In a world where consumers are continuously bombarded with marketing messages, there are a few ads and campaigns that stand out and are remembered for a long time. However, is there a need for marketer to make the iconic ads more innovative? Can impactful messaging be the new key to a successful traditional billboard? Sharing more insights on this, Arijit Chakrabarti, Vice President (Strategy & Creative), Kinetic India took centre stage at the 4th edition of the e4m NEONS OOH Conference & Awards 2023 where he spoke about ‘Innovative vs Iconic: The Modern Challenge for Meaningful Messaging’.
Opening his session by mentioning the iconic sites of the New York Times Square and the London Piccadilly Circus that went digital in 2017, Chakrabarti highlighted how despite being iconic they constantly reinvent themselves with the times. He said “If I were to reword the topic that we are conversing about today, it’s not Innovative vs Iconic but rather Innovative & Iconic. India is currently a land of opportunities, there is a huge amount of infrastructure development that has currently taken place. The whole idea is how can we leverage that and create something that is more meaningful in terms of conversation.”
Chakrabarti further went and categorised the opportunities in India into three groups - from a creator perspective, a format perspective and the experiential perspective. He further elaborated that an important aspect of it all is to build contextual coherence - be it taking the conversation that takes place at a site and making a creative adjustment, building place-based relevance or Guerilla Marketing.
Talking about the format perspective, Chakrabarti believes that there are a plethora of media formats that are present across our metros. He added, “There is a huge opportunity to look at individual media formats and therefore drive meaningful conversations - which we are trying to do. There is also Digital OOH, which is very interesting and gives a lot of different opportunities to come into play. There are a few L-shaped screens also which give the opportunity to go beyond a 2D advertisement and we have leveraged it to give a 3D OOH experience to the audience. As per PWC, India is transitioning faster than many mature markets in terms of DOOH. There are also opportunities in Programmatic Digital OOH that can be used for trigger-based campaigns.”
In terms of creating experience, there are a lot of opportunities waiting to be explored. He added, “We have done a lot of testing on QR codes, thanks to them you can create a whole journey starting from an OOH billboard which can actually end up translating into a final point of sales. This is another opportunity that can be explored. It’s about joining hands with the entire ecosystem of media that is present. Last but not least it’s about creating immersivity at a scale that makes the audience go wow.”
Concluding his session, Chakrabarti emphasised that iconic and innovative go hand in hand to craft client delight. He further added that looking at data-based insights, going big and remembering that it is a one-to-many medium, focusing on the long term where possible and being mindful of the variables are some points that agencies and brands need to keep in mind while crafting successful OOH campaigns.
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