Mumbai: Doing business without outdoor advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you’re doing but she doesn’t,” says an animated professor on a billboard of Creation Publicity Pvt. Ltd in Juhu, a northern suburb in Mumbai. Another hoarding on the city’s Western Express Highway says, “We talk to 1,000 million people in every corner of India.”
Outdoor media companies are doing what they know best: hard-selling brands. This time round though, they are doing it for themselves.
Image change: Outdoor media companies are using spaces such as these to break stereotypes and show that the medium, considered drab and traditional, can be used innovatively to enhance the brand message. Photograph: Rajeev Dabral / Mint
“You can’t just have a contact number on your hoarding anymore,” says Yogesh Lakhahni, founder director of
Bright Outdoor Media Pvt. Ltd. “There are hundreds of them in a city like Mumbai. How do you stand out in the crowd?”
Bright Outdoor’s brand campaign of talking to 1,000 million people every day was carried across its own billboards in key cities as well as the print media.
The company is not leaving any stone unturned in its attempt to build a brand image. Its website even has testimonials from Bollywood actors such as Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan thrown in for good measure. “After all, you wouldn’t have called me if you hadn’t seen our ad and the 1,000 million figure,” reasons Lakhahni.
Outdoor media companies have traditionally chosen to stay out of the limelight. More often than not, these media owners would be known only to people in the industry—a one-point contact person to book billboard space.
Experts, however, say this is changing as more players enter the market. “As more players such as Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc., Big Street and Viacom Outdoor Ltd enter the market, there is a great pressure on old timers to be seen and heard,” says Sanjay Shah, chief executive of Navia Asia, an affiliate of Starcom Mediavest Group.
Shah says old timers have a lot of catching up to do as companies that are established brands in other markets or launched by companies (as in the case of Big Street, the out-of-home, or OOH, media division of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group-owned Adlabs Films Ltd) that are established brands locally join the fray. Viacom Outdoor is the UK division of outdoor media company CBS Outdoor Ltd.
Add to this the growing interest in the outdoor media that has continued to attract investors despite the slowdown. Just last year, industry experts estimated that the OOH segment is expected to grow from Rs1,500 crore today to Rs 2,150 crore in 2010.