'Agencies can facilitate collective growth'

The trend of involving specialist agencies in the OOH business is not familiar to local brands and local agencies in most states. But Raj Mohanty leveraged the'UP Talks OOH' event platform explain the role of specialist OOH agencies in the business.  "Agencies play a major role in getting the industry together, acting as an umbrella and representing the industry to brands they work for. Also, the industry is fragmented. There is no umbrella organisation like INS / IBF and the brand team can't interact with all vendors therefore agencies have a bigger role to play,” stressed Raj.



According to Raj, these agencies have today broadened the range of their offerings by introducing monitoring of media, taking the media landscape into consideration, introducing benchmarking of media cost, media procurement as per brief and TG classification from multiple vendors. He added that the time consuming planning process handled by agencies saved on valuable time for brands and media owners.

Seeking to clear the perception among media owners that these agencies only focused on their own profit making, Raj explained how media owners could also benefit from the agencies. HE explained that the agency knowledge and thought process trickled down to media owners and helped them in thinking beyond the regular. He also felt that the improved media structures had been made possible due to the entry of global agencies and media owners and added that the shifting of media consumption from traditional formats to alternate formats and the creation of new media had been driven by agencies.

Raj concluded his talk by highlighting the way forward that media owners needed to adopt for better business transactions. He said that the procurement and tendering of media should be set as per market demands. "The media owners need to be more proactive in media creation as per brands and agencies' demands. The yield on a rise Year on Year for media must be done in saleable locations but not in other locations. The OOH spends should also be routed to other cheaper alternates like digital, mobile and social. The media owners need to understand that this is the time for OOH to integrate the digital and mobile media and make it experiential and engaging,” summed up Raj.