It lasts for a fleeing few seconds, but suddenly all eyes rivet to the outside, as a Kotak Life billboard fills out Delhi Metro?s widows in the dark alley. Suddenly, the slouching commuters sit bolt upright. Finally, they have something to fix their gaze on. Not unlike people looking at LEDs in closed elevators that give floor readings.
This is the kind of attention Kotak Life Insurance has paid for. Roughly Rs 30 lakh for a month?s display to C2E, a technology company that?s presented this new platform for ?in tunnel? advertising.
It presents a means of monetising some of DMRC?s (Delhi Metro Rail Corporation?s) dead assets, namely subways, tunnels and elevators. The first installation that has been put up covers a 240-meter tunnel stretch between Chandni Chowk and Kashmere Gate metro station that?s been leased out to Kotak Life. Other brands that have evinced interest in the new media include Airtel, Idea, ITC, Pepsi, and a few others.
Although out of home (OOH) media has been growing at a remarkable pace with consumers spending more time outdoors than indoors, the means of drawing their attention to an ad are somewhat limited and getting increasingly fragmented. Further, all that works only with a stationary audience. Now this is one way of engaging a captive transit audience.
The technology that the C2E team of consultants developed is fairly simple. As simple as the use of a child?s flip cards to create an illusion of movement. But it took C2E some time (roughly six months) and the support of a US-based company Submedia, which has patented the technology, before its consultants thought of it during a ride on the metro to devise a solution fit for DMRC?s underground tunnel conditions.
Incidentally, the US-ased Submedia, the company that C2E has partnered, has also put up installations in Tokyo, in Hong Kong and in a shopping mall in the US. Internationally, in countries such as the US and Japan, the medium has been shown to create high impact and recall levels for advertisers, with brands such as Adidas and Coca-Cola among the first to experiment with it.
?We were slotted only two hours at night (12 midnight to 3.00 am) twice a week, when metro movement is suspended for routine mainte-nance, but it was fun working under strobe lights on the installation in the pitch dark,? recalls Rachna Vohra, vice- president and co-founder of C2E, a town planner by training, who has in the past worked on various infrastructure projects in the country and abroad.
The platform holds allure for both mass transit authorities and advertisers. Usually short on funds, transit systems are always seeking new sources of revenue. But for in-tunnel advertising to have an impact, every little nut and bolt had to fall in place, looking at pixel effect and safety considerations, with the display box that functions as a crude camera.
The result, if you are a rider on that route, is dramatic. It promises to get even better with more animation, as is being done in the second phase of the project, when big brands engage their own creatives to pack some fun elements into the final execution?pop-outs, sound effects, the works! So you would soon have a Shah Rukh Khan thrusting a Pepsi Mycan at an unsuspecting commuter, or perhaps another in which he?s flaunting an Airtel handset.
?That?s our vision of the final application,? enthuses Vohra. ?There will certainly be more interactivity in this media as the months roll by.? The technology does make a whole lot of multi-media things possible.
Studies abroad anyway indicate that such interactive, in-transit displays have a high recall, averaging over 80%. The 15 seconds format that?s being used for the Kotak Life ad is also standard, as it?s been found that beyond that length the novelty effect begins to wear off and fatigue sets in.
As the display boxes are energy guzzlers, consuming 11 kv for a 15 second effect, repeated every four minutes (the frequency at which the trains passes the installation), the C2E design team has put in place sensors that automatically switch off the light during the intervening, inactive hours, that is, when there are no commuters to view the display from their windows.
Interestingly, unlike a TV slot or a billboard, the in-tunnel ad units are priced per contact (that is, per metro rider) because, as the logic goes, captive audience can be numbered. Such precise targeting is generally impossible with other OOH media.
Despite that, ?in-tunnel display works out to be at least 50-60% cheaper,? reasons Vohra, ?than TV (of course, varying with the channel?s popularity and reach) and billboards (again depending upon the location) at 30 paisa per contact for a 15-second spot. That would translate into 240 meters stretch of the tunnel in terms of space usage. For six months, C2E is running it as a pilot. ?After that it would be a revenue sharing (not leasing) model with DMRC,? says Vohra
Given DMRC?s average, daily ridership of four lakhs, the utilisation of the tunnel space at strategic points can virtually generate crores in revenue for DMRC. ?It is definitely clutter breaking, giving a very good ad recall. The metro riders? profile (SECA1 and A2 category of self-employed salaried commuters) also matches our target,? says Shubhada Basuray, associate vice-president, marketing, Kotak Life.
?Our objective is to relieve confined environmental psychology in a non-intrusive manner,? says A Rabindranath, CEO, C2E. ?With DMRC opening up other routes and traffic snarls on roads getting longer and more frustrating, the potential application for this media could be mind boggling,? he adds.
Bang on target
A DMRC study done in July 2007 reveals that on any given day, some 3.96 lakh riders board Line 2 of Delhi Metro from Central Secretariat to Vishwa Vidyalaya.Of these, 21% are female and the rest male.
The age break-up is: 18-24 (40%); 25-34 (39%); 35-44 (14%) and 45 and above (7%). Occupation wise, 48% are salaried, 19% students; 29% businessmen and self-employed. Their educational profile is 60% graduates; 4% professionals and 17% undergraduates; while the socio-economic classification is SEC A1 (15%); SEC A2 (33%) and SEC B1 (35%).
How it works
For long, there was no technology available that could withstand the tough tunnel conditions in terms of fire and safety norms.
That?s when someone thought of a 19th century toy, called zoetrope, designed by an astrophysicist, Joshua Spodek, and it led to the discovery of a ?reverse film? application?based on the thought that unlike in a movie theatre, where the audience is seated and the film rolls, in a tube tunnel, it?s the audience that rolls, while the ?film? or the installation is fixed to the tunnel wall. That gave rise to a logical algorithm that incorporates two processes: The first is a set of display boxes made of steel that are installed on the tunnel walls. The boxes house the images that are placed frame by frame and can be lit from inside by fluorescent tubes.
The boxes are laser cut in the front and calibrated specifically for each transit system taking into account the distance between the audience and the image boxes, as well as the speed at which the train runs in front of the installation.
The second step is changing the images in a manner that when viewed by a moving audience, they appear moving without any blur or distortion. The software is what manipulates the images and makes it speed independent.
