One fine day, I woke up and the administration decided to put the city under lockdown. We all were forced to remain inside our homes and this just did not stop here. The blue planet went to a standstill for many months till we saw signs of recovery. On the first day when I came out, I saw a city that now had less traffic and was much cleaner. However, I could see that a city that initially used to be lightened up with many billboards has no ad posts on them. The city I live in is Pune, one of the fastest-growing cities in India & the world, and is always populated with hoardings, especially the Realty hoardings. However, in August 2020 one would have witnessed just a few hoardings lined up.
When I met a friend of mine who runs his agency selling billboards, he was serious about the shortage of funds to run his business. He was talking about the customers that have now inclined towards digital ad campaigns compared to billboard advertisements. In fact, he had been asked to lower the whole cost of offerings. A year later when I met him again, the story changed, however, the demands were different. The premium developers were now focusing more on Return on Investment and the rest of the Developers were clueless about their sales methodology.
As a Technology founder, my focus was always on digital but thought of analyzing the hoarding market in India. This could give me an idea of going to the market with a better understanding. We wore the hat of the head of marketing who had a budget to pull crowds for Realty sales. We thought of enquiring about the cost of hoardings and not only for Pune, we enquired for other metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai. As we all know how the hoarding costs are driven by the factor called “Daily Traffic”! If you are in Mumbai, the cost of hoarding towards Bandra Worli Sea-link costs much higher than one on Western Express Highway and lower in some lanes of Mumbai.
The exercise allowed us to reach to an average rate card of per hoarding per month in various cities:
Bengaluru: ₹85,000
Chennai: ₹65,000
Delhi — NCR:₹1,80,000
Hyderabad:₹55,000
Mumbai:₹1,20,000
Pune:₹1,00,000
These are the average expenses required to run an ad on a single hoarding for a duration of 30 days. Depending on the footfall, the cost of the advertisement varies. However, Billboards are smartly positioned to catch a user’s attention. Crowded areas, walkways, and subways have helped them gain traction easily. Thanks to the traffic in the metro cities, the billboard owners now even levy hefty prices as people spend more time reading the advertisement. Undoubtedly, the advertisement put up on a hoarding would not go unnoticed.
Now as a brand the average number of billboards across a city goes from 10–15 numbers for bigger brands and for smaller ones it goes around 7–10 billboards. However, if I consider a realty company, the average number of billboards is 7 in a city to reach the potential customers. One more important thing with people I realized, is FOMO (Fear of Missing out) with hoardings, and two years after the pandemic the whole world is again crowded with colorful hoardings, however, just one question lies in my mind, how meaningful it is?
Well just to analyze a case of branding and marketing exercise, the budget set upon by most of the real estate companies is, they park their amounts for 3 things: Bill Boards, News Paper Ads, and Digital Marketing. However, the interesting fact is, in the last decade the maximum sales happened from the leads generated from the campaigns across Digital Channels and the reason is simple. People are glued to their devices all day, even when you are in a car and sometimes even when the vehicle is driven through an exotic and exciting billboard.
In one of our experiments, we realized that you can save your marketing budget by 23.7% by utilizing digital channels with normal efficiency. However, with better technology tools for the new-age buyers, these numbers can be improved by 20% to 47% and above. This includes a holistic ecosystem of technology tools that talk about virtual experiences, insights and analytics-driven tools, bots coming into the picture, guided tours, booking engines, etc.
Well just to add in the whole process, you will be averagely reducing one hoarding which can give you the latest technology to up your sales cycle.
Stay tuned for our next article on some breathtaking details of the industry.
(P.S- The article has been scripted from Samudragupta Talukdar’s (CEO, Relata) perspective. )
