The space is inviting and open to innovations
-Ishan Raina
The out-of-home TV medium itself in India is three years old and still in its infancy. But the medium has grown a lot as compared to what it was three years back. Today, people understand this medium and its future prospects. The need for reaching out to consumers where they go, the changes in the consumer lifestyles, the increase in time spent out of home and media fragmentation has led to the growth of this industry.
The digital format is focused on marketing to consumers when they are ‘on the go’ in public places, as a majority of this population spends most of its time out of home in places like malls, multiplexes, offices, restaurants, gymnasium, bookstores, clubs etc. OOH media plays the role of a strong emerging medium in all these places.
The economic slowdown had its effect on both the global as well as Indian market.
This has led to several changes in the industry, media and the advertising spends. There was uncertainty about spending due to the slowdown. Companies started getting constrained with ad spends and made sure that they are spending the money effectively.
They started looking at various media options to get maximum value for their money.
Companies felt the pinch of spending on advertising, which led them to experiment with new mediums. The industry did suffer in 2009, and clients and media agencies started moving out of their comfort zone and looking at focused and cost-effective options for reaching consumers, and that’s where we became an important media vehicle for the clients.
The OOH medium adds dynamism to advertisers’ existing media plan, and offers reach amongst dark and fragmented media users. The economic slowdown had its effect on OOH Media as well like any other media company. We have had an increase in the number of clients, but have had to decrease our prices by almost 30% to stay competitive.
The OOH space seems to be a lot more inviting, and open to innovations. However, many more clients and categories will have to be added. In general, the space is expected to see tremendous growth in the future, given the expected infrastructural growth, increased amount of time spent outside home, and the general economic boom in the coming years.
Of course, OOH has its own limitation to provide. Audience-led research on a similarity with other media to generate traffic, cover and frequency estimates. We as an OOH company understood the gap in the understanding of the medium and initiated OOH Metrics, which is today India’s first-ever large-scale digital out-of-home TV research. We conducted this research in association with Nielsen, with a sample size of 15,000 — the largest ever taken for any study done so far.
The objective was to understand the demographic profile and audience reach across our locations. While the world is moving from broadcasting to narrowcasting, we at OOH Media believe in Flexicasting. That’s the new media planning tool innovated by OOH Media. Flexicasting helps advertisers to communicate differently to the different target audience, depending on their product offering. It provides the flexibility to advertisers to telecast brand communication on OOH Media screens as per their choice of city, location, target audience, creative and language.
We always believe in experimenting to provide more value to advertisers. We try and customise the media plan for every advertiser so as to provide maximum value to the brand. We also try and experiment to create more hype for the brand. For instance, Maruti made the best use of Flexicasting to run ads suiting the target audience for each brand.
Tata Sky used us for contextual advertising i.e., we created different creatives for multiplexes, malls, etc. For the launch of the Nokia E75, we had converted many of our screens into the Nokia E75 phone. The conversion was done in such a way that consumers actually got a complete idea about the look of the E75.
2010 will also be a challenging year, but our role as leaders of this industry will be to keep building relevance of this medium to clients, so that not just OOH Media but the entire industry benefits.
The writer is CEO, OOH Media
Billboards turn sexy!
-Mandeep Malhotra
The current economic downturn will have little or no impact on most of the driving forces that have made outdoor advertising so popular and valuable today. One of the key reasons for the rise in popularity of outdoor advertising has been the drastic decline in value of all other forms of advertising media. In the presence of vast entertainment options right — from mp3 players to youtube — the entire business models for most media are in jeopardy and there does not seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. As the competition for advertising dollars declines, it just naturally buoys up the outdoor industry.
* In India: Telecommunication (OOH’s largest consumer at 43%) will play a very important role in outdoor advertising because this year, a host of new players like Datacom, Tata Docomo, MTS, Reliance GSM, Unitech, etc have launched services. In 2008, the total OOH advertising expenditure was Rs 1,455 crore and is projected to grow to Rs 2,100 crore by PricewaterhouseCoopers
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