TRP

TRP means Target Rating Points. It measures advertising weight against a selected audience, for example adults 25–54, city commuters, students, or higher-income urban households. In practice, one TRP equals impressions equivalent to 1 percent of the chosen target group. If a campaign delivers 50 TRPs against young professionals in Stockholm, it has served impressions equivalent to half of that target population once on average, although the real delivery is usually split between reach and frequency.

In Sweden, broad municipal and regional audiences can look attractive on paper, but many briefs are narrower: commuters in Greater Stockholm, shoppers in Malmö, office workers in central Gothenburg, students in Lund, or growth-oriented households in Uppsala. That is where TRP becomes more useful than headline GRP. It lets a planner assess whether a network is efficient for the people the brand actually needs to influence. This is increasingly relevant in a market where major operators offer both national scale and more selective urban products, and where planning tools can report reach and audience outputs by target group rather than only by total population.

GRP is based on the total audience universe; TRP is based on a specified subset of that universe. The formula is conceptually the same: reach multiplied by average frequency. The difference is the denominator. If a digital street network in Stockholm indexes strongly among affluent commuters, its TRP performance for that audience may be better than its GRP performance against all adults. That is why Swedish planners often use GRP to describe broad market pressure and TRP to judge target efficiency.

A Swedish marketing manager will usually use TRP in three ways. First, to compare locations: central city, roadside, retail-adjacent and transit can perform very differently by audience. Second, to compare markets: Stockholm often behaves differently from Gothenburg or Malmö, while university-heavy Lund and fast-growing Uppsala can justify tailored target definitions. Third, to align OOH with other media in a Nordic plan. Because IRM tracks outdoor as a distinct advertising channel across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, TRP can act as a common planning language when a brand wants consistency across markets while still adapting local delivery.

OOH does not count audience exposure in the same way as logged digital media, so TRP is typically modelled from mobility, traffic and visibility data, then mapped to target definitions in planning systems. In Sweden, buyers commonly work from tools and operator data that estimate reach, frequency and opportunity-to-see across analogue and digital inventory. The quality of a TRP estimate depends on the target definition, the city, the environment and the planning assumptions. For that reason, TRP is best used as a decision metric, not as a promise that every person in the target physically noticed the ad.

For BillboardBee readers, the simplest interpretation is this: GRP tells you how much pressure you generated overall; TRP tells you how much of that pressure landed on the people that matter most. If your brief is broad awareness across Sweden, GRP may be enough. If your brief is urban professionals in Stockholm, retail-heavy catchments in Malmö, commuters in Gothenburg, or student-adjacent audiences in Lund and Uppsala, TRP is usually the sharper planning lens. In the Swedish and wider Nordic market, that makes TRP one of the most useful bridge metrics between classic OOH, digital OOH and audience-led media planning.