‘Malpractice by site owner a blot on industry image’

Last week, the inverted display of a campaign creative on a billboard on Residency Road, Bengaluru had created a stir in the market, raising eyebrows on the professional ethics of one of the reputed OOH specialist agencies i.e. Posterscope India. The inverted creative was displayed by the site owner as a retaliation for alleged non-payment for the campaign display. However, a probe by Media4Growth unearthed certain other details.

Haresh Nayak, Managing Director, Posterscope Group India, explained that “there was absolutely no payment issue from the client or agency. All the dues pertaining to the recently executed Samsung campaign had been cleared. However, the particular hoarding was a different case where the brand stopped the payment due to certain failings on the part of the media owner.”

The brand advertiser Samsung and the specialist agency found while conducting their media monitoring exercise that the site displaying the brand’s advertising creative was not illuminated in the night hours for well over 10 days. Worse still, the media owner also replaced the Samsung campaign creative with a political campaign twice in the period the Samsung campaign was meant to be displayed. “Samsung as a brand has a strong media monitoring system in place by which every possible detail of their campaigns is captured. The brand has the images as evidence of the wrong practices and failings on the part of the site owner who had wrongfully displayed an inverted image of the Samsung creative alleging payment default. The brand has shared all the evidence with us and we further shared those with the particular site owner,” explained Haresh.

While the agency and advertiser are planning legal action against the site owner for the malpractices, the former has also approached IOAA to blacklist the vendor. The agency’s intent is to eradicate such false practices from the root and ensure OOH is always at par with other mainline advertising channels in terms of ethics and professionalism.

Haresh maintained that while 99% of the vendors would never engage in a malpractice like this, it is the 1% of the vendors who bring disrepute to the industry.