50 Retail Locations To Encode In-Store Audio For Arbitron PPM Trial.

Arbitron Inc. announced that four top retailers in the Houston market have agreed to play an integral role in the market trial of the Arbitron Portable People Meter (PPM) system.

More than fifty store locations operated by these retailers throughout Houston will play audio programming in their stores that has been embedded with unique PPM identification codes supplied by Arbitron. These codes are inaudible and can only be detected by a PPM. When an Arbitron PPM survey participant enters one of these retail outlets, the Portable People Meter will detect the codes and report that the individual has been exposed to its in-store audio programming.

The retailers that have agreed to encode in-store audio include:

Best Buy, 16 locations
Gap, 18 locations
Gallery Furniture, 1 location
Old Navy, 15 locations

“By encoding in-store audio as part of the PPM market trial in Houston, we’ll be able to demonstrate how the PPM, our advanced media and marketing technology, can measure the store traffic that advertising generates,” said Pierre Bouvard, president, Portable People Meters, Arbitron Inc. “Without adding any additional burden on a PPM survey participant, we would be able to measure the retail visits as easily as we measure the marketing effort. This will enable PPM to provide powerful measures of return on investment and accountability. Now for the first time, marketers can correlate local media exposure with retail store traffic.”

According to Scarborough Research, these outlets in aggregate are visited by at least 63% of the adult population over the course of the past year.

Arbitron is working to bring additional retailers on line for the Houston PPM demonstration. Previously, Arbitron announced that National CineMedia, a venture of AMC Entertainment Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group (NYSE: REG), will also participate in the Houston PPM demonstration by encoding The 2wenty, an original short-form, entertainment pre-feature program, available on 46 movie screens in two theatres in Houston.