Offline Advertising: Emerging New Domain in Location-based & Hyperlocal

By Published On: August 22nd, 2016Categories: Articles3.7 min read
offline advertising

Offline Advertising is an Emerging New Domain in Location-based & Hyperlocal – BHIVE

Amidst the increasing use of Technology to solve real-time problems in every industry, Media and Advertising are also experiencing major innovation & emergence of new domains. To challenge the traditional ways of advertising in India is a new domain altogether, called “Hyperlocal Advertising”. It is emerging solely with the help of Technology & is the key to the future Advertising strategies of small & large Businesses.

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India is the 6th largest market globally in terms of Advertising spends. In 2016, according to Maxus Media, Indian Advertising will be the fastest growing market globally at 15%. While all this is positive news for country’s advertising firms, it’ll be interesting to see where all this money will be spent. TV & Print have traditionally dominated the offline advertising market. However, in recent years this spent has declined in its market share for several reasons like targeting, ROI & costs.

Technology-driven, more targeted & focused offline advertising has already started making a dent into the traditional advertising mediums. My prediction is that next three years will see Hyperlocal Advertising eating into TV, Print & Radio spends across the country. More & more businesses will consider spending their Marketing budgets on location-specific targeted Advertising, to reduce their spillovers & increase ROI.

Define Hyperlocal Advertising

Every Business has a different customer profile. A Foodpanda customer avatar is entirely different from what a Flipkart customer looks like. A Zoomcar customer may nowhere be similar to a Housejoy customer, and so on & so forth. And yet, you will find almost all these Businesses use the same channels of Advertising to target the same kind of Audience all over the city. Sadly, their customer is not everywhere. Each category of consumer personality lives, hangouts, works & commutes in specific areas of the city & not all over.

An ideal media planning exercise defines the customer profile through age, salary, gender, marital status etc. & identifies the right mediums to target them. Add location to these customer characteristics and you get what we define as “Hyperlocal Advertising”.

Hyperlocal Advertising lets a Business target a customer in particular parts of a city using unconventional media options in a localized environment. Using the eyeballs & footfalls in social hubs like – Apartments, Food Courts, Hotels, Tech Parks, SEZs, Restaurants, Coffee Shops, Supermarkets and club houses – Hyperlocal Advertising innovates an effective & economical Advertising medium with suitable context & content.

Let me quote an example from a recently concluded hyperlocal campaign in Bangalore. A startup dealing in home delivery of fresh meat & fish targeted its audience through Supermarkets (meat & fish section), Apartments & Snack vending machines inside corporate cafeterias. Relevant & Targeted! Not only did they get a good response from the campaign they also achieved a good word-of-mouth from the masses. The best part is.. They learnt a new way of achieving their sales goals without burning their Marketing money on traditional media. Now that’s disruption.

‘Hyperlocal’ Reach

One may wonder that since Hyperlocal Advertising is restricted to targeting specific areas in a city what’s the level of reach or impressions one can expect from it? The answer is enormous. An ideal area of a city (50 sq. Km. – 80 sq. Km.) has more than 5,000+ advertising real estate options with more than 500,000 relevant eyeballs weekly.

The Many Use-Cases

The impact of Hyperlocal Advertising is not entirely to eat into the traditional media spends. In many cases it goes hand-in-hand with traditional Marketing campaigns. For example, a big-budget TV campaign for a franchise-model Business can achieve brand establishment initially. But, the real business happens in & around the franchisee locations. That’s where even the big brands need Hyperlocal Advertising for a brand recall in and around the actual point of sale.

Secondly, for Location-based Businesses, communicating about their services throughout the city is totally irrelevant. Yearly wastage of marketing budgets due to such spillover is estimated to be $2Billion in the Indian market alone. Hyperlocal Advertising can reduce this wastage drastically by advertising in only relevant areas around location-specific Businesses.

The Technology

Now that we have understood the concept of Hyperlocal Advertising let me take this further ahead to explain the involvement of technology. In my next blog I will be focusing on the use of Tech that makes Hyperlocal Advertising a totally new domain in the vast field of Advertising. Stay tuned!

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