‘The beauty of OOH is that it has adopted and adapted itself to the digital world’

At e4m’s NEONS OOH Conference, industry leaders came together to discuss the topic, ‘To Infinity & Beyond: The OOH Forecast’. The panellists were Dipankar Sanyal, CEO, Platinum Outdoor; Mangesh Shinde, Co-Founder, OSMO; Saibal Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, Xperia Group; and Vikas Nowal, Country Head, Interspace Communications. The discussion was moderated by e4m’s Senior Assistant Editor Kanchan Srivastava. During the discussion, experts spoke about what is required in the OOH industry and how it is still the most important and relevant medium.

The session started with the experts discussing how the OOH  medium will still be relevant in the future with digital’s increasing share in the AdEx. Speaking on the same, Sanyal said, “As many as 137 new airports are coming up. Then there is the Bharat Mala project under which all tier 2 and tier 1 cities are getting connected. Also, more and more metros are coming up. So people would want to go outside, and outdoor is relevant until people are outside. The beauty of OOH is that it has adopted and adapted itself to the digital world; outdoors is becoming a part of the digital world. It is not negating it. Hence now it is not getting irrelevant. Outdoor is going to proliferate, outdoor is here to stay and it will continue to grow.”

When asked about his forecast for the next 20 - 30 years for the medium, Gupta said, “OOH and DOOH  is no more a billboard advertising, it is all about experience creation. Industry only talks about billboard and digital billboard, why can't we include experiential marketing? As time will flow, more ad tech integration will happen and more experience creation will happen.”

The OOH industry doesn’t have a specific measurement system and data is something advertisers are after. Speaking on what the industry is doing to create credibility, Shinde said, “Talking about measurement, many of us unanimously will agree that out-of-home measurement is not as evolved as the traditional and digital peers. If we look at the numbers, out-of-home would be almost 10x of BARC measurement, considering we will have to measure by area and pin codes. However, the outdoor industry is 10 or 0.1x of the television industry, so the gap is really huge. So we have to take this call if it is financially viable to get invested and see if there is any return on investment.” 

He went on saying that this will also affect them in the asset level as the sites are attributed to keeping the grip data which includes various dynamics like traffic, chauffeur preference, etc. “So there is huge fragmentation in the industry which adds on to the operation and financial hustle”, he added.

When asked about bringing relevancy to the medium in a world full of digital attribution, Nowal said, “Looking at how digitization is happening at a faster pace, television has been replaced by YouTube, if you were to look at newspaper, it has been replaced by Twitter, video has been replaced by podcast and eventually theatres have lost their shine to OTT platform.”

“Out-of-home is still standing tall, and having said that, we can't complain that there is a need to be a little bit of adaptability, which is the relevance that is needed. In order to bring relevance and credibility, we need to position ourselves better. We can't be selling square feet or Excel sheets or 10-20 seconds of display. What we need to do is what Out of Home is known for: big, bold, and beautiful. I think we need to change your positioning from just someone who has a great network of media owners, sites, and execution bandwidth, to the brand custodians selling the war factor and the impact.”

The discussion also included topics like manpower requirements and the changing client demand. The panel also discussed how the AdEx for OOH is likely to go up but at a slow pace. The panelist concluded the discussion by saying that there is a need to redefine OOH with technology and creativity.