These and other relevant issues were discussed during the 5th OOH Conference, an initiative of the exchange4media, presented by Posterscope, in association with Laqshya Media Group, on 27 March 2015 in Gurgaon.

The conference featured a keynote address by David Payne of Kinetic Worldwide, an OOH media agency, followed by two panel discussions on ‘Digital OOH: The way forward,’ and ‘Innovation to drive OOH relevance and how to retain and attract brands,’ by insiders and experts in the field.

In his keynote address on ‘Getting ready for new-age consumers’, Payne detailed the changing environments of the OOH media. As more than 70% of the people today spend most of their waking hours outside their homes, there is a dire need for OOH to try innovations to connect with the target audience. “Smart environments personalised to their users will be revolutionary,” said Payne, “Smart personalised ecosystems will change how we utilise media.

Explaining who these new-age consumers are, Payne gives the example children’s expectations with technology. Growing up with smartphones and tablets, children today expect a media to be dynamic. For children, if it is not dynamic it is broken. He then gives the example of a campaign where the audience could point to a digital billboard with their smartphones and download and listen to the song being played on the screen.

Exhorting the need for smart OOH for tomorrow’s smart world, Payne said this smart OOH will the integration of right data with the right content. It will be built around four key pillars, data, technology, content and media.

Digital OOH in India was the focus of the first panel discussion, comprising of Kashyap Vadapalli, CMO, Pepperfry, Nitin Bahl, country marketing manager at Motorola Solutions, Shashi Sinha, EVP and business head at Laqshya Media Group, Rohit Chopra, CEO, Times Innovative Media, Delhi Airport Advertising. The session was chaired by Amit Sarkar, COO, India, Kinetic Worldwide.

“For today’s consumers, speed and interactivity play a huge role in their relationship with brands. As a marketer, I’m not thinking of a channel but about my audience and how I can reach out to them in the best way possible,” said Vadapalli when asked about a marketer’s take on digital OOH.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sinha said, “To me, digitisation of OOH stems from desperation. While we are not undermining digital OOH, we cannot completely overlook the positive side of static Out of Home media.”

Explaining that digital OOH is growing, Chopra gave the example of Delhi Airport. “Digital at Delhi Airport has become significant in the way it offers interactivity. We just celebrated 210 clients on digital. We do have several options available at speed. The qualitative difference is a big advantage. Technology is playing a huge role and is being used to micro-target. Technologies like facial recognition, geo-tagging and augmented reality were being adopted by the medium,” he said.

Talking about the current scenario, during the second panel discussion, Saumitra Bhattacharya, CEO, Madison OOH, said, “In India OOH is like an old passenger train being pulled by steam engine and the current situation is all of a sudden there is an express train behind us asking us to move out of the way or run faster. There are two things we can do, either we can speed up on our own or we let the passenger train push us along. OOH is currently in a dangerous situation where we can be pushed along because, what is happening here, OOH is the integrated with technology; digital, TV, print and everything and all those other mediums are far advanced in terms of their availability of proving ROI and their capabilities of telling everybody how good they are.”

Amar Thomas, head, marketing, BlackBerry India, said, measurement of investment in OOH is a major issue among the marketers. Thus, it is a challenge for the OOH segment to fight for the share of ad spending from a marketer.

Talking about innovations, Haresh Nayak, regional director, Posterscope APAC, stressed on the important of skilled and creative manpower. “At Posterscope, we do not hire people from the trade. Almost 70% of our people are from outside the trade.”

The panel discussed how a currency can play a significant role to boost this industry. Thomas said, “We don’t have to work in such a scenario where we will divide audiences in the number of billboards and square feet.”