At Piccadilly Circus, a child on an electronic billboard stands up and points toward the cloudy London sky which has a flight landing. ‘Look, it’s flight BA 475 from Barcelona’, the copy reads. This digital wizardry marrying clever branding (the child wears the British Airways’ logo colors) makes for an outstanding OOH advertisement. And guess what, this isn’t from the future, but from 2013, when the innovation earned the airline praise and eyeballs in equal amounts.
The future of Out-Of-Home advertising looks even more exciting. It could have you driving on a highway and spotting your name on a billboard along with a message recommending a car brand to you because the one you would be driving then may not be as feature-loaded. Or it could feature your face at a metro station after a billboard smartly captures you to plug a shampoo brand.
BY SAMARPITA BANERJEE (WITH INPUTS FROM SIMRAN SABHERWAL)
In a world where attention span of consumers is increasingly going South, innovations in advertisements are going up. Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising, one of the oldest forms of the function, perhaps has the most potential to innovate, customise, break rules and earn news. And several brands in the West are doing just that – the OOH industry in the UK, US and parts of Europe has been witnessing delightful match-ups between old-school branding and new-age technologies. Some of these include geo-tagging, use of sensors, gesture recognition, heat mapping or in the case of the BA hoarding, ‘automatic dependent surveillance broadcast’ aka triggers in billboards that react to objects in the sky!
Where does that leave India then, a landscape where there are infinite possibilities of OOH campaigns? Well, from what we see around, we haven’t really warmed up to marrying high-technology with OOH campaigns, and this thanks to many reasons ranging from lack of measurement and infrastructure to the absence of a uniform set of government regulations. That said, despite the challenges, the growth of the OOH industry in India has been witnessing an upward trend. The Pitch Madison reports of the last few years show that the industry has been growing at a steady pace. The 2016 report has predicted a growth of 12.9% to take the industry to Rs 3,010 crore.
This year, while the actual growth in the first few months of the year could not match up to the encouraging picture that the report had painted, agencies claim the industry is already back on track and the upcoming festive season should see some fireworks.
Measuring the treasure
The definition of ‘Out-of-Home’ today wasn't exactly the same last decade. OOH would earlier only mean hoardings and billboards but now, literally anything outside our homes, starting from the elevators is a part of the OOH landscape – which includes parks, bus stands, transport centres, office spaces and malls. Once you step out of home, you step into a giant ever-changing advertisement! It is thanks to these unending possibilities of OOH that most industry experts believe the medium is immensely effective in grabbing eyeballs. But they also agree that one of the biggest roadblocks the medium is currently facing is the lack of a unified measurement system.
How difficult then, is it to conduct market research and track consumer behaviour for the medium? Haresh Nayak, Regional Director, Posterscope Asia Pacific, a part of the Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) says, “The primary aim of any client is to get customers excited about their brand and staying connected with their target audience over a period of time. Outdoor is an area that allows us to build that connect. With the treasure trove of statistics available under the various agencies of DAN, we have enough data to effectively track clients.”
Pointing out that the lack of measurement is a persistent problem for not only India but across the world, Suresh Balakrishna, CEO, South Asia & Middle-East, Kinetic adds, “While other mediums in India such as TV and print have measurements like BARC and IRS, we don’t have any syndicated neutral study. More than the unavailability of technology, this is the result of a lack of will and funding.”
Owing to this lack of measurement, many OOH agencies are now carrying out elaborate in-house researches to help measure the ROI from OOH campaigns. Atul Shrivastav, Group CEO, Laqshya Media Group offers, “Most of the organised OOH agencies today have strong research bases for the study of competition, rating of the sites and planning tools to make the media planning task more scientific and efficient. We’ve seen a strong acceptance of Laqshya’s plans prepared on the basis of our planning tool ‘C-TAG’ amongst the clients. It has created a lot of interest from marketers who are customarily always looking for ROI on every buck spent.”
New rule at every mile
Another challenge that dissuades brands from investing heavily in this exciting medium is the lack of uniform government regulations. Currently, the Indian OOH industry follows different regulations for different states, cities and even municipalities.
Arghya Chakravarty, CEO, Times Innovative Media laments, “We have a lot of legislative issues when it comes to the use of moving imageries in the outdoor space. While digital screens are being used extensively in the ambient space like airports, we are still a far way off from having an Indian equivalent of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus.”
“In India, we have over a dozen authority bodies in each city and they have their own rules. Most of the time, these rules are not investment-friendly on a long-term basis. Most of our tenders and contracts are for two to three years. Added to that, by-laws don’t really permit LED video display as against contracts in the West that usually last between 15-20 years. Even creative agencies make minimum effort to create medium-friendly creatives for OOH,” Nabendu Bhattacharyya, CEO & Managing Director, Milestone Brandcom points out.
The third world factor
Let’s face it, ‘digital India’ is a dream that’s still under construction, and public places such as railway stations and parks are only now getting connected to Wi-Fi, but for OOH campaigns to truly innovate, they need much better infrastructure. For JCDecaux, that has worked on various technology-based campaigns globally, India has not been a playground for much innovation yet. Pramod Bhandula, Executive Chairman of the agency’s India office explains the challenge of lack of proper infrastructure. “The West is seeing a lot of innovation in OOH, they are using technologies such as geo-tagging, Wi-Fi to make their campaigns more interactive and immersive. If you have infrastructure support, you can implement thousands of innovations. But the reality of India is people aren’t really talking about investments in infrastructure in India.”
Figure this out - US and UK are currently said to be investing close to 25-30 per cent of their OOH spends on digital campaigns, while the Indian figures currently hover around 6-7 per cent, claim industry experts.
Hope is the dope
Despite the discouraging numbers however, agencies are confident that the digital revolution will soon hit Indian OOH. Chakravarty says that the way ahead for the OOH industry is increasing investments in digital and technology. “The only way of moving ahead is the digitization of the outdoor sites and the integration of mobile technology into outdoor spaces. Integration of different mediums is the only way of moving ahead.”
Nayak adds to that, “The proper use of technology, be it in planning, operations and monitoring will definitely help in disrupting the OOH scenario,” he says.
On the other hand brands which do have a liking to innovate are themselves wary of betting big on outdoor as yet. Godrej Consumer Products Limited for instance, a firm that spends big on both traditional and digital mediums, does not consider OOH as top priority in its ad methods.
“One of the primary reasons for us not investing big on OOH is that it is very difficult to measure. Also, when it comes to RoI, we feel there are other mediums that stand out. My message to the OOH industry is, the way technology, analytics and medium is evolving today, it’s time for the industry to evolve too and start using technology and analytics more efficiently,” Sunil Kataria, Head, Marketing and Sales, India & SAARC, Godrej Consumer Products comments.
Voicing a similar concern, Amit Gope, General Manager, Marketing, Century Ply feels that while OOH agencies are talking a lot of using technology, most of the campaigns being done in India today fail to create an impact in the minds of consumers. “While there have been a lot of talks around such innovations in OOH, I am still waiting to see them. In terms of telecom, India is not lagging behind. But these advancements have not yet been exploited by the OOH industry.”
The OOH works that broke through
The scenario may seem grim, but that does not mean brands will not try to break the OOH clutter and ‘make it large’. The recent past has seen some campaigns that truly offer hope to what the gurus above are talking about. Vodafone recently came up with a billboard campaign in Pune that used a sim card based water sensor technology to help in rainwater harvesting. The water that was collected through the campaign was then sent to the drought-affected Wadebolai Village.
Talking about the campaign, Ashish Chandra, Business Head, Maharashtra and Goa, Vodafone India said, “The idea was to drive a very important issue of water conservation and rain water harvesting in a state where water scarcity cripples farmers most of the harvesting season and triggers unfortunate farmer suicides. Along with our OOH partner Kinetic, we took up the responsibility of promoting the message of rainwater harvesting through custom-made billboard attachments. It doesn’t call for huge investment too, but the intent of providing an easy solution to a critical and perennial problem made us stand apart.”
Kinetic also partnered Ford at the Delhi Airport recently, where the German automobile giant executed a campaign introducing the Mustang using motion sensors. People crossing the huge billboard could feel both a gush of air and the sound of the engine of the car revving. In fact, the auto sector has been among the frontrunners to exploit the possibilities of OOH. Frank Emanuel Schloeder, Acting President, BMW India recalls: “For the all-new BMW 7 series, we focused on premium locations in Delhi and Mumbai. For three months, advertisments were run on video walls at malls such as DLF Emporio, Palladium, etc. to maximize the impact of the launch and also to showcase the innovative features of the vehicle. Our approach towards advertising has always been ahead of time. With our customers spending large proportions of their time out of homes, OOH mediums give us the opportunity to extend our engagement beyond the reach of traditional media.”
In Mumbai, the busy Mahim Causeway that links North to South of the city witnesses OOH innovations every week. One of the recent works that intrigued commuters was by Sony SAB for their new show, Y.A.R.O Ka Tashan. The channel set up an active hoarding on the street, featuring the protagonist of the show, a humanoid called Y.A.R.O. The campaign partnered with Twitter and got people to tweet and ask anything to the character and get their handles and tweet projected on the hoarding. The idea was to showcase its power of knowing everything, and it worked.
Chandramohan Mehra, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Sony SAB felt it played its part in boosting viewership. “The combined marketing efforts, including digital, outdoor and the promos collectively helped the show opened at 1.1 at 7:30 and the incremental viewership was 100 per cent at that slot. OOH as a medium is immensely powerful. It adds impact and reach to your marketing and is one of the crucial marketing mixes. The response we received for this campaign was superb.” He’s right, for this campaign received over 18.6 million impressions, around 43,700 brand mentions and reached around 9.3 million people. For a country where the landscape, languages and ways of living are said to change proverbially every four miles and where an internet-powered digital revolution is on the brink, OOH advertising presents a billion opportunities.
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samarpita.banerjee@exchange4media.com
