Waltz they do, hair oils and bank loans on village walls

Ramakant Tiwari earns his living painting advertisements on village walls for products ranging from hair oils to colas, cement, mixer-grinders and loans.

The 26-year-old from Uttar Pradesh has been doing the same kind of odd jobs for nearly a decade. But it is only in the last two years that his earnings have grown and insecurity over work supply has abated — a far cry from the earlier years when over 12 hours of hard work every day, come sun, rain or winter, barely helped make two ends meet.

The change came after Tiwari started working for Adwallz, which claims to be the only pan-India dedicated wall painting service provider.

Corporates have, for decades, used wall painting — one of the oldest forms of outdoor advertising in India. To be sure, billboards and television campaigns do the trick everywhere else, but in media-dark small towns and villages, wall paintings are often the single best medium for companies to look at advertising their products.

Yet, chasing individual painters across the country to get the job done was always an arduous task.

This is the niche Adwallz is growing into. The company, led by Mumbai-based entrepreneur Mihir Mody, has made wall painting in rural India a sophisticated market for both advertisers and painters.

And corporates have been quick to latch on to the idea. Today, the seven-year-old startup counts among its 45-and-counting corporate clients, names such as Hindustan Unilever, Colgate, Emami, Marico, CavinKare, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Uninor, Ambuja Cement, Godfrey Philips, Ultratech Cement, HDFC Bank, Castrol, Philips and Samsung.

Adwallz strategises locations for its clients, identifies walls — both free and paid — and executes the campaigns.

Mody started small, with `5 lakh from his father and a handful of employees and regional clients. However, with steady demand from companies hungry to penetrate rural markets, the company has been clocking 300-400% growth.

“From Rs40 lakh, we went to Rs3 crore to Rs8 crore and probably this year we will close with Rs20 crore,” says Mody.

Corporate spend has been looking up too, with companies across telecom, consumer goods, cement and banking increasing budget allocations. Going by Mody, many are spending Rs1-5 crore on a pan-India basis.

Once a corporate chalks out its budget and game plan for specific markets or pan-India, Adwallz visits different sites along with local representatives of those companies, meets painters and identifies strategic spots for the paintings to be executed. Many walls can be free of cost while others, at dhabas, beedi shops, restaurants, hotels and homes, are paid for.

As such, the medium still comes 4-5 times cheaper than billboards and gives the corporate flexibility in size vis-a-vis posters or hoardings.

But are there enough walls?
Mody says his company captures not more than 5% of the available market currently. “There is a whole India we can paint. India has a huge rural market. It is quite a big industry, but a lot of people have not studied this market.”

A graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Mody spent years studying the market, travelling from city to city and persuading painters to work with him. In fact, it was after starting Adwallz that Mody decided to study at UCLA to learn how he could expand his business.

Getting the painters under confidence was the trickiest part. “They are used to a certain pattern in their lives, which is difficult to break. They are artists and don’t understand business that well. We motivated them with more money and faster money than they were making,” he says.

Today there are 5,000-7,000 painters working for the company across 300 cities, making at least 25% more money than they were making in a month.

The painters do not have fixed salaries, and get paid per sq ft of work. Most earn Rs10,000-15,000 a month if work is in abundance, though they often have to share the earnings with their helpers.

Dinesh Kumar Gupta, 28, a wall-artist from Ghatkopar in Mumbai, says he took to painting at the age of 18 and later started working with Mody’s company.

With Adwallz, says Gupta, there is assurance of both money and work for his ilk.

“There is trust. Unlike many other painters in the country, I know I am working in an organised fashion,” he says on the phone from Madhya Pradesh where he has been sent for a painting project.

What’s more, most of the painters are trained to capture their work on digital cameras and upload them on the company’s online system from cyber cafes, says Mody.

The company aims to have offices across the country, in every state and city. It wants to bring in innovations in the form of glow paints and reflective paints, which can be highly effective for brands in rural areas and highways in the absence of power.

The company already uses digital painting, a combination of digital and wall painting that involves painting on non-tearable and weather-proof plastic paper.

As for funds, Mody would prefer to lay a stronger foundation before seeking external funds.