The Hindu Business Line : Ostracised outdoor?

Deo-da, you are right. When everything else has grown by leaps and bounds in India, the outdoor medium and its use has moved at a snail’s pace in the market for the advertising medium.

Outdoor has remained restricted to the big cities for decades. Even here, there has been such a high degree of clutter that marketers think twice before entering a space that is considered local, unorganised, not metrics-oriented and ad hoc.

Very few brands have a really detailed outdoor plan that dovetails the brand plan into an orchestrated multimedia campaign that aspires to make the brand ubiquitous.

The marketer is demanding measurement. The marketer is demanding less clutter as well. What’s more, other media such as television, radio and print seem to offer solutions on these counts.

The outdoor medium is also not a medium of endless possibilities. It has a glass ceiling of its own in every city. Every city and its streets can take only so many hoardings. It is time for other forms, such as street furniture and other innovative formats, to take off in India.

As I write this, I must also point out warning signals to the category and those who depend on it for their income and profits.

The outdoor category, particularly in the big cities, is in danger of becoming an ostracised category of its own. Outdoor, particularly its most dominant ‘avatar’ – the hoarding, is progressively being seen as a menace. There are issues being raised by the general public, the traffic police, house owner associations et al.

Take a look at Chennai. In one fell swoop, the city is looking greener all of a sudden. Not because more trees have been planted, but just because the hoardings have been cleared. A popularly elected government has taken a key decision to clear the metroscape of hoardings and cut-outs. Citizens’ action groups are going to be vigilant about their cities as the days go by. As will governments. They will demand and get sensitivity from this medium.

Indian States have started branding themselves aggressively. How have they done thus far?

- Ravi Punoose, Mumbai

Ravi, very well at the macro level and horrendously at the micro level. The bulk of it is tourism branding, of course. Today, tourism branding has, however, been largely mistaken for tourism advertising by many. Advertising touches large numbers of people. The two, branding and advertising, are confused. Advertising is easy. Ground level-branding is tough. Sensorial branding of the offer that is touted in advertising is even tougher to handle. A good branding programme would attend to it all.

It is fine to trumpet the ‘Incredible India’ line. What is difficult to achieve is the real ‘incredible India’ experience at the ground level. More often than not, these programmes are not seamless. They stop with the advertising line and the actual ground-level experience of tourists is totally different. There is a huge disconnect between promise and actual ground level delivery. This sure does create incredulity in the campaign! Incredible India for sure! With incredible advertising as well!

Does a celebrity endorsement actually generate sales? What does it do for a product?

- Nalini P., Chennai

Nalini, celebrity endorsements work at several levels. At level one, it helps build brand awareness. At level two it converts this awareness into an interest in the product. At level three this interest is converted into a flaming desire to possess the product or service on tout. At level four, celebrity endorsements help create a sale. At level five it helps sustain post-sale dissonance at low levels.

Today, however, with promiscuous endorsements by celebrities of the Bollywood and cricket kind, endorsements work well only at level one: that of creating awareness. This is good for new products and for products being re-launched. Sadly, celebrity endorsements do little to the other three terrains of creating interest, stoking it into a desire to buy and the actual action of purchase. It, however, works at the final level just as well. Endorsements help manage consumer post-buy dissonance even today.

There are a lot of changes in the Indian workplace. How do you see this change?

- Arun Loganathan, Tiruchi Arun, the workplace of today is an evolved one. In the old days, everything important and everything not important was a cabin. The CEO in the corner office sat in a plush cabin and his secretary sat in a cabin as well, albeit a little less plush. Everything about the workplace was privacy-oriented and hush-hush. These were indeed the days of secret covenants arrived at secretly. Things morphed gradually at the work-place. The first development was the reduction of size of the office cabin. Space was at a premium. And when the cabin got smaller, the concept of cabin itself got to be a stifling development. Fully enclosed cabins of the plywood and wood kind gave way to fully enclosed cabins with glass walls. This was still private and not-private at the same time. This then gave way to broken walls. The cabin gave way to cubicles. Cubicles which got private when you sat down and became public when you stood up. In the Indian context this is a breaking of walls. Mixing of people in a real manner. This has, however, happened across workers of the same levels sitting with other workers at the same level. Cross-hierarchical seating is yet to occur in a big way. It will.

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