Once upon a time, out-of-home (OOH) advertising was synonymous with static hoardings and colourful tinplates. Formats like billboards, unipoles and gantries continue to deliver strong recall in metros and tier II and tier III cities. Since then the advancing technology has disrupted this medium.

Brooke Bond’s Taj Mahal tea. It displayed Megh Santoor billboard at Silver Cannes Lions 2024 in the outdoor category. The raindrops fell on the huge santoor and created a symph, resonating with the raga of rains. In Lucknow and Kolkata, an empty plate was transformed into a platter of pakodas in a Fortune hoarding. In both the instances, technology has transformed the out-of-home into digital out-of-home (DOOH).

The OOH market stood at Rs.5920 crore. Out of this, digital commands a share of 12 per cent at Rs.700 crore. The DOOH is likely to grow at a CAGR of 24 per cent. It will then all out for 17 per cent of all outdoor advertising revenue by 2027.

The urban centers are driving the growth of digital transformation. But it is spreading to many more centers. The top six metros account for 80 per cent of digital screens.

There are advantages of digital outdoor. The creative can be changed quickly. It has the ability play video and animations. The off-line messages can quickly transition to online. And the significant game changer is programmatic DOOH. It makes advertising effective and facilitates targeted messages. The messages could be location-based and real-time. They are contextually relevant.

Advertisers can leverage micro-moments using weather, time, traffic density or audience data to service the most relevant massages.

Though the medium of DOOH has grown in India, it has yet to see the kind of growth it has in markets such as the US, UK, China and others. Globally, DOOH accounts for 56 per cent of OOH advertising.

There are several challenges the outdoor media faces — there is fragmentation of the medium and its ownership, lack of standardization in terms of pricing, measurement and quality of displays, inability of advertisers to plan and execute large scale OOH and DOOH campaigns.

There are local municipal authorities that regulate OOH. There is an issue of measurement — there is no unified measurement and real-time audience tracking.