Amongst these, the auto category is the most active with multiple brands planning their launch campaign for the upcoming year The OOH industry has had a rough economy this year due to the pandemic-hit market environment. As markets have begun to open the brands that are opting for OOH in their marketing mix mainly belonged to categories from the FMCG, Health, Automobiles, and Real estate sector. As the lockdown being eased out, the OOH medium has been doing its best to recover on a month-on-month basis amidst license fee waivers. The festive season itself as OOH agencies and owners have pointed out-touched almost 60-70% of last year's ad revenue. The auto sector did show some spirit in leveraging OOH in their marketing mix with 9% of their spends being invested in OOH. An OOH owner shared that clients like Skoda, Kia, Volkswagen, and Hyundai from the automobile sector have been investing in OOH. The FMCG categories were active during the months of October and contributed 16% of their marketing spends on OOH. e4m spoke to OOH experts to understand which brands are prominently spending on OOH and helping in the amplification of the revival process.

Atul Shrivastava, CEO, Laqshya Media Group, said, “Out-of-home (OOH) media is consistently recovering after Unlock was announced. Festive spends touched 50-60% compared to last year’s spends. The different phases of Unlock saw an increase in mobility, pan India. While traffic within cities picked pace, inter-state travel also resumed. Brands across automobiles, smartphones, jewelry, BFSI, OTT, and real estate are driving this recovery. Media occupancy in Tier 2 cities is touching 80-90% level.” Shrivastava stated, “OOH had an uptick since July with the campaign #13thKiTaiyyari from ZEE TV, Tanishq, Maruti, Hyundai, etc. As per the recent WARC Report, OOH is globally forecast to be the second-fastest growing medium in 2021, with ad spend rising by a fifth (20.2%). We expect this rally to happen in India as well.” Sharing a DOOH companies' perspective on ad spends, Gulab Patil, Founder, and CEO of Lemma says, "Business post-lockdown is scaling to pre-covid levels with certain categories advertising in full capacity. Amongst these, the auto category is the most active with multiple brands planning their launch campaign for the upcoming year. In addition to this, we are witnessing traction from FMCG brands as well. Within the finance category, there are occasional spurts of media briefs shared for campaigns likely to take flight in the 1st quarter of the year to come. The auto category started first and continues to spend on the DOOH inventory. This category alone accounts for the highest percentage vs all other brands, especially the high-end cars." Lastly, for Atin Gupta, Managing Director, Atin OOH, according to his clientele, the prominent brands investing in the OOH medium are Apollo Hospitals, BOSE, LIC, NISSAN and Duradoor.