‘OOH brings in a lot of versatility today’ — Aniruddha Haldar of TVS Motor Company

The fireside chat between Aniruddha Haldar, SVP – Marketing, Scooters, Commuter Motorcycles & Corporate Brand – TVS Motor Company; and Dwarika Prasad Uniyal, Pro-Vice Chancellor, RV University, on the theme ‘Connecting with consumers countrywide: The OOH experience’ on Day 2 of the just concluded OOH Advertising Convention (OAC) 2024, was a lively interaction that delved into the automobile major’s journey with out of home advertising.

Sharing his own professional journey, Aniruddha mapped and highlighted how the OOH medium had evolved over the years. “What’s exciting now is that OOH is also being able to target very different types of cohorts and a wider segment of consumers at a variety of places, including airports, malls, etc., and this is especially so with digital OOH (DOOH) coming in. I think there is a lot of versatility that OOH brings today. But it also depends on the client purpose.”

Aniruddha backed his observations by citing a TVS Motors campaign that involved hyper localizing and which proved to be an instant success, reinforcing the importance of relatability and authenticity in OOH campaigns.

Reiterating what OOH as a medium means to TVS as a brand, Aniruddha pointed out that TVS was possibly the largest OOH spender in the two-wheeler segment in 2023. Through this, he also addressed another important question – whether OOH as a marketing medium was an after-thought for the brand.  The answer quite clearly was a no.

But while stressing on the importance of OOH in the brand’s overall scheme of things, Aniruddha also stressed on the need for better measurement tools. Both he and Dwarika also discussed at length the need for better collaboration between OOH and digital media teams in order to widen the scope and get the best from both.

In this context Aniruddha brought up the example of the launch campaign for TVS Raider in 2021, where the brand chose to go only with digital (YouTube mainly) and OOH, illustrating the power and relevance of integration in OOH today.

The conversation also highlighted the key role that OOH could play in contributing to city infrastructure and in the process create new monetization opportunities, thus summing up the expanding horizon for OOH today.