 Good morning everyone. Nice to see all of you here and thank you Anurag and Naval for inviting me to speak this morning and share my views. So first of all, my hearty congratulations to all of you in this room for you know surviving the Covid years which fortunately are behind us now. I think all of us have seen a carnage like never before at least I don't think I have seen such a carnage. India was more affected than the rest of the world in advertising overall, advertising took a dip of I think about 25% always took an even sharper dip, which market share dropped from 5% to 2% it's now up to 4% which is good news and from speaking to everyone in the room and others and from my own experience at Madison I feel OH now has really a right to win and it has already begun to take shape from the sort of optimistic view and the smiles I see from outdoor people when I meet them. Now whilst all that is good news, I think at conferences like this probably an opportune time for us to sit together and discuss and debate what can we do more to you know make the flag fly higher and higher. So over the years expert but yes, I've been around in marketing and advertising for 50 years so I obviously have a point of view on what outdoor should do to actually gain back its market share for a long long time globally outdoor used to have a 7% share of addicts Over the years today, it is 4%. Obviously outdoor as an industry has been growing but the fact that share has come down to 4% globally not just in India means the other media are growing much faster than outdoor is so why should we in this room allow that to happen or what can we do so that outdoor can also grow much faster then it is going now and that I thought should be the theme of my 15 minute talk to you this morning So to give you a global perspective, you know according to what I'm talking about, I'm talking about a stock whose figures I respect because they're an independent agency not involved in the media business they're more a third party research kind of agency according to them the world today spends 880 billion US dollars on advertising. Yes, that's the size of the global addicts market. Despite Covid if you take the last 10 years last 5 years it has been growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10%. Of course we all know this that you know the new dazzling mistress in addicts is digital and you know digital never fails to surprise me or all of us in the room do you know globally globally digital has gone up in share from 33% to 56% today that means digital alone is larger than all other mediums put together now I'm talking global figures not India figures you know even the mighty television which we thought was invincible at one time and the favorite medium of most large big multinational and Indian companies who even today spend 70 to 80% of their huge budgets on television is beginning to soften you know television globally has lost its share from 39% to 29% today over the last 5 years print seems to be the worst effected and the carnage there is dramatic a drop of 14% I mean a share of 14% is now down to 6% actually India is one of the bright spots for print where it still has a share of 22% so given all this you may say that we are doing reasonably well at least we have grown our share back from 2% to 4% but is that really good or is it good enough for us should not our ambition be higher digital technology also you know has not just penetrated OH or outdoor actually it has penetrated every medium you know if you take television now within television I would say we have connected TV which is nothing but digital and in OH you know my figures say globally digital now contributes 27% to overall OH in India it's a little lower but I was happy to hear from Nubi this morning that actually our local municipalities are now encouraging you to put up more digital screens which I think is very good news for all of us including the advertisers so now let's take a little closer look at OH we can do to sort of further build on the momentum that we now seem to have gained did some analysis to see which countries do better than 4% in OH 4% is the global average the countries that do much better are Japan and it has stopped the list for the last 3 years with a share that is almost 3 times the global average so in Japan share of OH is 12% it's followed by France, China, Russia and Germany all these countries have a much higher share of outdoor on the other hand UK, Brazil, USA and Italy are lower than the global average now I think we should try to analyse those countries which are higher what are they doing in outdoor how are they wooing the advertisers there and how are advertisers looking at outdoor in Japan versus in India I am also trying to do an analysis to see whether there are sharp differences in the category wise contribution to global average and OH should give special attention to certain categories and what I came up with is that they are not very different except in the very large FMCG category in India FMCG in India at least is the largest category of addicts it is about 30-32% of addicts it has been like this for the last 10 years and some years it has gone up to even 40% for one reason or another does not use outdoor in India as extensively as it should another area where OH is under index seems to be technology and electronics so I think special efforts must be made with advertisers in these two categories to convince them about the power of OH in building brands in these categories now a disconcerting fact for many people in this room is what these very large management consultancies global consultancies have to say about outdoor you know many of these large companies employ such consultancies to do very elaborate return on investment analysis on the money they spend in advertising and rightly so because as I told you advertisers are spending $880 billion on advertising so their company boards must be demanding to know what it is doing for them now recently I came across some figures put out by Ibequity and Bain pretty respectable names they say television delivers the highest ROI of 71% online video, radio and OH just delivers 3-4% now we can say thankfully not many advertisers are taking Ibequity or Bain despite their reputation very seriously seeing the way OH is growing in India at least in the last one year but this is something that I think we as a group should try to address wonder based on my personal experience with some advertisers as to why outdoor is not growing as much as it should our outdoor does not have the kind of share that I really it deserves to have in India's ads the first I think Anurag alluded to it is I think widespread diffused ownership a lot of issues could get resolved if there were few large corporate players with good holding power to deal with agencies, clients and authorities whether we like it or not the unfortunate truth is media today is bought and sold based on some very very stringent negotiations and it is important unfortunately for the seller to have some holding power if you see other media they are concentrated in the hands of a few players and therefore they have better ability for holding power important point I feel is lack of advertiser confidence now this stems from fourth is one lack of credible third party monetary was in a large outdoor pitch I think I have not attended too many outdoor pitches but the one question the advertiser asked what guarantee can you tell me that every board that you say that is in your estimate or plan can you say with a certain guarantee will actually be up it is a telling question for all of us to reflect in this room secondly third party credible industry supported and recognized viewership data is still eluding us my friend Numi is trying to do a lot in this but somehow the industry does not seem to be responding well for one reason or another a third as I see it is lack of clear guidelines of local regulatory bodies rendering legality of sites in question I was personally involved in an issue I think about a year a year and a half ago where four of my clients very prestigious clients got legal notices from the government those notices created a scare at the board level and you know we had to fly our people several times to some I think distant place in UP or somewhere to try and understand what the issue was I mean fortunately I think after six to eight months we were able to cool things down and the advertisers were led off the hook but this kind of thing no advertiser wants to get involved in and least of all CMOS would then take the easy way out and say look I don't want to get involved in this laffra where I get pulled up by my ward also what you're done for and I don't think this is often spoken about is inadequate selling efforts by sales teams to both educate and sell to media planning agencies resulting in inadequate awareness of the opportunities that exist in outdoor the efforts put in by print TV and radio if you come to the Madison reception on any average day in the afternoons there is no standing room it is full of well sales people in one way or another from different media waiting to meet our media planners to talk to them to sell them to overtly or otherwise about the opportunities that are coming up all this time I don't think outdoor does that in the same aggressive way and maybe they do it they do it more to the outdoor agencies and not to the media planning in the full service media agency who actually sits on the total budget so what should we do to target say a 10% share you know if we hopefully achieve try to reach for the skies we'll at least go somewhere higher than 4% I want to do say that I am personally extremely bullish about the prospects of OH in the coming years and why am I so for a few reasons one as we all know now technology has entered OH which earlier it had not and I do know from my experience in other media that once you have the benefit of technology actually scaling up becomes faster and advertisers also love the input of technology second is the arrival and rapid adoption of digital OH around the world I'm sure it's going to happen in India too sooner than later third reason why I'm bullish is the immense possibility that programmatic will offer to advertisers which will allow optimum use of even non-marky sites and some of you may know this I have put my money where my mouth is and invested in a platform called Lemma about which I'm sure you'll learn more of in the months to come this will allow OH to operate not just in the OH market as we narrowly define it today which is estimated at 4% as I told you but participate in the much larger digital market and in the much larger TV market whose main characteristics of audio plus visual is always laptop in this room have to do a few things one, we need to develop category wise knowledge and expertise we need to develop case studies of when outdoor works how it works why it works what works and when it does not work and we should not miss out outdoor understand why some countries do better why does Japan do better and try and incorporate some of those learnings here understand why some categories do better present these and talk about all this in ANM industry fora like this one write about it in AMN journals and websites and one-to-one meetings at agencies and advertisers end secondly, we need to develop testimonials from prominent marketing people who have used outdoor and are willing to speak about it I don't see too many such testimonials floating sometime ago I was asked to present my views at one outdoor congress I think in Malaysia and I asked five advertisers to talk about their experience with outdoor and I was surprised they gave their I believe they were honest views but they were extremely happy with what outdoor was doing for them but I don't see such videos floating around in India we need to get the mere agency who should be media agnostic and who has the year of the advertiser to be more familiar with such successful outdoor case studies and also be familiar with the opportunities available and a few basic mechanics like rates, impressions, viewership and what not I dare say today they are not and of course we need to build confidence in outdoor trying to take care of as many impediments as possible sometime ago I had done an analysis may not be a very thorough analysis but there are only about 550 advertisers who spent more than a crore of rupees in outdoor now this number is just too low in a market where there are lakhs of advertisers using digital and definitely a couple of lakhs to use print why are advertisers mega advertisers only 550? I think it's something that we have to address and my last point and I made this point before in other industry forums is the importance of creative in outdoor even recently Google had put out a study which said that 50% of the impact that an ad makes is because of creative content it's only the balance is affected or impacted by media now the truth is historically creative reputations of individuals or even agencies have been built on television advertising also I've seen spend 95% of their time developing creative for advertising films and even those who use outdoor do not pay adequate attention on the creative use in outdoor I hope I'm wrong but in my view almost 50% of our sites have created that I believe is not ideal it is overcrowded, too busy, too many words not enough color contrast they do not use typeface which is suitable for outdoor and very often the layout is not suited to the parameters of the site I use the ceiling very often and I've seen there is a large hoarding that has come up in the last one or two years on Tarz Landsend and I see that hoarding I'm sure many of you have seen it more than half the time sure it's a very expensive hoarding the layout or the creative use is not suited to that hoarding you can't read it clear sometimes you can't even make out what the brand advertises because you are seeing it from a huge distance it's a terrifying site but nobody is paying attention to creating a design for that site maybe that site costs I don't know 2-3 lakhs a month isn't it worth everyone's while to spend at least 15 minutes thinking about what creative should go on that site a simple rule of thumb that I would use for creative is not more than 5 words on the site one dominant visual or word and flat bold colours you wouldn't go wrong guys I'm very bullish about the possibilities that outdoor is going to present to advertisers with the rapid development of technology but I think it requires some serious work from all of us in this room especially those on the sale side because ultimately they are the ones who rake in all the money to begin to invest seriously in this medium beyond what we are doing today in terms of technology in terms of deep knowledge in terms of sales efforts and some of the things I spoke to you this morning so thank you very much everyone have a good conference