Aegis completes Heartland buy, incorporates Carat's OOH unit into Posterscope

Posterscope China will now have presence in 14 second-tier cities: Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, Tianjin, Dalian, Taiyuan , Xian, Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Nanning, Kunming, Hangzhou and Zhengzhou.

"With marketing budgets shifting west, this presence is essential to deliver locally targeted and relevant opportunities for advertisers to reach China’s consumers beyond the first and second tiers," said Benjamin Milne, managing director of Posterscope China. Milne was previously the general manager of Posterscope in Russia and most recently managing director of Heartland China.

The new Posterscope will offer new research including 'Out-Of-Home Consumer Surveys' (OCS) that it says goes into more depth about specific OOH formats than existing industry surveys.

"OCS also gives insights into consumers' mindsets during various portions of their OOH journeys," Milne said. "This level of data is not available in other OOH studies."

The agency will also conduct studies of consumer attitudes toward new technologies such as near field communications (NFC). The agency has already run some NFC campaigns on Focus Media’s Q Card system and is currently working to integrate the technology into bus shelters, although smartphone penetration equipped with NFC is still relatively low at the moment.

That said, out-of-home media is "on the verge of a new era," Milne explained. "With media choices becoming infinitely fragmented yet increasingly interlinked, and consumer behavior becoming more social-local-mobile, we need to stop thinking about the OOH medium only as a group of locations or formats”.

K F Lee, CEO Aegis Media Greater China, commented that Posterscope China now incorporates Heartland and Carat's out-of-home business within the Aegis group. In 2007, Aegis acquired a stake in Heartland, which became an affiliate to London-based Posterscope's worldwide network. In early 2012 Aegis acquired full ownership of Heartland.