Written by Jacob Courtney – Business Manager, VIC & TAS
MOVE is here and it changes more than you might think.
There’s a moment in every industry’s evolution when it stops apologising for what it can’t measure and starts proving what it can. For Out of Home advertising in Australia, that moment arrived on 9 March 2026.
MOVE, the industry’s new audience measurement currency, is live and while the name might sound familiar, make no mistake: this is not an update. This is a complete rebuild. A clean break. A new standard.
As someone who works across Victoria and Tasmania representing Bishopp Outdoor Advertising, I’ve spent years having conversations with agency planners and buyers about the strength of our inventory – the foot traffic past a regional high street, the commuter volumes on a key arterial, the captive audiences moving through our airport environments. Those conversations were always grounded in experience, local knowledge, and frankly, instinct.
Now they’re grounded in data. Proper, rigorous, independently validated data.
What MOVE is is and why it’s a big deal
MOVE (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure) is Australia’s OOH industry measurement currency, built with unanimous industry support and endorsed by both the MFA’s Outdoor Futures Council and the Independent Media Agencies of Australia. On 16 March 2026, it became the sole currency for all OOH planning, buying and reporting in Australia. MOVE 1.5 is retired.
The methodology behind it is extraordinary in scale. MOVE models 2.9 billion individual trips across 2.2 million Australians – calibrated against 67,000 real-world count locations, 90-day mobile device data, 7 million road links, and public transport timetables. It underwent 491 acceptance tests before launch.
This isn’t an educated estimate. It is the most rigorous audience measurement system OOH has ever had in this country.
What does MOVE measure?
Three core metrics sit at the heart of MOVE: ROTS (Realistic Opportunity to See – viewability based on sign size, location and orientation), VAC (Visibility Adjusted Contacts – refined further by eye-tracking data to show who actually looked), and NIF (the Neuro Impact Factor – which quantifies the subconscious impact of a sign on long-term memory and emotional response). Together, they take OOH measurement from “could someone have seen this” all the way to “did it actually land.”
For agency planners who’ve long had to work with blunt instruments when evaluating OOH, this is a significant step forward. You can now evaluate OOH campaigns with the same rigour and confidence you apply to other channels – hourly audience data across 365 days, 180+ demographic profiles, seasonal variations accounting for school holidays and travel peaks, and apples-to-apples comparisons across formats and markets.
The regional breakthrough and why it matters for your clients
This is the part I find genuinely exciting, and I’ll be transparent about why: Bishopp’s inventory spans Queensland from top to bottom, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia – markets that range from major metro corridors to regional heartland. Our assets sit in the environments that national media plans have historically been reluctant to commit to in regional areas – not because the audiences weren’t there, but because the measurement wasn’t.
That changes now. MOVE covers 5 metropolitan and 21 regional reporting areas. For the first time, a client looking to reach regional Queensland or drive brand awareness in Tasmania has credible, standardised audience data to plan against, evaluate performance against, and report back to their stakeholders against.
Think about what this means practically. A retail client planning a campaign across regional Queensland. A tourism brand targeting visitors moving through Western Australia. A financial services company wanting to reach the NSW regional corridors or the Geelong growth belt in Victoria. These are campaigns that were difficult to justify with confidence before. Now the data exists to plan them properly and the case for regional OOH has never been stronger.
At Bishopp, we have always had dedicated local reps across each of our regions, people with genuine on-the-ground knowledge of audience movement, seasonal patterns, and what drives results in their market.
Our local intelligence hasn’t gone anywhere. But now it sits alongside measurement data that gives agencies and their clients the confidence to act on it.
What this means for your OOH plan moving forward
A few practical things worth knowing as you navigate the transition:
MOVE and MOVE 1.5 are not interchangeable. They are different systems with different methodologies, and the OMA is clear: results cannot be used for benchmarking or reconciliation across the two systems. Campaigns booked in MOVE 1.5 will be post-analysed in MOVE 1.5. Everything from 16 March 2026 moves to MOVE exclusively. This is a clean cut, and it’s the right call – the integrity of the new currency depends on it.
The new platform itself has been built for usability – intuitive dashboards, dynamic campaign analysis by region, flexible campaign views as a list, map or flighting plan, and API integration with media owner systems. For those of you who’ve found OOH data clunky to work with historically, the experience is meaningfully better.
And importantly, MOVE has been built to evolve. The OMA has committed to ongoing development in collaboration with the MFA, which means the measurement will continue to sharpen as industry needs develop. This isn’t a static system – it’s a platform.
The broader impact on media planning
What MOVE represents, beyond the methodology, is a maturity moment for the OOH industry. We have long argued that outdoor advertising is one of the most powerful and cost-effective media channels available – that it reaches audiences at scale, embeds in memory, and drives brand and retail outcomes. The data has always supported that argument. Now the measurement does too.
OOH can now sit at the planning table as an equal. Same language. Same rigour. Same accountability. That’s good for agencies, good for clients, and good for the industry as a whole.
For those of us at Bishopp, it’s also deeply personal. We’ve spent years building local knowledge, investing in regional markets that others overlooked, and backing our inventory with the conviction that the audiences were there. MOVE gives us and more importantly, gives you the proof.
If you’d like to understand how MOVE data applies to Bishopp’s specific inventory across your market, or want to talk through what this means for your upcoming planning cycles, we’d love to have that conversation.
