Infuse personalisation, concentrate on micro-markets: WPP India Country Manager CVL Srinivas

Speaking on the theme of How OOH can leverage the emerging media growth opportunities’ at OAC 2018, CVL Srinivas, Country Manager, WPP India pointed out that although OOH is growing at 11% CAGR, the medium still attracted only about 6% of the total ad spends. He explained that the marketers still find OOH to be rather unorganised platform and lacking in general the trust and authenticity in the market without any loyal customer base. Therefore, to fight this issue, Srinivas suggested to bring in a 3rd party audit certification to get some transparency, stability and data technology into the Indian OOH industry.

Need of personalisation was the second factor that OOH can leverage from another medium. Srinivas explained that there has been a shift from mass marketing era to personalisation in other mainline communication and likewise OOH needs to bring forth the personalisation factor in communications. And to achieve it, Srinivas shared that the industry needs to start to work with data and get suitable talent for the same. He also suggested to build an OOH consumer profile base segregated by age, gender, income, demographics and various other parameters.

There is also a need to focus on micro markets. Srinivas articulated that gone are the days when national brands were restricted to the metro markets. These days brands are deeply penetrated into smaller cities and so proper outdoor formats need to be developed in those markets.

The medium needs to come out silos and work on holistic brand building, he added.