‘We will invest more confidently in creative-based DOOH when….’

For Continental Coffee, DOOH has emerged as a medium that bridges brand narrative with lived consumer experience, delivering relevance, scale, and memorability in moments that are difficult to ignore.

According to Preetam Patnaik, Head of Consumer Marketing at Continental Coffee, the growing confidence in DOOH is reflected in how budgets are being allocated. “Yes, DOOH budgets are increasing,” he says, adding that the medium’s strength lies in how it combines scale, flexibility, and visually driven contextual storytelling. “Its ability to deliver timely, location-specific narratives makes it a strategic investment, not an experiment.”

Defining creativity and innovation in DOOH

For Preetam, creativity in DOOH is shaped by pressure, the pressure to connect instantly. “Creativity is the ability to distil a brand story into an idea that lands in seconds, instantly relatable, emotionally resonant, and impossible to ignore,” he explains. Innovation, he notes, must play a supporting role. “Innovation is when technology elevates that idea by making it more contextual, dynamic, or meaningful, never when it competes for attention or becomes the story itself.”

Standing out in cluttered environments

In dense urban environments, Preetam believes restraint is often the most powerful creative tool. “What makes a DOOH campaign compelling is one clear, powerful thought executed with confidence,” he says. “In cluttered environments, restraint often outperforms excess.”

Scaling creativity without losing meaning

Executing DOOH campaigns at scale presents its own challenges. For Continental Coffee, the key concern is protecting the idea as it travels. “The biggest challenge is ensuring the central creative idea remains intact as it scales across diverse markets,

screen formats, and technology constraints, without losing impact or meaning,” Preetam notes.

DOOH as a lived brand experience

DOOH plays a distinct role in Continental Coffee’s brand storytelling approach. “For us, DOOH is an important mechanism for moving from our brand story via communication to a lived experience,” Preetam explains. “It enables us to appear in the physical environment with relevance, scale, and contextual associations, embedding our narratives into everyday consumer experiences.” When executed well, he adds, DOOH builds “unique memory structures of the brand through visibility, tangibility, and its sheer difficulty to ignore at high-impact locations”.

Learning from recent campaigns

Reflecting on past executions, Preetam points out that emotion-led ideas consistently outperform technology-driven ones. “Environmentally focused media and consumer emotion-driven advertising campaigns yield much greater recall and engagement than a reliance on technology,” he says, reinforcing Continental Coffee’s belief in an idea-led approach.

He cites the launch of Percol, Continental Coffee’s premium instant coffee, across Mumbai and Delhi airports as a defining example. The campaign used DOOH to turn a transit moment into an immersive brand experience. “We enabled consumers to see themselves as part of the high-altitude coffee growing environment, helping them understand the product’s quality and provenance in a simple yet memorable manner,” Preetam explains.

What builds future confidence in creative-led DOOH

Looking ahead, Preetam says deeper collaboration across the ecosystem will be key. “We will invest more confidently in creative-based DOOH when media, creative, and technology partners work together as one team, from concept to completion,” he says. Equally important is measurement. “There need to be clearer and more consistent connections between the quality of creativity and business outcomes, so creativity is seen as a driver of brand and business growth.”