CASE STUDY OOH Media Monitoring Reporting & Compliance in Out-of-Home Marketing Bubna Advertising is the largest outdoor advertising agency by volume in India or perhaps the world. We say that because the sheer numbers of advertisements in form of billboards, hoardings, transit ads, wall paintings, and other nondenominational form of outdoor media that the company handles is mind boggling to say the least. “ To comprehend the magnitude of operations, Hashbrown Systems handle over 150,000 locations in real time for the agency ” The problem was presented to us casually in a party over drinks, ‘Could we have some acceptable form of conditions in place to monitor on the ground media and BTL campaigns?’ ‘A just question my liege’, is how we answered and got about to doing our work. Before we proceed, we would like to add that the client seriously wanted our endeavor to succeed and ensured that infrastructure, both in terms of man and material was made available to the team at Hashbrown Systems. As is the way of Hashbrown, we designed and deployed the application immediately for real world testing. We tend to optimize our software in real world, and that process has served us well. Checks and balances were put into place to account for human and machine error but the idea was to include the real people to guide the process and that is what we did.
The resulting image looks like this – We build a custom camera module for Android. It removed all bells and whistles and made photographing efficient. The photographs served the objective. Verification for Internal Audit Process & Mobile Application The verification was a standard operating procedure that required taking images and saving the geographic meta data alongside date, time and bearing i.e. navigation.
The CRM Brand Managers, Auditors and Executives If you remember the client had over 100,000 advertisements, segregated and classified various media formats. Once the images start to pour in, we realized the true scale of the problem. The problem had transformed from one of ‘location intelligence’ to that of logistics. The idea was success from the very first day, and the adaption was swift. The client hired a whole team of field executives to stay on the road, an office team to verify the images and sort, sieve and assign them to their respective brand managers. End of the day, we did a swell job of it. The Dashboard we designed in late 2012 still performs the tasks that it was intended to do. We still open the hood for upgrades, patches, performance enhancements, moving from one cloud infrastructure to another, because sometimes the IT Managers cannot help themselves but we understand as professionals that it was all in good faith.
The ERP Executive Tracking, Operations & Brand Reports The Cloud Dashboard also functions as an ERP software for Bubna Advertising as it handles the tracking of field executives, measures and manages the efficiency of the team working on processing of images, and the whole audit and reporting aspect for the brands that employ services of the client. The system has built-in Excel support for effortless campaign management.
OOHMonitoring.Com The Portal The portal serves as point of contact for brand managers to measure effectively the performance of any advertising campaign that is being handled by Bubna Advertising. Clients are finicky bunch and they need to be kept assured of all the media and all the locations, all the time.
With Humans come Human Error Checks and Balances The application considers a lot that can be attributed to machine malfunction, network unavailability and human mischief. The application is able to successfully gather data from remote parts of the country to only assure the brand of the performance of the campaign but also to ensure the functioning and operations of Vendors in various places. It works in offline mode, is tamper-proof and works effectively with inexpensive devices as well. A people’s product.
Conclusion It works in offline mode, is tamper-proof and works effectively with inexpensive devices as well. A people’s product. The product has been developed further with additional modules, better performance and with inclusion of Data Analytics and Machine Learning tools we are building the next generation of Audit, Planning and Compliance Tool with one of the big four consulting firms.