From your vantage point, what’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in how brands engage with audiences today?
The biggest shift is that brands no longer view OOH as a medium for mere visibility, they see it as a platform for engagement and brand experience. With a deeper understanding of OOH fundamentals, advertisers today are not satisfied with being seen; they want to be remembered. As a result, media plans are increasingly evaluated on their ability to spark interaction, conversations, and lasting recall, rather than just deliver impressions.
This shift is clearly visible in the growing preference for digital and exclusive formats. We are seeing a significant rise in DOOH-led and DOOH-only campaigns, driven by the medium’s ability to deliver dynamic, visually compelling storytelling that brands can truly own. DOOH enables narratives to evolve by time, context, and audience, making brand communication more immersive and impactful.
Another strong indicator of this shift is the way brands are building landmark identities by owning spaces. Station branding rights at Mumbai Metro Line 1 and Line 3 are prime examples, where brands are not just advertising but creating holistic, end-to-end experiences for their target audience. These exclusive environments allow brands to engage commuters repeatedly, across multiple touchpoints, in a highly contextual setting.
Finally, there has been a strategic move towards long-term presence. Instead of short, tactical bursts, brands are increasingly investing in long-duration placements, be it landmark sites, logo-led dominance, exclusive stations, or curated media clusters. This approach allows brands to build consistency, familiarity, and high recall over time, transforming OOH into a sustained brand-building engine rather than a checkbox medium.
What role does data play in understanding evolving consumer behaviour at scale?
Data has become the fuel powering modern OOH planning and execution. The industry has decisively moved away from intuition-led planning to strategy driven by insights and intelligence. As brand investments in OOH grow and expectations rise, advertisers are demanding solutions that are tightly aligned with their business objectives and audience realities.
Data enables a deeper understanding of who the audience is, how they move, what they prefer, and the context in which they consume media. These insights help brands identify the right cities, touchpoints, formats, and messaging, ensuring that OOH communication is not only high-impact but also highly relevant. When data informs both media selection and creative design, the brand presence feels native rather than intrusive.
At Times OOH, we have strengthened this approach further through our proprietary research and partnerships, including Nielsen-led studies, to decode commuter behaviour, dwell time, and audience quality across premium transit environments. These insights allow us to deliver planning solutions that combine scale with precision, helping brands maximise both reach and resonance.
What are the biggest challenges organisations face while delivering personalised experiences at scale?
The foremost challenge is budget. Creating personalised or immersive experiences, whether technology-led or experiential, requires sustained investment. Historically, OOH has often been viewed as a cost-efficient medium rather than a value-driven one, which can limit the scale and ambition of innovation.
The second major challenge is fragmentation. OOH is inherently diverse, with each city offering a unique mix of formats, sizes, regulations, and operational constraints. Replicating a single high-engagement idea seamlessly across markets often requires localisation and adaptation, which adds complexity to execution.
That said, this challenge also presents an opportunity. With the right mix of data, modular creative thinking, and flexible formats, specially through DOOH, brands can maintain a consistent core idea while adapting it meaningfully across locations. The organisations that succeed are those that view personalisation not as uniformity, but as relevance at scale.
What role does culture play in successfully leveraging data and innovation?
Culture is the true enabler of data-led innovation. Data on its own is inert; it becomes powerful only when an organisation’s culture encourages curiosity, collaboration, and informed risk-taking. At Times OOH, we foster a culture where data is not used merely to validate decisions but to inspire better ones. When teams are empowered to question insights, connect them with on-ground realities, and apply creative thinking, innovation naturally follows. A strong culture ensures data remains a strategic compass, guiding planning, execution, and optimisation, rather than just a reporting tool.
How do you see the role of data evolving in shaping brand storytelling over the next few years?
Data will increasingly move from being descriptive to being deeply narrative-driven. In the coming years, data will not just inform where brands should appear, but how they should speak, what moments they should own, and how stories should evolve across contexts. In OOH, this means smarter storytelling, using mobility patterns, audience behaviour, and real-time triggers to deliver contextual, relevant narratives at scale. At Times OOH, we see data shaping stories that are more human, timely, and culturally resonant, where creativity is amplified by intelligence, not constrained by it.
Enjoyed this interview? Now imagine yours. Write to:
jeevika@thefoundermedia.in
