'DOOH is giving more brands access to the media'

Jian Tsin Hor, Managing Director, Rapport Malaysia talks about the changing contours of Malaysia’s OOH industry, in an interview to Rajiv Raghunath.

How would you assess the Malaysia OOH market as it stands today vis-a-vis three years ago?

| would say the most obvious change is the increase in digital OOH inventory. That is seemingly driven by the fact that a lot of media owners are facing increasing cost of site acquisition and so they need to find ways to get greater returns per site and they feel that going digital is the way to achieve that by running multiple advertisements on a single site at any point in time. So, that is the biggest change.

There has been a significant expansion of metro rail networks in the Klang Valley, in Kuala Lumpur, leading to the introduction of a lot of transit media. That’s another big change that is seen on the OOH landscape.

OOH offers a variety of advertising formats today. Is that helping the medium to attract more advertisers?

To be fair, | don’t think that there was a drop off in OOH spends in Malaysia in the recent years. Innovative use of outdoor advertising, activation, and lately digital OOH are all enhancing the perception of OOH. Transit media, like those on the LRTs, have also augmented the OOH offerings to brands. Add to this, formats like car wrap that are becoming popular with advertisers.

There are several OOH formats available today. | think it's important for the advertisers to know what they want to achieve and which format can help them achieve that result.