2012 has been a disappointing year. We started the year in a very encouraging note when we heard that the three of the largest media owners in Pune have come together to create one unit for pooling together all their assets and marketing doors. End of one year, we hear from the same people that their basic objective of achieving more values and getting more occupancy were all satisfied but at the same time there have been at least 4 or 5 new players who have entered the market with a whole lot of more sites. So what has happened is that on both fronts i.e increased fragmentation and a lot of unreasonable regulatory measures have taken their toll on this medium in the last one year. This is especially true in Mumbai and Delhi which together accounts for a huge majority of total spends that this medium sees.
Bangalore also as usual has its usual bout of annual problems with the regulations and steep increases in fees. The positive sides were that the upcountry markets saw good occupancies, saw renewed interest from people, from advertisers and also saw an increase in the rates that they command which is really the point because that is where the future expansion and a lot of future investments should lie, if you follow advertisers and the way their money is going to get spent. As far as new media or developments of new things are concerned, I would point out the success of digital media in T3 at the Delhi airport by the Times OOH there. They have done a remarkable job in making a big success of their entire digital medium. Focus on doing the right kind of creative’s, animated creatives as well as being able to convince the clients to share the platform has of course paid off.
Digital everywhere else continues to languish because of advertiser’s reluctance to share space in view of so much of exclusive space being available to them in the same location or in the same vicinity. Fragmentation and over availability of media is really destroying a lot of our values today. Street furniture never went anywhere after for e.g Delhi, boost that it got during the Common Wealth Games but since then it is more or less languishy including maintenance because obviously if you are not able to generate sufficient revenues, that aspect of it will suffer.
Let’s see how this year goes but in 2013, I would expect that the medium will again be back to a significant growth in revenues because numbers of categories are expected to do better and spend much more in 2013 than they did in 2012. The biggest problem was with the entire Telcos practically withdrawing from the markets in the last year compared to the spends in the previous year.
BFSI as well as media and entertainment have been big time spenders in out of home in 2012. Real Estate supported the medium in a big way in the numbers of cities, especially in south. These are all expected to continue in this year as well. Automobiles are expected to do even better in 2013 as compared to 2012. So overall 2013 should see a good growth story and it should see some of the growth momentum that was lost in 2012 being completely recovered.
