Collaborate to evangelise transit media: Suresh Balakrishna, CRO, Hindu Group

Suresh underscored the need for more innovations, better maintenance of the media assets, audience metrics and clear visibility on RoI, and importantly a concerted effort to bolster the image of the transit media itself among the advertisers

Addressing the 2nd Transit Media Talks conference held in Mumbai on February 6, Suresh Balakrishna, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of The Hindu Group, exhorted the business leaders to collaborate to evangelise transit media and thereby wrest a larger share of the ad pie. Speaking on the theme of how the media operators could influence the specialist agencies to direct more spends on transit media, Suresh said that segments like airport media are poised for attracting bigger ad dollars considering that those environments have robust audience data available, high consumer dwell time, use of sophisticated ad displays, among others. That said, he pointed out that the transit media operators should not typically function like the erstwhile Bollywood actor Jagdish Raj who in his record-breaking number of roles in movies as a police officer arrived at the crime scene much after the villains have been roundly thrashed. Timely intervention is the name of the game.

Among the key issues to be addressed in the transit media space, Suresh underscored the need for more innovations, better maintenance of the media assets, audience metrics and clear visibility on RoI, and importantly a concerted effort to bolster the image of the transit media itself among the advertisers.

Suresh pointed out that the media owners have to be innovating on their transit formats instead of expecting agencies to do that and there is an emerging need to introduce new and innovative formats in this space. He also suggested that the transit media operators could plan out-of-the-box initiatives like promoting a major e-commerce big sale on the transit media formats which will not only help draw such brands to this medium but also give the operators huge access to consumer data.