How E-commerce Pulls Off Powerful Outdoor Adveritisng - How Housing.com grabbed eyeballs

Taken off Nigel Hembrow's share of an article from LiveMint - How Housing.com grabbed eyeballs



Many e-Commerce brands look to Outdoor Advertising for real world connection as they battle for market education and brand switch in the digital world. Thus e-Commerce brands such as Google, Taobao.com and most recently for the iPhone 6 and other e-Commerce often look to various Outdoor Advertising platforms such as GIANT billboards or taxi transit advertising to achieve their marketing objectives.

For better details go on directly to the article here. I loosely paraphrase the article as follow:

 For Housing.com - an online real estate website operated by Mumbai-based Locon Solutions Pvt. Ltd. undertook an advertising campaign in print, digital and outdoor... the company reached threshold visibility through billboards...in seven cities, including the metros. Threshold visibility simply means visibility that spans platforms (despite the ad largely being on one or two platforms). 
It is kind of a tipping point which packaged goods brands try and reach when they buy spots on television. Housing inundated one medium quite smartly and achieved that threshold. The creative execution of the campaign was done in-house struck a chord because it told a likeable story of the life journey of a young couple via a static medium (print and billboards) rather than through the audio-visual medium. It was a story in motion in a static medium: “People capture a moment in such ads. We were stringing together moments to create the story which moved forward,” he says, explaining why people felt they had seen a TV commercial. The campaign features a young couple sharing a pizza, with unopened cartons in the background. In the next ad, they are seen looking for a house. A third shows an expectant mother. A fourth shows a young child playing in her own room. On billboards, the ad changed every seven days as the story moved forward, although 25% of the billboards retained the older ad to retain continuity. [On an analytic level...]
Housing pulled off with outdoor what other e-commerce brands are attempting to achieve with expensive brand ambassadors and associations with valuable sporting properties such as the Indian Premier League.
The media and entertainment industry report released by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and KPMG last month noted a significant surge in spends by e-commerce companies, which are said to have spent between Rs.750 crore and Rs.1,000 crore (USD 150,000) on advertising across media. Like most venture capital and private equity firm-backed e-commerce companies, Housing, too, is burning cash in marketing, and a large part of the Rs.50-80 crore advertising budget it had set aside for phase 1 of such efforts was moved to billboards when the company saw a huge jump in traffic after the launch of its out-of-home campaign. 

 For better details go on directly to the article here.

 Outdoor advertising works for e-Commerce brands targeting a highly mobile and educated audience that do not consume mainstream media such as news print and TV on a regular basis, preferring to pursue and choose their own content thus making them hard to reach. Outdoor advertising reaches everyone at the targeted location.

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