"We Have Selected Avenues Where The Audience Is Relaxed"

In February, 2013, Vishnu Telang, the man instrumental in making the Noel Tata-owned Jaguar Services Pvt. Ltd the undisputed leader in cinema advertising and mall & multiplex branding, started a fresh stint as a 50% stakeholder in Khushi Advertising - one of India's fastest growing agencies.

In his 17 year career, Telang single-handedly started from Mumbai and contributed in building Jaguar Services into the leading player with pan-India presence and was one of the first few people to walk the tough routes to convince marketers and theatre owners to build the market as a relevant media for effective communication. Telang talks about Khushi Ambient Media Solutions in a conversation with Outdoor Asia. Edited Excerpts:

Innovation is central to success in the outdoor advertising space, and yet few innovations make an impression on the OOH landscape today. Khushi Advertising has always advocated an innovative approach to advertising. How do you see your approach different from the others in the outdoor space?

All clients have started focussing on innovations -- innovation of ideas, services, reduced cost and what not. All of these efforts have been taken to create differentiation. We have a differentiation strategy which helps us to incorporate features into our media products which in turn helps to differentiate Khushi from others.

Khushi is an ambient media agency and our ambient media products are strategically placed where the audience congregates. All our branding spaces are around and within the walls of ambient properties like the malls, multiplexes, hypermarkets, departmental stores, coffee shops, gyms, bookstores, airports, etc. We have selected avenues where the audience is relaxed, in an open frame of mind and ready to absorb any communication they are exposed to. We create customised innovative brandings at unavoidable locations within these avenues.

You cover a range of media from malls and multiplexes to hoardings and on-screen promotion. What is your value proposition to advertising clients? Do you get them to use each of these options, or which kind of brands opt which each of your media?

Khushi Advertising Ideas Pvt. Ltd. is a leading ambient media solutions company in India. We have created a great mix of media spaces across avenues where audience congregates. We deliver SEC A, A+ and B+ audience to our clients across India by these branding spaces which are spread across major shopping malls, multiplexes, coffee shops, hypermarkets, gyms, QSR's, entertainment avenues and other such ambient avenues where the mentioned target audience congregates.

Within these avenues we provide a complete solution to our clients like onscreen advertising in multiplex, branding and activation at all ambient avenues. Our value proposition is "If it's ambient, Khushi will make it happen”. From ideation to execution, our customers can trust Team Khushi -- we always try to ensure that we deliver more than satisfactory levels of deliverables.

Are advertising brands open to the use of ambient media? What are the typical concerns and how do you deal with them?

Traditional marcom techniques are on a decline in effectiveness. The reasons for this being fragmentation of market, lack of accountability, increasing traditional media costs, diminishing and fragmenting audiences and increasing advertising clutter. As a result, marketers are increasingly including new and potentially exciting opportunities to communicate with consumers alongside traditional media.

In the cluttered traditional media options, clients want something clutter-free, innovative and exciting which Khushi delivers in its unique ambient media basket. The concerns here include various permissions, restrictions by property management as per their policies, monitoring national-level cinema advertising or branding campaign, actual cost per contact, etc. To address these, we have dedicated a huge team which consists of more than 50 personnel spread across India to execute and supervise each and every activity across India.

We operate from 23 offices where our team ensures smooth execution and monitoring. Over a period of one decade our clients now know they can trust and rely in our service which is the biggest achievement. Going forward we are planning and strategising technology enabled accurate actual evaluation reports to our clients

You have a pan-India market presence. Tell us about your growth journey and the challenges that you met along the way.

Pranay Shah -- a second generation entrepreneur -- joined his father's business in the then highly unorganised cinema advertising industry. He faced lots of adversities as most brands were unwilling to experiment with cinema advertising. But relentlessly and with great passion he persevered with a vision to create a clutter-free engaging medium which would help the nextgen brands to reach its audience effectively. This vision led to the inception of Khushi Advertising in the year 2004 with a small office in Ahmadabad. What followed was a saga of unflinching dedication, team building and total commitment to the customers.

During this period, when I was a client of Khushi, we both met and it took us no time to understand that we shared a common vision and goal. I came on board as a partner in Khushi and Khushi Advertising Ideas Pvt. Ltd. was formed in 2013.
 
Today we operate from 23 offices in India with 160 employees. We have invested strategically into young and experienced talents from the industry. We ensure that each and every employee in the company is satisfied with their jobs and are happy. This ensures 100% passionate efforts by each and every team member. Our approach with clients is similar and we work very hard to deliver satisfactory results each time for every client. Currently, we are working with more than 150 corporate and retail clients and all major media agencies in India.

We practice smart-hard-work which has helped us to grow so far and will help us keep moving and achieve our vision and mission to make Khushi a truly global ambient media company.

You lay great emphasis on creativity, which is often cited as a less visible factor in outdoor advertising. What is the scope of creativity in the OOH space?

At Khushi, we are experts in delivering targeted Ambient OOH planning. We study TG's movement, where they go, what they see, and what really holds their attention. This understanding translates into creativity, using latest media options available to deliver multi-sensory digital advertising, experiential and customized integrated campaigns to our clients.

How do you ensure that creativity finds its right expression in the outdoor, where the variables are many?

Give them an ambiance which is conducive to creativity. Khushi fosters creative thinking as we know that creative people work the hours that work for them. Our team sees possibilities in the client brief and is constantly taking in information that becomes fodder for creative expression to connect the dots.

Do you use digital OOH properties?

We have LED billboards at the Amritsar International airport. We will also introduce new innovative digital media options soon.

Tell us about some of the outstanding campaigns and projects that you handled through this year.

We take pride in executing each and every campaign of our clients; however, few stand out from the rest. We executed "The Transformers” movie promotion by ideating and executing a larger-than-life Optimus Prime cut-out which stood 25 feet tall bang in front of major malls in India resulting in a lot of children, youth and young at heart standby and look. A lot of them took pictures with their favourite animated superhero. Ideas first, but we are also beefing up our executional strength to ensure boundary less ideations to remain truly an ambient media expert in India.

Where do you see your business going from here?

We have strategically invested in targeted ambient avenues at a time when growth is there to stay and which will give us a lot many opportunities to deliver to our esteemed clients. Going forward, we see these avenues being used by the industry in their sustainable long term ambient plan.