People, Places & Paths - One Unified Framework
People, Places & Paths
One Unified Framework
Explaining why multiple panels matter and how they work together to deliver true audience insight.
provided by the
Data Science Team at Motionworks
Motionworks: A Framework built to Endure
Motionworks was born from the Out-of-Home industry's need for an audience intelligence framework that could evolve as data, technology, and demand evolved. From the beginning, our foundation was built for resilience, transparency, and continuity; qualities that allow it to adapt without breaking.
We have always been focused on the Out-of-Home industry, and have developed a deep understanding of all facets of the industry, from operating and selling inventory to creating and buying media plans. We uniquely understand the needs of Out-of-Home as we develop and build our audience intelligence framework.
The Motionworks framework ensures continuity through data-policy shifts (MODPA, COPPA, GDPR), or data source shifts (Apple, Google, Meta privacy programs) by combining redundant, cross-validated panels that dynamically complement one another to maintain stability. It's a system designed to flex, not fail, when faced with these shifts.
Our adaptability is evident in how the framework has evolved:
- Expanding from a single media category to producing monthly impressions for over one million assets.
- Introducing roadside granularity in response to pandemic-era mobility shifts.
- Pioneering cross-category reach and frequency modeling, enabling OOH campaign measurement and integration into media-mix modeling.
The industry's needs drive the ingredients; data sources, device signals, behavioral inputs, and Motionworks brings them together through a unified, fault-tolerant methodology.
Today, Motionworks provides the independent foundation for OOH measurement; connecting places, paths, and people into a flexible, privacy-compliant, and continuously improving framework that evolves with every new signal, standard, and opportunity ahead.
Key Tenets of Our Framework
Data Source Interchangeability – dynamically adjusts inputs
Synthetic Population Backbone – continuity through privacy-safe scaling
Cross-Panel Reinforcement – Macro, Micro, and Vehicular fill one another's gaps
The Motionworks Framework
People, Places & Paths in Motion
At its core, Motionworks operates as an audience intelligence company, not a data aggregator. We transform raw mobility signals into statistically valid audience intelligence, grounded in engineering, modeling, calibration, and data governance.
Our framework connects people to places through paths, integrating multiple perspectives of movement into a single, deduplicated view of the audience.
When it comes to understanding audiences, one question always comes up: "Why does Motionworks create and use multiple panels for its products and why does it matter?"
Many data providers lean on a single dataset, stretching it to fit every scenario. That shortcut creates blind spots: weak coverage in some geographies, fuzzy dwell times, or trip patterns that don't match reality. Even when providers bring massive streams of data, like sensor grids or national telco feeds, scale alone doesn't solve the problem. Without complementary panels working together, the outputs still break down. Unlike data aggregators, Motionworks transforms raw signals into statistically valid audience intelligence through engineering, modeling, calibration, and data governance.
That's why we built three complementary panels, each designed for a specific role, and then fused them into a single system that provides:
A flexible methodology built to evolve with industry needs
And continuity of output necessary to support a stable industry currency.
The value isn't just in having multiple panels, it's in how they reinforce each other. Places explain why paths exist. Paths explain how places get visited. And the panels bridge both back to the real population.
This is the Motionworks difference: not just more data, but a smarter foundation that turns shapes on a map into meaningful audience intelligence.
Unified Framework
Reflects how audiences naturally move across venues, roads, and environments, producing a unified basis for measuring reach and frequency across Out-of-Home media.
By anchoring audience intelligence in movement, Motionworks provides a consistent, scalable foundation that can adapt to changes in data, policy, or technology.
Framework Resilience in Practice
From 2 Billion to 400 Million, Multi-Panel Continuity
Case StudyThe Motionworks Panel represents approximately 400 million qualified devices derived from a raw universe of ~2 billion. Devices are filtered through behavioral, temporal, and geographic consistency tests to ensure they reflect persistent, human movement. Each device contributes to a person-level representation calibrated to census-weighted population distributions. Devices may contribute to multiple sub-panels (Macro, Micro, Vehicular) if they meet respective criteria. Our synthetic population models that rely on these panels reconstruct population movement, scaling devices to real-world population estimates while ensuring statistical validity and privacy compliance (more details here: methods-people-synthetic-populations).
Illustrative Example: Data Continuity at a 7-Eleven
Individual site specific data gaps are inevitable when dealing in a scale of millions. Imagine a 7-Eleven location temporarily losing visibility for a week due to a data source change. Motionworks' framework doesn't break; it compensates:
We maintain historical baselines for that exact location dating back to 2019.
We have cross-location correlations across thousands of 7-Elevens in the market and nationwide.
We reference category cohorts, comparing behavior across all convenience stores to establish expected norms.
Our vehicular panel shows traffic on roadways in proximity to these locations, revealing real-world movement patterns even when device-level visibility changes.
These redundant signals and relationships allow us to recognize anomalies, infer continuity, and maintain stable intelligence, ensuring that temporary gaps or regulatory shifts (like MODPA) don't disrupt the underlying industry currency.
Think of it like Three Layers Working Together
Macro, Micro & Vehicular Panels informing People, Places & Paths
Macro Panel
The Macro Panel represents Motionworks' large, diverse sample of devices that provides both scale and representativeness across the population. It forms the basis for understanding population mobility patterns; where, how often, and for what purpose people travel.
The Macro Panel combines volume with resolution, enabling statistically reliable insights across trip frequency, distance, and purpose for any given markets or time periods.
Inclusion Criteria
Only devices meeting strict behavioral and quality thresholds are included to ensure consistency and reliability. A device must:
- Have a valid household type appropriately weighted for demographic representation.
- Be observable for an average of eight or more hours per day.
- Be active all seven days of the week.
- Exhibit valid trip behavior patterns, excluding devices that are stationary, spoofed, or erratic.
Micro Panel
The Micro Panel is the high-resolution subset of the Motionworks ecosystem, delivering precision and longitudinal consistency. While the Macro Panel establishes representativeness and scale, the Micro Panel brings individual movement patterns into sharper focus.
These are the actors in the system: persistent, high-visibility devices that mirror real population movement and behavioral repetition. The Micro Panel enhances the fidelity of dwell time analysis, repeat visitation, and path modeling.
Each Micro Panel device is rooted, linking every observed trip back to the broader population framework defined by the Macro Panel. This connection ensures that trip-level activity is both traceable to its source population and statistically scalable across markets.
Inclusion Criteria
- Present in the Macro or Vehicular Panel.
- Only devices with sustained visibility and consistency in those panels are eligible for inclusion.
- Selection is algorithmic and adaptive, driven by a signal refinement process that continuously surfaces the most stable, high-fidelity devices with the clearest behavioral signals.
Exhibit high visibility across locations and time periods:
- Maintain persistent identifiers, often opt-in or long-lived signals suitable for longitudinal analysis.
- Pass dynamic algorithmic selection thresholds to ensure ongoing precision and reliability.
Vehicular Panel
The vehicular panel is navigation-grade precision from connected car feeds.
- Comprehensive road network coverage including rural and low-volume segments.
- Validated penetration averaging 27% of registered U.S. vehicles.
- Machine-learning enhancements anchored to permanent counter-based ground truth data.
Inclusion Criteria
Inferred partial trips are filtered. Complete routes include origin and destination.
By the Numbers
Why this Matters
Panels reinforce each other: advancements in one strengthen all three.
- Resilient and fault-tolerant: no single source dependency.
- Future-proof: as new opt-in, sensor, telco, or mobility feeds expand, output only gets stronger.
- Protection from disruption: no over-reliance on any one source, insulating against commercial, legislative, or tech shocks to inputs.
From Framework to Output
Once unified, the methodology produces insights for People, Places and Paths
The Motionworks Macro, Micro, and Vehicular Panels form a unified framework that produces three core outputs: People, Places, and Paths.
Together, they describe how populations move and interact with the world: who moves, where they go, and how they get there, creating a fault-tolerant, flexible, and adaptive foundation for cross-media audience intelligence.
Once unified, this framework enables consistent, de-duplicated reach and frequency across all environments, connecting place-based and digital-out-of-home screens, roadside and transit exposures, and even connected-vehicle impressions within a single, campaign-level view.
Population
Population tells us where people spend time, including their demographics, behaviors, and movement patterns.
Places
Places creates a detailed profile for every point of interest, showing who visits, when they arrive, and how long they stay.
Paths
Paths create a profile of every road segment, revealing who travels, where they go, and when movement occurs.
How They Work Together
Population + Places: Reveals who goes to each location, when, and how often.
Population + Paths: Shows how audiences travel between exposures.
Places + Paths: Connects venue and roadside activity, enabling unified frequency and de-duplicated reach across media types.
The Value
Without population panels, places and paths are just shapes on a map. Motionworks brings them to life, defining who, how often, and how consistently people experience campaigns, regardless of format or environment.
- Panels reinforce one another: improvements in one strengthen all three.
- Resilient and fault-tolerant: no single data dependency.
- Future-proof: as new data sources join the framework, coverage and accuracy only improve.
- Built to protect against disruption: insulating intelligence from commercial, legislative, or data-source shocks.
One Framework. Three Panels.
Three Outputs. Unified Intelligence.
A closing thought.
The Motionworks panels are the bridge: they connect the abstract geometry of places and paths to the real-world population we're trying to measure. And because the panels reinforce one another, Motionworks is uniquely fault-tolerant, resilient, and future-proof, ensuring every improvement in the data ecosystem translates into a stronger solution for our partners.
Provided by the Data Science Team at Motionworks
