Draft OOH policy vague and open to subjective interpretation in its current form: IOAA

New Delhi: The Indian Outdoor Advertisers Association (IOAA) has urged Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to reconsider the latest draft OOH policy and engage in meaningful dialogue with industry stakeholders. The IOAA believes a collaborative approach is essential in creating a visually appealing and safe outdoor advertising landscape.

“The BMC has given an opportunity for response and corrective measures, but we at IOAA think it is not enough; the policy requires a deeper intervention and should be designed from scratch in view of massive evolution and changes,” it said.

IOAA highlighted several key issues with the draft policy. The association criticised the lack of a comprehensive vision for OOH advertising, stating, "These guidelines need to encapsulate a larger vision from an OOH perspective rather than just restricting it to hoardings and signages."

The IOAA also emphasised the need to address the problem of illegal hoardings through collaboration, suggesting, "As IOAA, we had suggested and represented to BMC that in collaboration with BMC, IOAA can create a database of all legal sites permitted by BMC and put in the public domain through the IOAA website."

IOAA further said that this draft policy in the current state is at best vague and prone to multiple subjective interpretations.

“This possibility of multiple subjective interpretations of the guidelines persists through the entire document and provides a definite loophole for the people/companies to exploit these to bypass norms.” 

However, praising some aspects of the draft policy, the IOAA stated that the most obvious example of this is illegal sites, which, despite all intent to the contrary, continue to mushroom, posing danger to the man on the street.”

“Similarly, there has been an attempt to create common standards (clause 2.5 Duties of the Permit holders) for the implementation of the sites on the ground, which is a great step towards ensuring safe and aesthetic media assets.