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The 411 on DMAs

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DMAs, or Designated Market Areas, are 210 markets in the U.S. defined by Nielsen Media Research and are categorized by geographic regions. They are primarily used as television markets to see which regions receive the same TV, radio, and broadcast stations. However, the information also serves beneficial to OOH media planning since DMA reports include figures on population, age, ethnicity, and household income for specific regions. The OOH ad industry uses DMAs to target advertisements geographically and to compare OOH campaigns to other advertising forms. With this geographic targeting, ads can be strategically-placed to reach high concentrations of the desired audience.

The divided regions are usually groups of counties and can include different states in the same DMA. For example, the DMA for Cincinnati includes counties in Ohio and Kentucky and the DMA for Philadelphia contains counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. These regions are non-overlapping, so no single area is featured in multiple DMAs.

Depending on population size and other household categories determines how these DMAs are ranked. The highest ranked DMAs represent the regions in which ads achieve the largest audience share. The top 10 DMAs include:

  1. New York
  2. L.A.
  3. Chicago
  4. Philadelphia
  5. Dallas-Ft. Worth
  6. San Francisco-Oak-San Jose
  7. Washington D.C.
  8. Houston
  9. Boston
  10. Atlanta

Since top-rank DMAs signify highly coveted markets, the DMA rankings also help determine prices for media buying. This means media buying and planning in highly-ranked regions are generally more expensive.

Overall, DMAs, or designated market areas, provide powerful data to understand audiences in specific regions. With this, OOH media can find out race distributions and market demographics like median ages to learn about the audience reached in places like Chicago or Houston. In the end, DMAs not only help TV and radio broadcasting but help to create OOH ads that better suit a region to make a more significant impact.

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