Mumbai’s startup lights up the city with mobile OOH on taxis

LitCabs is providing OOH advertising solutions by mounting back-lit panels atop taxi carriers while supplementing the income of taxi drivers. Over 8,000 kaali-peeli taxis in the city will be outfitted with taxi top advertising displays with the first 350 already in the city from the first week of March this year.

The start-up has been founded by a team of four entrepreneurs. Jyotiba Patil, the founding partner along with Arjun Meghe, Siddhartha Shekhar and Aditya Thorat.

The four partners started LitCabs with an objective to bring on unconventional options to make new-age communication innovative and mobile to target masses on the go.

Patil said, “Mumbai’s black-yellow cabs are an iconic, essential part of the transport system and a big part of city life. Advertising on cabs in Mumbai will allow brands to reach their target group within the city; markets, at malls, cinemas, railway stations, and airports, essentially capturing an entire city audience.”

LitCabs keeps a track of the total kilometres run by the taxis on a daily basis, the route taken by taxis, as well as the hours the advertisement was lit up, through their GPS system. Each taxi makes an average of 5,00,000 impressions per day according to MRSS, a market research firm. This database is combined regularly and shared with the client as an ad effectiveness report.

“This is an added advantage that other OOH advertising solution providers typically cannot provide,” added Patil.

Majority of the fleet consists of shared cabs. These cabs follow a definite route throughout the day that starts from an office complex/market place and ends up at a railway station. They spend most of their day in a specific area ensuring repeated exposure and hyperlocal advertising which helps in the brand recall value.

Commenting on the launch, Patil said, “Our goal is to provide OOH advertising solutions that are mobile, cost-effective and impactful compared with that of billboards, bus stands and other transit media. Kaali-peeli is a popular medium of transport. With the ability to schedule advertising by location, coupled with superior reporting tools, we are looking to provide advertisers with a highly targeted, flexible and reliable medium to manage campaigns for their clients.”

The team has been investing continually in R&D to enhance the aesthetic appeal of their design and production and also towards studies to understand consumer behaviour further. They also want to begin engagement with OOH fixed screens. Based on the response generated, they aim to expand to other cities over the next few years.

LitCabs was conceived by Jyotiba Patil in January 2018. The first LitCab was on the street on 15 January 2019. It aims to have over 1000 cabs on the streets by the end of the year.