‘It’s business as usual in Delhi OOH market’

The Delhi OOH market is a key advertising destination for various national and regional brands, given the demographics of the capital city, traffic volume on the roads, and indeed the quality of media that is available for advertising. However, more recently, there have been concerns expressed on some the advertising norms pertaining to OOH not being friendly to media operations.

To get an overview of the current Delhi OOH market and to get particular views on the regulatory issues, business coming in from the national agencies, and other matters, Media4Growth caught up with Pawan Bansal, COO, Jagran Engage.

At the outset, Pawan maintains that the Delhi OOH market has been doing well, just as all metro markets have done since 2022-23. “At Jagran Engage we’ve seen our share of business grow from specialist agencies, and that would be the case with a lot of other media owners too,” he says.

While Q2 of last financial year was a challenging period for agencies and media owners operating in the Delhi market and elsewhere, Pawan points out that the positive business sentiment was a driving force behind media owners participating in tenders floated by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). “If business was going down, nobody would have participated in the bidding,” he asserts.

Pawan adds that given the spurt in spends by real estate brands, and with local media owners inclined to give out their media for real estate advertising, the volume of media available to specialist agencies could have come down, thereby creating a perception that spends by the specialist agencies has reduced.

Regional and local brand participation

When it comes to participation of regional and local brands in OOH advertising, Pawan is of the view that local education-related businesses, and real estate jewellery brands were active on OOH. “Hence, I do not subscribe to the view that OOH business in the Delhi market has seen any decline,” he says.

Short-lived contracts

When asked if there is a serious issue of feasibility of media contracts awarded by the MCD,

Pawan’s point of view is that some of the media owners who pitched aggressively for the tenders could have surrendered some of their contracts, whereas some others have carried on with their respective contracts. “It’s a kind of correction,” he says.

However, he adds that there is an over-supply of media. MCD itself is floating so many formats. They’ve started giving permissions for flag poles. There is this other competition coming from media on EV charging stations, where again the operators get to put up unipoles and smaller formats. “How much of this can a city absorb? By increasing the media the spends don’t go up, but you will cut into somebody’s share. And then agencies also get confused about what to include in the media plan. Regulation is one important thing that we really need to start looking at — how much media we need to put up in a city,” he says.