Fillip to digital printing in India

Tag : Digital Printing Vinyl

Fleet and wrap advertising, the latest media additions, are openingup a significant market for large-format, digital printing inIndia. It is pegged at about Rs 200 crore, and estimated to begrowing at around 25 per cent annually.
Wrap ads are different than hoarding ads in terms of material andprinting. For instance, Peacock Media - a Mumbai-based out-of-home(OOH) advertising company - recently entered into a project withthe Indian Railways, under which it will wrap up Rajdhani trains(one has been on wheels for some time as a pilot project and threeother Rajdhani trains are being readied) with ads of telecom giantAirTel.
The project demands a strong, all-weather material andhigh-quality, computerised, pixel-less vinyl printing to createsuch a giant sized advertisement. It requires a huge number ofgraphics and imaging technology input.
So Peacock tied up with HP (Hewlett-Packard) to take on theherculean task. Paresh Shetty, country manager, graphics andimaging business, HP IPG (imaging and printing group), India, notesthat HP has also wrapped inter-state luxury buses that ply betweenMumbai-Pune and Mumbai-Bangalore, commercial vehicles for many MNCspromoting their brands and HP distributor vans.
Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst at Gartner, an ITresearch and advisory company, said: "This is a huge marketopportunity - both in terms of the number of possible 'surfaces',and the fact they are all short-lived advertising which means agreat recurring business."
Cabvertisement, for instance, is another phenomenon to boost thedigital printing market. In Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad,cabs wrapped up with ads have been making rounds from a year or soand will become a common sight in near future. Ashok Vashist, COOof EasyCabs (a city taxi service company), says, "As the medium iseconomical and its mobility enables more visibility for the ads,opportunities galore."
Neeraj Gupta, managing director of V-Link Taxis (another radio taxicompany), which runs Meru Cabs, says, "Currently, the demand forfleet advertising is at a nascent stage and expected to growrapidly just like this trend did in Singapore and London and otherparts of the globe. As there is strict prohibition on hoardings orbillboards in some places, we feel that advertising on cabs is anexcellent OOH alternative for the advertisers."
Radio taxis have caught the eye of companies like Radio City,Bharti Axa Life Insurance, Sahara Filmy, Reliance Consumer Finance,P&G, Vodafone, Vishal Megamart, Emaar MGF, HPCL and manyothers. Not only this, liquor companies too want to tap the mediumto cover up for the ban on liquor advertising in the othertraditional media. If the concept catches up, down the chain,printing machine companies will see inflated sales figures.
Corporate houses, too, are simply a case in point. Multi-nationalbank HSBC's Mumbai campus, for instance, is decked with a verdantwrap, as a part of the bank's 'go green' campaign. India'sglass-fronted corporate hubs will look draped with such wrapadvertisements in the future. Alok Bharadwaj, senior VP of CanonIndia (a digital camera and printing machine company), says:"There's one more vertical to it-advertising walls. Now-a-days, youcan come across a wrap ad in a lift too."
Vipin Tuteja, executive director, Production systems Group (PSG),Xerox India, says: "Personalised printing is becoming a necessarytool for the advertising industry to be able to offer its customersmore targeted communications that have been proven to yield greaterresults."
And the retail sector - which has been at the top of thelarge-format ads pyramid - will only add to the market's potential.A Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj report indicates that 328 shoppingmalls are scheduled to come up in India by 2010. This is expectedto explode the large-format ad space in retail, spelling goodfortune for the large-format, digital printing market.