So here are my favourite seven, not in any particular order.
1.Technology
Technology has always played a role in the growth of OOH. Unfortunately in India, the adoption of technology has been experimental and isolated rather than wide and sustained. As with many things in our industry, technology as an area has seen more talk than action. In almost all out-of-home related exhibitions and conferences, technology owners and fulfilment companies demonstrate their capability with great fan fare and many visitors watch them with wide eyed disbelief, but when we get back to ‘normal’ life, most of our efforts go towards the standard forms and formats.
The question the industry has to ask in future is how quickly and in what scale can we adopt technology already popular elsewhere in the world in order to provide differentiation, high speed message roll out and interactivity. High definition LED billboards riding on the internet as the backbone will make the message impactful and effective, changing messages instantaneous and can allow interactivity with people with handphones. This is not science fiction. The format is already popular and growing well in many countries and with the right cost and scale it should be possible to deploy it here. The usage of internet as a backbone alone has the potential to make OOH a strong combination of broadcast, delivering scale and narrowcast, delivering customisation. Perhaps years ago, putting technology at the core of our thinking was an option. I do not believe that is true any longer.
2.Measurement
Measurement has been the holy grail of Out-of-Home for as long as I can remember, not just in India, but in most parts of the world. We have used a lot of techniques to conduct upstream research trying to assess the likely exposure of an outdoor plan, from simple traffic counts and visibility indices of individual signs to high end probabilistic modelling, but measurement has remained a big challenge pretty much everywhere. It is my belief that in future, we have to change our approach to measurement fundamentally.
Upstream Measurement: As far as upstream measurement goes, we will have to shift our focus from pure exposure driven metrics such as reach and frequency to what out-of-home really delivers – the full suite of exposure, engagement and experience. The other two big media - TV and Print – are already being challenged to look beyond exposure metrics, so if all OOH tries to do is play catch up, it would be doing itself a dis-service.
I would encourage OOH to take inspiration from Digital as a platform and a medium, rather than from TV or Print. As the number of types of vehicles practitioners use multiplies manifold, we need to find the balance between size and scale and understand the relative role of different vehicles in achieving a brand’s goal. The classically understood role of OOH as a reminder medium, still held as a belief by many marketers, needs to be challenged.
Downstream Measurement: Marketers have invested too little of their own money in understanding the specific contribution of OOH to their brand equity metrics. This has to change. Years ago, our client Western Union, whose product for obvious reasons has a limited usage by Indians residing inside India, found out the role of OOH in building familiarity and curiosity and started investing disproportionately on OOH, both through rentable media as well as in outlet media. In several markets, our proprietary research IntenTrack has helped us delve deeper into the role of OOH and helped us guide clients better.
Marketers cannot wait forever for the industry to deliver upstream research data. That’s laziness and that has to change.
I would encourage OOH to take inspiration from Digital as a platform and a medium, tather than from TV or Print
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3.Regulation
All media owners and industry practitioners are well aware of the role of regulations and often the frequent, and sudden changes in them in shaping the OOH market. It is my belief that in future, instead of being more liberal, regulators will only become stricter. While they fully understand the revenue generation potential of OOH, many non-revenue factors will contribute to decisions they may take which will appear counter attractive to the industry. If spoiling the cityscape, creating traffic hazards and cutting of trees have been the main grouse of regulators, many more issues such as damage to citizens’ eyesight, degradation of environment, excessive consumption of energy will emerge as legitimate reasons for regulators to take a less than kind view of the OOH industry. Advocacy by Consumer Groups is likely to accelerate this. Of course, a lot of this has to be neutralised by persuading the regulators to see the positive side of OOH industry, in terms of employment generation, creation of public infrastructure, providing utilitarian services such as road guidance and cleanliness. Suffice it to say here that regulation and regulators will play a major role – both potentially beneficial as well as dampening – on how the industry grows.
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4.Consumer Advocacy
Consumer Advocacy is already emerging as a major attention area for a lot of marketers. Consumers will voice their opinions louder in future than ever in the past, either informally by talking to each other or formally through Advocacy Groups. Either way, their voice will travel far and deep, often accelerated by technology enabled social media and is bound to influence the decisions regulators take. Whether more consumer groups believe the growth of OOH is beneficial to society or otherwise and the relative strength of these groups, will affect the way OOH is viewed by the larger society and how it grows. One of the big areas where I foresee high decibel advocacy is the labour practices – including usage of minors in installing billboards, minimum wage, provision of security features and health facilities.
5.Planning framework
From a practitioner’s point of view, what OOH lacks today, more than anything else, more than even research, are robust and credible planning framework. As a result of this, most OOH plans continue to be intuitive and classical media planners often ridicule what passes as OOH strategy. This has to change and it will. Emergence and growth of specialist OOH agencies has already changed the way OOH is planned and the more these agencies apply well tested principles of marketing and media planning, mixing data with experience and intuition, rather than use only intuition, the more product and service categories will be encouraged to use OOH consistently in their marketing.
Today’s road based planning approach will perhaps need to be augmented with destination based approach. Understanding the textural difference of demography and consumer behaviour between one neighbourhood and another and understanding how that influences engagement and experience will be key. We will need to combine reach and relevance and arrive at a composite metric to assess the role of OOH better.
6.Consolidation on buying and selling side
Consolidation is a reality of life in every medium and OOH is no different. In future, we will see consolidation on both buying as well as selling side and after a phase of tug-of-war, both will understand that collaboration and partnership in the true sense is the only answer to growing the industry. It is my belief that at present there is too much of suspicion and mistrust around, regardless of what we may recognise. Consolidation will lead to improvement of efficiency, long term investment and general improvement of labor practices and governance. All this will contribute to the growth of the industry.
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From a practioner's point of view,what OOH lacks today, more than anything alse, more than even research, are robust and credible planning framework |
7.Multiplicity of Vehicles
While classically, OOH has been roughly segmented into static, ambient and transit, it is my belief that in future we will see more definitions and inclusion of more forms into the definitions. Is radio OOH? Is the mobile screen OOH? Is music OOH? Is computing OOH? As one can imagine, inclusion of these in OOH planning will not only make OOH an even more exciting medium than it is today, it will also make it infinitely more complex.
In sum, what makes the future of OOH very exciting, in my opinion, is how little of that future we can predict. It is quite possible that within a year or two, many more factors influencing OOH would have emerged. And the debate will go on. Long Live OOH.
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