on its way to becoming "impressions".
From bodies to impressions: the quiet multipliers
The journey from raw traffic to billed impressions involves a chain of multipliers, each reasonable, each soft. Total passers-by get adjusted for direction of travel (half the street faces away), for visibility (obstructions, approach angle, speed), and for what the industry politely calls likelihood-to-see. Vehicle counts get an occupancy multiplier. Digital screens divide the result among rotating ads in the loop. Every link is defensible; multiplied together they can stretch or shrink a number severalfold. Two sites with identical real traffic can quote impressively different "audiences" purely through chain hygiene. When comparing inventory, ask each seller for the raw count and the multiplier chain separately — sellers with good numbers don't mind, and the ones who mind have answered the question anyway.
Passing is not noticing
Traffic data tells you who was there; it is silent on whether anyone looked. The gap between presence and attention is where OOH arguments live: the panel by the escalator gets fewer passers-by but slower, eye-level ones; the highway bullet gets sixty thousand cars at a hundred km/h, worth a glance-second each. Attention research and common sense agree on direction — dwell beats speed, eye level beats sky, few-at-a-time beats clutter — even where precise coefficients are vendor folklore. Practical compromise: use traffic for reach and weight, then apply placement judgement for attention rather than buying the vendor's attention score as if it were a meter reading.
Dayparts make cheap inventory valuable
Because traffic has a schedule, so does OOH value — and digital inventory lets you buy the schedule. A QSR wants the screens by offices at 11:30, not at midnight; a delivery app wants the opposite. Footfall curves by hour, which panel data provides for most dense locations, turn daypart buying from intuition into arithmetic. This is also where venue screens — malls, gyms, transit — quietly outperform their list price: their traffic is not just counted but typed (gym-goers, commuters, shoppers mid-mission), so the daypart and the audience arrive pre-matched in a way street inventory can't promise.
The feedback loop nobody closes
The underused trick in local OOH: the same data that priced the campaign can grade it. If you advertise a store on screens within its catchment, foot traffic at the store is the outcome metric — compare the campaign window against matched prior weeks (or matched stores without the campaign) and you have a lift estimate that cost nothing extra to produce. It's coarse, it's confounded by weather and promos, and it's still more honest than the brand-lift survey of forty-one respondents the media owner offers instead. Traffic in, traffic out: the loop is right there for anyone willing to close it.