Content based Social, Local and Mobile Marketing Platform for Out-Of-Home (OOH) Advertising

Hi Everyone,
I wanted to seek your valuable feedback on another venture that I’m currently involved in.

If you’ve under 5 minutes right now:
Request you to go through this concept + prototype video https://goo.gl/jMNjn, and share your feedback based on the below questions.

Specific ask (Please mention Yes/No, and Why?):
1) Overall, did you understand what we’re trying to do?

Put on your Consumer Lens and answer:

1. Would you use this mobile app?
2. Would you keep coming back to it, and for what reasons?
3. Either ways, would you like to sign up as beta user?
4. Anything else we should consider from a Consumer perspective?

Put on your Brand / Media Agency / Media Owner Lens and answer:

1. Do you see any value in digital content based social local mobile marketing (not mobile banner ads)?
2. Would you pay for the potential benefits that we can derive through our platform?
3. Are you a decision maker at any of the above entities, and would you sign up as beta customer?
4. Can you refer us to someone who might be interested?
5. Anything else we should consider from an Brand / Media Agency / Media Owner perspective?

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If you’ve more than 5 minutes read through the below list of problem statements that we’re trying to solve for.  If interested in helping out / being involved, please reach out and I can share additional details.

Problem statements by user type:

Consumer: As a consumer who spends a significant amount of time on daily commute, we are bombarded with brands trying to capture our attention via highly visual, information heavy, sometimes smart and funny advertisements (ads) posted on non-digital OOH media like billboards and gantries, which typically have some call to action. Of all the ads posted, we may like some, we may not like some, and for the most part we don’t even end up noticing some of them. With that as the context, we strongly believe that there are unsaid and unmet needs of consumers which can be categorized into:

1. Discovery: While consumers may see some ads, there are equal chances that they may not pay attention to ads that may be relevant to them, or address a specific need that they may have.
2. Recollection: They may be in a moving vehicle and do not always have the time to digest or capture all the information mentioned on the ad (e.g. “I saw this lovely 1BHK housing project ad, but I don’t seem to remember their exact location or where their sales office is located” OR “They had mentioned this 1-800-XXX-XXX number, but I didn’t get a chance to note it down”).
3. Convenience: As consumers, there isn’t any easy way to see a list of all the brands that would like to interact with them while they are on the move, what brands have to offer, and how relevant those might be to what they are looking for?
4. Fulfillment: Is there a single place to go and look at the various calls to actions that consumers can take for all the brands that they are interested to interact with? (e.g. “Call us to know more”, “SMS us for a free gift”, “View our movie trailer”, “See a 3D view of your potential 1BHK house”, “See a list of designer shirts in our product line up”etc.

Brands / Media Agencies / Media Owners: With an ever increasing array of touch points that a consumer interacts with a brand, it becomes extremely challenging for an advertiser to allocate where they would like to spend their advertising money. This is particularly evident in the following categories of challenges that an advertiser faces today in the OOH space:

1. Social / Local / Mobile: With the rise in mobile device penetration and reducing rates of 3G/4G data plans, the time spent by a consumer on their mobile device will increase. This will shorten the consumer’s attention span for things happening around them, and lead them to spend more time on their mobile device. Therefore it is imperative for advertisers to create avenues for their consumers to interact with them in a way that the consumer prefers to (e.g. share, like, tweet, post, tag, pin, check-in etc).
2. Content: In today’s hyper active e-commerce environment, a consumer’s brand loyalty is typically short-lived and is as good as the last deal that they got. Thus, we strongly believe that in the long run, brands will need to evaluate how content can help them remain competitive, create better brand awareness, recall value, product or service differentiation, and generate sustainable consumer engagement.
3. Target specific: With the same static non-digital OOH ad, the advertiser is unable to target content that may be specific to a certain demographic. The best they can currently achieve is placement of ads based on socio economic status of a certain locality, but cannot get granular to the level of age/likes/dislikes etc. (For e.g. Audi may decide to place an ad on the busiest traffic junction in an affluent South Mumbai locality, hoping that the right consumer would look at it. But it currently does not have the ability to say “Of the people that are looking at my ad, how many already have an Audi, so I can identify a repeat customer?” OR “How many of them own a Mercedes, so that I can offer them competitive analysis?” OR “Which corporate executive just got promoted to a CEO, and I can sell them my Audi, that they have always been talking about on their Facebook page?”)
4. Interactive: Today a brand is unable to create an immersive interactive experience for a consumer who is on the move and lead them right from discovery to fulfillment.
5. ROI measurement: Historically, measurement of ROI on the OOH ad spend has been one of the key pain points of this industry globally. The closest that people have got to, is measurement of vehicular traffic and in rare cases a reliable and sustainable video surveillance system.

We aim to address these problem statements by building a sophisticated digital content distribution system for the OOH industry with the core focus on consumer, context and convenience.

PS: We’ve just applied to a leading accelerator, and awaiting results. If we don’t get through, an ice-cream parlor is just around the corner 🙂