OOH industry: In search of measurability in spite of 10% growth

At the IOAA board meet held in February 2012 in Mumbai, the IOAA Board released the industry revenue data that it has collated for 2011.

Every year, various bodies and consultancies in India publish revenue estimates of various media including that of OOH.

The reason we look at this is as a significant development is, the absence of a common measurement data in the public domain. Innumerable researches are present in the market; and each estimate quotes a different statistic, depending upon the base used for the estimation. Plus the  number of companies in the industry that had been surveyed.

The IOAA team that spoke to Campaign India stated that they carried out their own estimation. The estimation followed two approaches:

• Based on top-line revenues of top ten outdoor specialist agencies + mainline agencies who have direct OOH business. The research then extrapolated the same to include direct business done by media owners – estimated to be 35% of total industry business. As was reported in Campaign India in 2011, the top ten specialist agencies are estimated to have topline billing of about Rs 1,240-crore in 2011 with mainline agencies adding another about Rs 280-crore.

• IOAA collated revenue figures from airports, railways, and adding that to non-transit media revenues in the top ten cities. This was extrapolated  across the rest of the country, with the latter estimated to be 30% of total national spends. While transit advertising accounted for approximately Rs 605-crore, non-transit OOH advertising revenue in top 10 cities alone is estimated to account for approximately Rs 1,070-crore.

The revenues were collated by asking companies to provide top-line figures on a confidential basis, which is more or less how the IOAA arrived at the magic number of Rs 2,251-crore.

This is good news. But there are two concerns: greater rigour in the research process to get an accurate revenue figure.  Plus third party accreditation so that clients and brands can say aye to numbers. Till such time we continue to grope with measurability in the OOH segment.