We will double down on number of screens in next few years: Sandeep Bommireddi, AdOnMo

From just standalone billboards, to now digital screens which change every minute, out-of-home advertising has seen a rapid growth over the past few years. According to Statista, In 2021, out-of-home (OOH) advertising spending in the Asia-Pacific region amounted to approximately 15.8 billion U.S. dollars, marking an increase from about 12.7 billion dollars in 2012. Outdoor ad expenditure was forecast to increase further in the next few years, reaching over 19.8 billion dollars in 2024.

Sandeep Bommireddi, the co-founder of AdOnMo, a company specializing in digital out-of-home services, speaks exclusively to Exchange4media about the company, its goals, challenges in the DOOH industry and his favourite campaigns in the category.

Bommireddi talks about the company and how it modelled into what it is today. “So, we initially worked with cab drivers and all for the first couple of years. During COVID, is when we had to do expand into the existing version of the business that we have beyond cabs. That's when we started the inside building media network, mostly the elevator focused, inside and outside elevator. This was growing so fast that we never got a chance to kickstart or restart our cab business. So currently we have over 30,000 screens. In India, we are the largest outside China in terms of network size. We are expanding further.”

Speaking about the industries that like to spend on DOOH, Bommireddi says that they are seeing digital first brands being very proactive.

“Within digital out-of-home also the way we look at it is, the roadside large digital billboards, your digital screens inside airports or malls and all of this is one kind of a segment, where your viewers or audiences are kind of fleeting. The second segment of digital Out-Of-Home is where your cohort of audience is uniform, constant and repeatable. So, these are the gated communities, office spaces and supermarket. In this format of digital out of home, you can obviously do much more than what you can achieve with a digital screen inside an airport. You can actually now profile your audience.

This is where we believe you can get very, very close to how digital online advertising is operating. With cookied application and all the measurement and targeting of digital online is being limited by the day. With advancements in technology and as understanding our audience better, our capabilities are improving every day. So, we believe very soon, there'll be a point where the second form of digital out-of-home will literally be an extension to our digital online ecosystem that we have,” He adds.

Bommireddi describes some of his favorite DOOH campaigns, as he speaks about BlinkIt’s 8-minute delivery campaign which showed the location of the delivery person and Air Asia’s campaign which was brought to life from a social media campaign and targeted specific communities.

He also talked about a major challenge in the digital out-of-home advertising world. “I think the biggest challenge today is that we don't have quality inventory. Laws and everything else are just opening up. If you look at the per capita screens in India, it is still very low compared to most of the other mature advertising markets. The number one challenge is of course, having enough screens in the market and then all of these other aspects of what do we do, how do we do? How well we do and all comes later. So, I think, yes, just the sheer number of screens that we have is a challenge currently. I think it can be much more than it needs to be much larger in number for this to be a continuous meaningful line item and every single media plan.”

Drawing on these lines, Bommireddi talks about the next goals for the company. “We just want to grow the overall number of screens that India today has, and we definitely see an opportunity to have few lakh screens for the next few years. So, we're going to just double down on the number of screens and it will benefit the entire ecosystem by creating a mainstream media channel where all ecosystem players would benefit from it. So, that's our focus in the next few years.

We see a future where most of the ambient screens will be controlled, unified and powered by the AdOnMo platform and we think we can do a lot more meaningful things beyond advertising.”