Schindler India targets 3x growth in in-lift advertising venture over next 2 years

Two of India’s legacy company, Schindler India, with 148 years of expertise in elevators, escalators and transit management has partnered with, Times OOH, a part of the Times Group which has been in India for over 180 years now, to introduce in-lift digital advertising in the country.

While the making of the 32-inch digital screen and the CMS which forms the base for running ads inside lifts has been developed by Schindler India, the role of Times OOH is that of a marketing partner which through its expertise in out-of-home ads will help advertisers in media placement.

Tarunesh Mathur

Delving further into what led to the genesis of the idea, Tarunesh Mathur, Senior Vice-President, Existing Installation Business, Schindler India, told BestMediaInfo.com that given the company’s basic motto is to improve the quality of life in urban environments through its urban mobility solutions and lifts are now the last mile of transport, the idea with this development is to convert the quintessential elevators into communication platforms.

In his views, while this doesn’t intrude into anyone’s personal space, what it does is it improves the quality and experience of the captivated audience owing to its engaging nature and the screen’s  ability to run highly targeted programmatic ads including videos.

Throwing light on the GTM strategy for the same, Mathur explained that while the quintessential Indian elevator market is 75% residential and 25% commercial, and Schindler India has only begun deploying the digital screens in certain major cities, it at the moment is touching nearly 1.2 million eyeballs each day. However, the aim is to scale this further to 5x-10x, given how the business model works.

Since urbanisation is growing in India, in his views, the offering in its initial stage is limited to metro cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, NCR, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, etc. in a pick-and-choose format but will eventually ramp up in the coming times.

That being said, the job of these digital in-lift screens is to not just run ads, even though that’s the primary purpose, but also have certain slots which the society owners can use for running their own ads, community and safety announcements, building inquisitiveness in children by showcasing facts, showing live weather updates, etc. 

“The benefit of our offering is that since India is a very diverse country with a rich and varied cultural heritage which quite often becomes essential for marketers to cater to, what they get to do with us is that at a click of a button they get the freedom to decide which of their hyper-local creatives should run in x, y and z markets and that too while knowing the sub-segments such as building size, geography, pin code, etc. to reach the desired mind-to-markets,” he said.

Explaining further, he said, “On average, a single human being in urban cities goes up and down the lift at least 8-10 times in a day, without even realising, and every lift ride is approximately 1 minute. And if in that one minute, an advertiser runs 5-6 slots a day, the marketer gets a high brand recall on a one-to-one basis.”

But, it is primarily the residential space, where he sees a very big opportunity for not just running hyper-local and local but also national campaigns in a ten-seconder format.

So far, brands such as Tanishq, Big Basket, Ikea, Jaguar, Netflix, Reliance Digital, etc. have already engaged with Schindler’s in-lift advertising proposition.

“Our initial experience has shown that national campaigns, be it from e-commerce and quick commerce players, jewellery brands, home development players, furnishing brands, etc. have worked quite well,” he stated.

Upon being questioned as to how the multinational goes about setting up its 32 inches high-res digital screens in lifts as of now, he replied that since there is no acquisition team at Schindler India which scouts for certain societies and buildings which are compatible for setting up the digital screens owing to the additional technicalities associated with it, it is the building owners themselves who reach out to the elevator manufacturer.

“Once the building is identified, or the owner themselves reach out to us for in-lift ad solution, what we do is we sign a contract with them and set up the screen and our marketing partner  Times OOH sells them the ads. And then, it is both the building owner and Schindler which carve out certain portion of the ad revenue coming from the same,” he said.

Sharing his views on how he foresees in-lift advertising growing in the portfolio of Schindler India, he recalled that until 20 years back, elevators were a luxury and were limited to high-rise houses, however, now the case is a lot different and a large portion of any elevator manufacturers’ business comes from individual villas or low-rise residential buildings since lifts have become a necessity today because of aging population, urbanisation and its affordable cost.

Hence, he feels that in 2-3 years the business can even scale up 10x given that Schindler India wants it because not only does India has access to the portfolio and to the consumer but the company has its technology system up and running.

“If the lift takes around one month to install, the screen installation is fairly quick which is why the whole decision is about how we look at the business model development and revenue flow coming. We are going in the direction of programmatic and targeting captive audiences and what we do charge for running these spot ads is also quite competitive, all this points towards that logically it should work. But conservatively, we can scale up to 3x minimum in the next two years,” he elaborated.

As a company which has been up and running for 148 years now, the ambition of Schindler India is to make every elevator ride more effective and there is a lot of spillover benefit in that because as of now almost 40% of the portfolio is getting connected with IoT, and another 20-30% will be connected next year.

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