Adgully Exclusive | Moving Trumpet, empowering cabbies, engaging advertisers

Advertising space has evolved to a great extent over the years. From the traditional print advertising, it has come a long way. With the recent TOI Volkswagen's talking print advertisement, the advertising space has been revolutionized, opening up doors to innovative concepts.

Moving Trumpet was born out of one such novel idea on October 2009 when three individuals decided to think creatively and use the power of taxi advertising to reach out to more numbers and have a unique impact at the right moment in the right place. Vishal Gupta (Managing Director), Gautam Bhirani (Director Marketing and Corporate Communications) and Vikrant Gupta ( Head Operations and Fleet Management) of Moving Trumpet felt the need to provide their customers an alternate and cost effective advertising and marketing solution.

Talking exclusively to Adgully, Gautam Bhirani explains the thought process that went behind such a resourceful idea. "The way to provide our customers with cost effective advertising was by using the potential of Black and Yellow Taxis which have been dominating the roads of Mumbai City for long but haven't been utilized by marketers and advertisers to its true potential," said Gautam Bhirani.

Such a kind of advertising already exists in the market internationally. New York Taxis have been using Taxi tops since a long time and it also generates a lot of revenue. However in India, the only known taxi advertising has been the body wrapped vehicles which although it looks good may not be that impactful, considering the traffic that is there, especially in a city like Mumbai. "Whereas the taxi tops which are of a reasonably good size 3 feet X 1 feet with Dual Display is more visible and even in congested traffic the vehicles around and the people can see it since it is on top," Bhirani further added.

Moving Trumpet is currently in long term deal with Reliance ADA as of now and in the coming two weeks major telecom players will be using their taxi tops.

"Since we have just introduced the taxi tops as it wasn't easy, it is still a new medium. As of now we have got an extremely good response from the Telecom Industry, including all the big players in the market also a lot of Players from the Financial Market have shown good interest and we are on the verge on closing deals with them for the upcoming year. Apart from these two sectors few TV Channels have also got in touch with us these taxis go everywhere and in lanes where hoardings can't go" said Bhirani.

The potential of taxi top advertising is huge. "We are on talking terms with a few fleet owners across Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune. We want to offer our clients a One Stop Cost Effective Multi City Solution. Taxi Tops are already tried and tested in all parts of the World especially in The United States of America and Europe. It is a very successful and a popular outdoor media which is popular with both Big Corporates and SME'S." he further said.

Introduction of Taxi tops in a market like Mumbai is huge and is an absolutely untapped. The whole idea and aim of Moving Trumpet is to make taxi tops as a popular Reminder Medium.

"City of Mumbai represents special opportunity to medium of mobile advertising in India. With cramped roads and high traffic and close proximity of pedestrians to roads the visibility of taxi tops is very high to all segments of the society. It gives advertisers a unique opportunity to showcase their brands and their products to millions of Mumbaikars using this unique source of advertising. Also the up and down nature of Mumbai roads does not provide a lot of alternate roads to both pedestrians and motorists to chose from. And that leads to great visibility of these taxi tops," explained Bhirani.

Moving Trumpet took 6 months just to get a grasp of the market scene. "Also we have teams assigned for different areas like Churchgate , Bandra, Lower Parel. These teams monitor the cabs , so getting business isn't difficult for such a product but managing these taxis is the biggest hurdle. We have about 28 men who handle only monitoring and contracts with the taxi owners," he further added.

It wasn't an easy journey. Great ideas always have to face challenges to make it feasible.

Bhirani stated, "In terms of Operations it took us good 7-8 Months to build an inventory of over a 1000 cabs. Also these cabs are owned by Individuals and not by one person so you can imagine how tough it was to get hold of so many cabs. So we had to do individual contracts with each taxi owner. Apart from that permissions took time also we wanted a wide spread of the taxi stands so that our clients get good coverage across the city"

This kind of advertising cost will range between Rs.3000-3500/- per month. Moving Trumpet usually does bookings for a minimum of 3 months. "So whenever there is a new campaign we just change the collateral for them. It works out to be very cost effective in terms of both the price and the target market. Like we have SHARE TAXIS in areas like Churchgate , Lower Parel, Charni Road etc. These taxis do 50 round trips a day and will give you extra ordinary coverage in the targeted area specially in the corporate zones like Nariman Point, Marine Drive , Fort, V.T. Also the captive audience is extraordinary . Each share taxi takes 350-400 people a day from one point to another. So at this rate CPM is very good."

Moving Trumpet's next big idea, apart from a few innovative outdoor solutions that are still being worked upon, is to use the "in cab' space especially in the share taxis as the numbers in terms of captive audience is immense.

Moving Trumpet is literally moving along ground breaking ideas, in the process creating a fresh and distinctive angle in the advertising space. | By Janees Antoo [janees(at)adgully.com]

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