Fleet and wrap advertising, the latest media additions, are opening up a significant market for large-format, digital printing in India. It is pegged at about Rs 200 crore, and estimated to be growing at around 25 per cent annually.
Wrap ads are different than hoarding ads in terms of material and printing. For instance, Peacock Media - a Mumbai-based out-of-home (OOH) advertising company - recently entered into a project with the Indian Railways, under which it will wrap up Rajdhani trains (one has been on wheels for some time as a pilot project and three other Rajdhani trains are being readied) with ads of telecom giant AirTel.
The project demands a strong, all-weather material and high-quality, computerised, pixel-less vinyl printing to create such a giant sized advertisement. It requires a huge number of graphics and imaging technology input.
So Peacock tied up with HP (Hewlett-Packard) to take on the herculean task. Paresh Shetty, country manager, graphics and imaging business, HP IPG (imaging and printing group), India, notes that HP has also wrapped inter-state luxury buses that ply between Mumbai-Pune and Mumbai-Bangalore, commercial vehicles for many MNCs promoting their brands and HP distributor vans.
Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst at Gartner, an IT research and advisory company, said: "This is a huge market opportunity - both in terms of the number of possible 'surfaces', and the fact they are all short-lived advertising which means a great recurring business."
Cabvertisement, for instance, is another phenomenon to boost the digital printing market. In Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, cabs wrapped up with ads have been making rounds from a year or so and will become a common sight in near future. Ashok Vashist, COO of EasyCabs (a city taxi service company), says, "As the medium is economical and its mobility enables more visibility for the ads, opportunities galore."
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Neeraj Gupta, managing director of V-Link Taxis (another radio taxi company), which runs Meru Cabs, says, "Currently, the demand for fleet advertising is at a nascent stage and expected to grow rapidly just like this trend did in Singapore and London and other parts of the globe. As there is strict prohibition on hoardings or billboards in some places, we feel that advertising on cabs is an excellent OOH alternative for the advertisers."
Radio taxis have caught the eye of companies like Radio City, Bharti Axa Life Insurance, Sahara Filmy, Reliance Consumer Finance, P&G, Vodafone, Vishal Megamart, Emaar MGF, HPCL and many others. Not only this, liquor companies too want to tap the medium to cover up for the ban on liquor advertising in the other traditional media. If the concept catches up, down the chain, printing machine companies will see inflated sales figures.
Corporate houses, too, are simply a case in point. Multi-national bank HSBC's Mumbai campus, for instance, is decked with a verdant wrap, as a part of the bank's 'go green' campaign. India's glass-fronted corporate hubs will look draped with such wrap advertisements in the future. Alok Bharadwaj, senior VP of Canon India (a digital camera and printing machine company), says: "There's one more vertical to it-advertising walls. Now-a-days, you can come across a wrap ad in a lift too."
Vipin Tuteja, executive director, Production systems Group (PSG), Xerox India, says: "Personalised printing is becoming a necessary tool for the advertising industry to be able to offer its customers more targeted communications that have been proven to yield greater results."
And the retail sector - which has been at the top of the large-format ads pyramid - will only add to the market's potential. A Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj report indicates that 328 shopping malls are scheduled to come up in India by 2010. This is expected to explode the large-format ad space in retail, spelling good fortune for the large-format, digital printing market.