Hashbrown Systems has been purveyor of Outdoor Media and Advertising for some time. Our OOH Media Monitoring System was managing over 200,000 outdoor locations, which also included unauthorized wall paintings and transit media, at any moment. The company had also acquired substantial expertise in Data Analytics, and application of Data Analytics into various domains – institutional sales and Financial Markets, in particular.

We performed a pilot study of about 88 billboard locations in Delhi and measured the traffic. We further analyzed the area, particularly the government zones of the city for demographics, vehicle ownership, literacy, gender ratio, apart from quoted monthly costs of the billboards.

By applying some rudimentary machine learning techniques, we were able to able to build an allocation model that would rely on hard numbers, relied on good metrics and provided measurable results. The whole system was simplified for the marketing executive into three solid steps:

• donut_smallEnter Amount in Rupees
• donut_smallSelect by numbers, by literacy, by gender or combination of those
• donut_smallPress Enter

After we verified the first three results by sending people on the ground and tallying the results, one of us wanted to leap out of our bathtub and run into the streets of Syracuse shouting, ‘Eureka! Eureka!’ But it was not to me as there were stringent laws against public nudity in Chandigarh and our findings were far from getting accepted by the outdoor advertising industry at large.

If we could allocate funds for 88 locations in one particular region, we could do so for the whole state, or the country even. It would be fundamentally the same approach but a different solution.

This was groundbreaking! This was breathtaking! This was the pioneering moment that would define the Out-of-Home Advertising & Marketing industry for years or an aeon to come.

Or so we thought?

Our first brush with the industry was encouraging to say the least, it reminded us of the not too old an adage that assumption was the mother of all fuck ups. We had in our naivety and the haste in applying newer technology into the oldest form of advertisements, had ignored or made assumption of needs and requirement of an OOH Marketer.