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Home » Viewpoints » ‘OOH is often our go-to media’

‘OOH is often our go-to media’

By Bhawana Anand - December 17, 2019

Vishal Jain, VP & Head - Growth, Shuttl talks about the hyper local approach offered by the OOH medium

Vishal Jain, VP&Head -Growth,ShuttlHow well does OOH deliver to your brand?

For our kind of service, it is important to target the right set of customers and in that context, OOH has great significance for us, especially for cities like Pune where we know there is only one cluster that we are targeting. So, if I have a big outdoor campaign running in that cluster, I am assured that the message will be reaching out to the relevant people traveling to that destination. For instance, there is a big office cluster in Hinjewadi and there are routes connecting Pune to Hinjewadi and the moment we do an OOH campaign in Hinjewadi, the communication holds relevance for everyone traveling to that place.

Additionally, there is no spillage like in another medium, specifically for office clusters. In certain cases, we have tried doing outdoor campaigns in residential areas as well like Dwarka, because it is still relevant for the majority of people traveling from Dwarka to some other place of work. In a place like Delhi, we are covering almost all clusters via OOH. The majority of our spends in most of the cities are on OOH as this medium has worked well for us in the offices and residential clusters.

In the offline space OOH is the biggest channel for us. Almost 50% of our ad spends are on OOH.

What is your strategy to beat the clutter in the outdoor advertising space?

I would say, the constraints bring out the real creativity. If there are no constraints then you put everything in the communication which at times can become boring for consumers. We have seen that happening especially with large size formats, where brands like to put all kinds of messages on them. But OOH medium has its own constraints whereby it is impossible to fit more than an certain lot of information. And then the brand needs to be choosy about the communication. Hence it clears up their minds about the communication. It has always worked for us because we know that there is only one message we can give to consumers and we pick the most significant message to communicate.

Being a hyperlocal targeting brand, how do you zero upon the right OOH sites for advertising?

The selection of OOH sites clearly depends on the target audience at any point of time. If I am targeting a residential cluster that is on an office going route, I would want to take up outdoor sites available on those particular streets because that way I am ensuring that my message reaches the right audience. That would be true if one were to take up sites in Hinjewadi that sees a lot of traffic snarls.

Whenever we do campaigns, we opt for a combination of big, medium and small sites in order to get optimum outcomes with the budget available at hand.  Some sites are taken for visibility alone whereas some are taken for tactical messaging.

What are the typical challenges that you face while rolling out an OOH campaign?

Hyperlocal advertising in the OOH space could prove to be rather expensive. That is, the rates for sites needed for particular hyperlocal advertising could be way too high. We have experienced such situations in markets like Mumbai, especially near to the office complexes.

Apart from this, transparency in the business transactions is an issue. While it is much easier to engage with firms like JCDecaux, the same cannot be said of some of the smaller OOH firms, more so if those firms are having highly localised operations. But we are working around such problems by having small teams working in cities where we are running our campaigns.

Shuttl has also been using text messaging for your brand communication. Could this be done in tandem with OOH?

Typically, we run consolidated campaigns and we make sure that we run one communication led campaign in every city and whichever medium is used, it communicates the same message. For instance, lately our communications had been on the odd-even initiative in Delhi. As an organisation our objective is to ensure uniform messaging across all the mediums that are part of our plan.

It is always good to have a common message as the target audience gets exposed to the same message from different channels. Moreover, it is easier to remember the message that the brand seeks to deliver to them.

How successful was your campaign in Dwarka?

We have over-invested in that cluster so we wanted to increase our ridership. Whenever we do a campaign, the first level of impact comes when people start recognising our brand. There were instances of people telling us that they saw our campaign and that it made sense to them. So, brand visibility was one key aspect to be looked at.

The second aspect was impact – leading to transactions. We have seen an increase in ridership in Dwarka but the entire impact is yet to come because typically people take time to change their transformation preference. We expect a greater number of people opting for our service in the coming months.

Is DOOH a preferred advertising format for your brand?

We are open to experimenting with other formats provided they are relevant to our target audience.  We have used DOOH in a cyber hub for the announcement of our Gurgaon to Gurgaon routes targeting people traveling for work and for leisure. So, the choice of media is dependent on the relevance to the TG.  

How was it like working with JCDecaux for your recent campaign?

We have always had the highest regard for JCDecaux. JCDecaux partnered us when we planned a campaign in Dwarka. In the past when we did campaigns using bus shelters in some other cities, we found that those sites were not well maintained, whereas JCDecaux offers high quality bus shelters that are well maintained. They have also been very supportive in servicing our requirements.

 

 

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