Ooh!
“Fasten your seat belts, put your seat backs in the upright position and enjoy this commercial break.” Now you can see or hear an ad and sample a product from the comfort of your aircraft seat.
Out of Home, or OOH, is the new frontier. With TV, print and radio becoming saturated with ads, and prohibitively costly to advertise on, brands are seeking new places to catch the consumer.
Planes, trains and taxis provide an ideal venue. You have a captive audience with time to kill. The mode and cost of the transportation also give you a specific socio-economic target audience. In the past airline magazines were the only medium through which to reach passengers. But now there is audio and video and product sampling to surround the consumer with.
Taxis are already renting out their exterior surfaces for ads. I am sure that this mode of transport will soon be used in more imaginative ways.
Trains have allowed mainly for posters in the past. But there is no reason why small screens could not be installed in compartments to reach consumers with time on their hands. Advertisers should also take a cue from vendors who have traditionally sold everything from food to books with creative flair on trains. The train provides an ideal venue for experiential advertising: A team could move from compartment to compartment, using song and dance to whet the passenger’s appetite and then provides a free sample. Mass communication in the context of mass transit!
On firmer ground, restaurants are another venue that could be used interestingly by advertisers. A crockery maker might tie up with a chain of restaurants. Food could be served on their brand of crockery. The menu could have a write up on the brand. There could be a lucky draw in which one diner gets an entire crockery set free. The product could be sold at the restaurant. And the food prices could be reduced thanks to the profits the restaurant makes from the tie up. Just as the price a consumer pays for a newspaper is a fraction of what it actually costs, thanks to the advertising in the paper that actually pays for it, in the restaurant too the consumer could enjoy the fruits of the advertising paying part of his bill. Yes, I know this would not work so well in a fine dining restaurant – but it could be a hit in fast food or budget eateries.
OOH media are an opportunity to get creative about both discovering new media and using them in an innovative manner. One looks forward to the next surprise in this new focus area!
(The author is Executive Creative Director, South Asia, Ogilvy & Mather)