Hype Integracomm an OOH company has entered in to a private – public partnership with Western Railways in Mumbai to install LCD screens in all of its 67 trains.
The contract will be valid for five years. 4,000 screens will be installed in all, out of which 72 have been installed in the first phase. Hype Integracomm will be earning revenue from the advertisements on the screens and Western Railways will get a licence fee of Rs 35 crore for the duration of the contract.
These screens will be called Smile Tv and will play a mix of entertainment, information and advertising for 18 hours a day in all the trains. The screens will run contests, display SMS jokes, travel clips and also show non-commercial content such as safety messages and other public interest messages.
Initiallly, the screens will show recorded content. However, the company is developing solutions for real-time content as well. Apart from being an innovative advertising medium, these screens will also be a good medium for presenting socially relevant messages.
Discussing the categories which could benefit from advertising on the medium, he says, “I believe screens like these offer a wide reach to advertisers from sectors such as FMCG, financial products, automobiles and lifestyle.”The TV screens will be seen by the large number of Western Railway (Churchgate to Dahanu Road) commuters, which translates to more than 2.6 million passengers per day – almost 43 per cent of Mumbai’s total suburban rail traffic.