Urban Ladder: From online to outdoor

With the entry of a new category and brand, the outdoor advertising medium gets a breath of fresh air, in terms of its visuals, presentation and approach. Urban Ladder, an online portal dealing with furniture and household merchandise, targets the high-end audience with its innovative outdoor deployment. The brand went outdoors with an aim to drive the recall value, to give heroic approach via copy and provide familiarity of their products. Urban Ladder spends around 10 per cent of their budget on outdoor, which would go up by another 5-10 per cent including installs and activations. Even with such meagre budgets, the brand has been able to execute catchy campaigns at airports and all large-size OOH formats.
 
For any brand, the main attractive feature of the OOH medium is the enormous options offered for display. Manu Prasad, Director- Marketing, Urban Ladder explains, "From traditional billboards to interactive displays and installations, OOH offers quite a few options to bring out the brand experience. It has the potential to extend the brand storytelling by bringing in contexts like location and interactivity. We believe that the medium offers its own set of advantages - the ones mentioned above, as well as creating a perception of being omnipresent. While measurement is not exactly strength of the medium, there is a lot of 'anecdata' that we do get.”

Promoting via OOH

For Urban Ladder, just visibility was not enough as the brand has always believed in developing a direct bond in terms of communication through billboards. "We saw a great opportunity to carry forward both our brand as well as product narratives in this medium. The idea is to make the product the hero. The copy is aimed to bring out the witty persona of the brand and make it all the more relatable to the consumer,” said Manu.

Billboard is one of the formats which brand prefers to utilise for their larger campaigns as well as standalone installations to communicate its story. However in both cases, the design aesthetics of their products and the personality of the brand are the key ingredients. As far as locations are concerned, the brand likes to deploy campaigns on large impact sites on critical junctions and high traffic roads, as the TG pass by these areas regularly. The brand explains that though it targets both morning and evening traffic, the higher weightage is given to the latter. Malls and shopping areas are other critical parts of the outdoor campaign.
 
Bringing to life
 
Considering the nature of the merchandise they offer, it is essential for Urban Ladder to provide the look and feel of the products. For this, the brand exploits this medium to enhance the product communication on outdoors.  Recently Urban Ladder has taken up space outside boarding gates 7 & 8 at BIAL, Bangalore and replaced airport seating with its supremely comfortable and elegant wing chairs to make the pre-boarding experience pleasant for passengers. Travellers were in for a surprise when they realized they could spend their waiting hours on Urban Ladder's comfortable chairs before boarding the plane. A sign board in the area read'Window or aisle, the best seat is here'.
 
For smooth execution of the campaign, the brand has daily reporting processes and formats with their partners, and also monitors sites from time to time.
 
"We plan to use OOH extensively as it offers many avenues to reach our potential customers to interact with us. Our outdoor advertising campaigns will depend on key factors including the dynamics of the cities we are already present in and the cities we plan to enter,” Manu signs off.