By Vipin Agnihotri
You must have noticed that Mumbai has so many billboards and Delhi almost none. This is because the Supreme Court had banned billboard advertising in Delhi in 1997. However that rule may be overturned via the Supreme Court after a period of ten years. The Supreme Court is appointing a two-member committee to review the past decision and to submit a new draft regulatory code for allowing billboards in Delhi!
It is worth mentioning that billboards have since time immemorial been a snappy way to communicate the marketing concept to the consumer. In my opinion, thriving on this tool is the new concept of Out-of-home advertising, which contains not only billboards and hoardings but also buses, airports, malls and taxis.
If experts are to be believed, this industry in India has a staggering compounded annual growth rate of 14 per cent and there are number of reasons for this. The most important factor being that this medium has a capacity to target consumers across socio-economic classes- from a Merc to a bus traveller. In other words, one can capture all sorts of target audience that is not a possibility with any other media.
Taking this into account, there is hardly a surprise that Hutch, Tata Indicom, Airtel, GM, ICICI and many more have started using the out-of-home space with a special focus on outdoor advertising. Point to be noted here is that apart from Mumbai and Kolkata, Delhi is also emerging as a major hub for such advertising.
Both advertisers and agencies are using new technology and number of innovative advertising options in order to grab this opportunity. The emergence of mall culture and the erstwhile retail boom has also played a prominent part in this regard.
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1 comments:
Mumbai might be having many billboards as compared to Delhi, but the better ROI to the advertisers can come in Delhi as compared to Mumbai.
The reason behind this statement is that Mumbai runs on tracks (Local train) whether Delhi moves on roads.
There are many limitations to an advertiser to do outdoor-advertising in a city that moves primarily on the tracks of OVER CROWDED local trains, such as size, quality and the positioning of the boards. One cannot catch attention of the viewer, when people are stuck up in heavy crowd. The income group is also divided in Mumbai, on road and on track.
Rather, Delhi moves on roads and so we have more options for outdoor advertising. On Delhi roads we have people from all income groups. We have options to display bigger sizes, better quality and of course most better positioning. If we talk about tracks in Delhi, we have Metro trains where in, if there is limitation in the sizes of the board but of course we find better quality boards as compared to boards used in Mumbai local trains.
The bigger brands mentioned in your blog, do look for size, quality and positioning.
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