The world of marketing has been witnessing an unprecedented growth over the past couple of decades. This growth has not only been with respect to the volume of advertisements that are created everyday but with respect to the academic disciplines that are used to devise the best ad campaigns. With the homogeneous nature of the products that are manufactured by companies it is the advertisements and the campaigns that give the true competitive edge to a product or a brand.
Prakash and Lajeesh, who comprise the founding team of Platooh Technologies, have a clear vision about the advertising industry’s future as well as the challenges that they will be facing in the forthcoming years. The role that will be played by outdoor advertising in brand building cannot be overemphasized. They opine that even though this type of advertising can play a very important part in building a brand’s image, and is a thriving industry, there is a lot of improvement that is required in the industry. There are no streamlined processes which will assist in making the process of outdoor advertising easy.
With these issues in mind they have utilized their collective experience of over seven years in digital marketing and devised an innovative solution that promises to come to the aid of both vendors as well as clients. Platooh is their vision for optimization of OOH advertising. According to them, Platooh is the answer to the issues that hamper the world of OOH advertising today. It promises to integrate a state of the art, ERP software that will make planning, buying and executing outdoor ad campaigns a very easy task and also save time and money.
Prakash on his own is an efficient administrator and has an experience of more than 7 years in building key scalable and successful products in outdoor media industry. Lajeesh with his decade long experience in e-commerce businesses and partner management experience in a couple of successful companies combines forces with Prakash and together, they make a resourceful team that has great potential and leadership qualities. Essentially what Platooh promises to do is to fill the gap that was formed by the big players on account of a lack of proper market research and up to date analytics.
Platooh is an out of home advertising planning tool that advertisers can use to plan, buy, execute and manage OOH advertisements in an intuitive way. It offers a complete Enterprise Resource Planner to manage OOH business for clients at www.client.platooh.com and for vendors at www.vendor.platooh.com. OOH planner and Platooh for vendor work in tandem with each other and enable the vendor and the client to work together and plan media, plan their inventory and gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. It therefore caters to the needs of both the vendors and the clients; a feature that is a rarity in the OOH market. Platooh offers a comprehensive set of services that address several aspects of the OOH business, namely: staff management, media management, payment gateway, OOH planner, booking management, proposals and also offers new opportunities for vendors.
When asked about the rationale that made them enter this particular nice market, they pointed out that it was the vagaries of the startup environment and the challenges that they could have faced if they had come up with a startup. They then made a prudent decision to develop a system that tailored ecommerce to suit the OOH industry instead of adapting the OOH industry to ecommerce. Hence, Platooh was born. They were very clear from the start that this venture was only directed at the OOH industry and not intended to extend to other forms of marketing. The intention was to bring all the advantages of an ecommerce marketplace and tailor it to suit the OOH industry.
They realized early on that the most crucial aspect would be pricing and had to invest a lot of time and effort in deciding a system. Eventually pricing was divided into two areas; pricing for advertisers and pricing for media owners. For media owners, they implemented commission based pricing plus the number of medias they could add to their account due to storage and bandwidth resource consumptions. Hence they pay a small commission for each of their bookings based on the amount of the booking with the provision that they could upgrade their account to a higher number of media if they wanted to. For advertisers, Platooh was priced in packages. Regardless of the package they choose the functionalities of the ERP were free. The only difference was that the packages were limited by the number of campaigns they could create using the OOH Planner.
Platooh promises to radically change the way OOH advertisement business will be conducted in the future. Using intelligence gathered from Platooh, it will be possible to erect new billboards, plan campaigns effectively and buy OOH media at a cheaper rate. Till now OOH industry was almost an unmarked territory as far as technical exploration was concerned. The founders plan to make their company as relevant to the OOH industry as Google Maps has been to navigation. They do feel that there is scope for continuous improvement even in their product and it is this constant quest for perfection that promises to make Platooh a market leader that will be capable of covering all outdoor medias in the south and east of India in the next six months and also get corporate advertisers to use Platooh OOH planner for their outdoor ad campaigns.
Name of Startup: Platooh Technologies Private Limited
Website: http://platooh.com
Number of Founders: 2