With the number of online startups popping out every day, it can be said that online advertising has taken over the out-of-home (OOH) media space.
And while that is true to some extent, it is also true that the OOH industry can never go out of fashion as marketers are becoming increasingly creative with their outdoor campaigns nowadays. Step out of your home and you’re sure to spot a billboard, hoarding or a unique out-of-home advertising creative running on the sides of the roads.
No longer just confined to static billboards, global brands have been conjuring up some truly creative interactive ads that are actually a joy to look at and play with.
With a valuation of INR 1040 billion, the Indian out-of-home (OOH) market is still highly unorganized. In a market of this big, finding, genuine information regarding the outdoor advertising is not an easy task for many. The duplicity of information, varied prices for the same space, and lack of information regarding traffic are some of the major problems that riddle the sector.
To bridge this gap between brands who are looking for outdoor marketing and the vendors, Prakash & Lajeesh launched Platooh.com. Platooh is a Marketplace and ERP solution which allows its customers to plan, launch, manage and optimize their outdoor campaigns with various outdoor media across the country in a single automated platform with state-of-the-art technology.
The website connects buyers and sellers on its platform and provides them with tools to make the job faster and more efficient.
Prakash & Lajeesh bring 17+ years of combined experience into the marketing segment.
While Prakash brings 7+ years of rich product and customer experience in building key scalable & successful products in the outdoor media industry, Lajeesh brings 10+ years of e-commerce business and partner management experience in a couple of successful companies.
“Today the outdoor advertisement industry is a thriving one. Yet it is not a streamlined industry and having a large gap to fill. Almost all uses basic spreadsheets, power point slides to prepare everyday media availability and update their clients for potential purchases,” says Prakash.
“Platooh simulates outdoor advertisements into their ERP software enabling it to act as a platform for planning, buying and executing outdoor ad campaigns saving time and money,” he adds.
Platooh is a very useful platform for buyers looking for outdoor advertising. They can advertise in any cities pan India, with the help of Platooh, sitting at their locations. The best part is Platooh works with a model with no broker in between. It assures buyers that they will get the space at the best price. Not only the marketplace, the ERP solution works like a charm for advertisers. Its end-to-end solutions help in entire workflow of an outdoor campaign. Platooh’s OOH Ad Planner is the tool that advertisers use to plan, buy, execute and manage OOH advertisements in an intuitive way.
For media vendors, Platooh is a complete ERP to manage the entire workflow of their businesses and a marketplace to transact their media directly with brand owners and media agencies and without any brokers & intermediaries who charge an exorbitant rate of commission. OOH Ad Planner and Platooh for vendor work back to back just like in an e-commerce site with seller and buyer.
Platooh incorporates almost all sections of the media business for vendors
- Inventory management with auto update after every booking
- Media Availability Update
- OOH Ad Planner
- Booking Management
- Media Proposal Creation
- City based Lead Management
- Financials (Invoices & Payment Gateway)
Vendors feed OOH Ad Planner with their media inventory; OOH Ad Planner presents the inventory in a way that is easy for advertisers to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign.
Overall the cloud-based tools, centralizes and standardizes campaign workflow. Vendors can find their media plans, campaign status, invoices and campaign results, and reports are securely stored in one place.
The numbers that Platooh boasts of are pretty impressive. There are 1500 OOH media listed across multiple cities; it has over 150 brand owners who have used the services of the site to buy ad space. There are more than 200 media owners who have already enlisted with their media and are enjoying the services of the Platooh team.
Platooh is bootstrapped and follows the Free / Freemium / Premium model.
For Advertisers, it has implemented subscription based pricing based on the number of campaigns they can add to their account.
For Vendor, pricing is Pay-per-sale, which comes in a package based on the size of media (No. of media). Whatever the package they choose, they get all functionalities of ERP for free. The only difference is that the packages are limited by the number of media they can add to the marketplace.
OOH business is a big industry where there is very less technical exploration was done before. The young and vibrant team at Platooh aim to make it the Google AdWords of Outdoor Ads.
