Tunnel vision

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It lasts for a fleeing few seconds, but suddenly all eyes rivet to the outside, as a Kotak Life billboard fills out Delhi Metro’s widows in the dark alley. Suddenly, the slouching commuters sit bolt upright. Finally, they have something to fix their gaze on. Not unlike people looking at LEDs in closed elevators that give floor readings.

This is the kind of attention Kotak Life Insurance has paid for. Roughly Rs 30 lakh for a month’s display to C2E, a technology company that’s presented this new platform for “in tunnel” advertising.

It presents a means of monetising some of DMRC’s (Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s) dead assets, namely subways, tunnels and elevators. The first installation that has been put up covers a 240-meter tunnel stretch between Chandni Chowk and Kashmere Gate metro station that’s been leased out to Kotak Life. Other brands that have evinced interest in the new media include Airtel, Idea, ITC, Pepsi, and a few others.

Although out of home (OOH) media has been growing at a remarkable pace with consumers spending more time outdoors than indoors, the means of drawing their attention to an ad are somewhat limited and getting increasingly fragmented. Further, all that works only with a stationary audience. Now this is one way of engaging a captive transit audience.

The technology that the C2E team of consultants developed is fairly simple. As simple as the use of a child’s flip cards to create an illusion of movement. But it took C2E some time (roughly six months) and the support of a US-based company Submedia, which has patented the technology, before its consultants thought of it during a ride on the metro to devise a solution fit for DMRC’s underground tunnel conditions.

Incidentally, the US-ased Submedia, the company that C2E has partnered, has also put up installations in Tokyo, in Hong Kong and in a shopping mall in the US. Internationally, in countries such as the US and Japan, the medium has been shown to create high impact and recall levels for advertisers, with brands such as Adidas and Coca-Cola among the first to experiment with it.