The Challenge of OOH Media in India
This digital age has spurred the growth of many businesses. Today’s marketplace has grown roughly 10x from just a decade ago. This increased competition makes it harder for brands to grab the attention of their target market. To compensate this pressure to succeed, crafty marketers of today are equipped with a plethora of tools and strategies. The success of these marketing approaches ultimately depend on whether the brands truly understand “how” their customers access information and consume content.
The offline advertising in India mostly consists of OOH mediums like Billboards and posters on Bus shelters and on public transport. The market itself is estimated to be valued around Rs 4,182 Crores (approx $800 million USD). However, it is split into smaller sections and dispersed over the whole country. Only a handful of advertisers can truly claim to have a presence pan-India. Making it difficult for Brands to launch a nationwide campaign without first securing contracts with multiple agencies and distributors.
The effort is well worth though as India is still very fond of traditional methods. Their affection to posters, billboards and cut-outs can clearly be seen every time their favourite movie star’s film is released. The reach and impact of OOH media can be clearly seen here. Proving that not all in the world’s second largest population are tech savvy to fall into the charms of digital advertising or social media marketing.
The real challenge here is how brands can run an effective coordinated campaign in a fragmented OOH market. They are left with a few options, spend a lot of time and resources to try gather info on OOH media owners or scale down their campaign by splitting it into different segments. In both cases the cost invariably goes up and so does the amount of time taken to launch their campaign.
To solve this issue, start-ups like Bordo, and few others are stepping up and offering a OOH media aggregator service. Very much like how redbus.in managed to solve the fragmented private bus travel industry, it plans to connect the advertisers to the media owners directly. Saving immense time by making it easier to view media sites available for hire and plan their marketing campaign accordingly.
Even the media site owners have reason to be happy. With the added exposure their sites are getting, they are able to sell their space faster and never worry about losing revenue. It becomes a 3-way win-win situation as the Advertiser, Media Owner as well the Aggregator platform all benefit from the high ease of doing business.
