Audience data will power outernet growth in sync with internet: Srikanth Ramachandran

The Outernet primes and mobile activates. Stating this in his address on the theme of ‘Making audience data talk for OOH, organised by Media4Growth on October 29 under the banner ‘OOH Dialogues’, Srikanth Ramachandran, Group CEO, Moving Walls, pointed out that a greater number of campaigns are using mobile, as also stated in the most recent IAB research report. He reckoned that in the next 10 years “audiences will shift to the outernet”, and big digital brands like Amazon are building their outernet presence “where they start looking at how they engage the internet audience with the outernet”. “That’s going to the exciting decade that we are going to live through,” he said.

Referring to the challenges for Indian OOH in this period of transition, Srikanth said that each OOH media category continues to be seen in isolation. “This has to change”. Moving Walls platform facilitates seamless, integrated planning. Audience data help both agencies and media owners to plan the campaigns more in sync with the client briefs, and plan for both OOH and other mediums like mobile.

Srikanth said that in this Covid-19 impacted period, clients have also started to ask for more detailed campaign performance reports. Moving Walls addresses this requirement through its “campaign in-flight measurement and attribution”.

Speaking on the ‘Use Cases’, Srikanth said that incremental reach-based media selections, retargeting billboards as exposed audiences, hyperlocal content execution and trigger-based content executions will  help the outernet grow.

Srikanth believes that all segments of the outdoor industry will see immense growth when audience data tools get adopted. “So, we have created an outernet market in an interest group. We are looking at eight industry leaders from the market where we are opening up our platform free for six months to build use cases as per briefs with the idea that this gets documented as industry knowledge and gets published for the benefit of the industry.”