MAM
First Indian outdoor advertising meet in June
MUMBAI: The great outdoors just got more exciting. Outdoor Today, which claims to be India’s only magazine on outdoor advertising, has announced the launch of an annual convention for the outdoor advertising community in the country.
The two-day event, Outdoor Advertising Convention (OAC 2005) on 10 and 11 June 2005 in Mumbai will bring together experts from the industry in India and abroad.
The aim is to address issues of relevance. The event will end in an awards ceremony.
Outdoor Today publisher Vasant Jante says, “Outdoor Advertising is no longer just a ‘brush and paint’ medium. In fact, the medium has seen resurgence the world over and is also being touted as the last broadcast medium.
“When we launched Outdoor Today in 2002, the objective was to provide a forum for the Outdoor industry that is growing at a healthy 10 per cent. OAC 2005 is the next logical step in that direction.”
OAC 2005 will comprise a series of interactive seminars addressed by thought leaders from India and abroad.
The delegates would comprise all interest groups in the industry including media planning and buying agencies, advertising agencies, outdoor specialists, outdoor concessionaires, regulatory authorities, research agencies etc.
The speakers will address the entire range of issues that are of relevance to the industry, including research, regulation, innovation, technology, creativity etc.
The two-day event would culminate in an awards ceremony to recognise exceptional creative executions on the outdoor medium – another first for the industry.
The event is being supported by the recently constituted Indian Outdoor Advertising Agencies’ Association (IOAAA), an association of all specialist agencies in the country.
Outdoor Today states that specialist agencies currently account for over 60 per cent of the outdoor spends in the country and have been largely instrumental in bringing a semblance of order to a medium considered disorganised for long
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.






