Out-of-home media between programmatic buying and agency economics

An editorial interpretation of the conversation, distinguishing the guest’s arguments from verified business outcomes.

Making strategy worth paying for

Ranganathan Somanathan traces his route from statistics and a marketing MBA into media before examining how the industry prices its contribution. In his view, India’s advertising market combines strong creative insight with a procurement culture that too easily reduces value to CPMs. He argues that strategy and creativity should earn payment for the competitive advantage they create. His diagnosis of holding companies is a delayed shift from buying scale to audience understanding: a consolidated profit-and-loss account does not automatically produce a shared culture. He sees adaptability as important for both networks and independent agencies.

The culture hidden by a common P&L

Drawing on his leadership experience, Somanathan describes Publicis as more centrally aligned and Omnicom as more decentralised, while stressing their shared commercial and client priorities. Global playbooks provide consistency, he says, but local insight and partnerships help convert and retain business. On pitching, he favours trust, competence and paid discovery over speculative demonstrations. He also resists treating outcome pricing as a future invention: CPM guarantees already constitute one form of outcome commitment. Linking remuneration to business results is harder when data is incomplete and advertising’s contribution cannot be isolated. Agreeing measurement with the client matters as much as choosing a commercial model.

How OOH measurement actually works

At billups, he describes accountability as a way to help out-of-home media compete across the marketing funnel, including static and analogue inventory. He argues that outdoor remains a shared, one-to-many experience whose effectiveness depends on location, audience and creative context. Buying it as though it were an individual digital impression risks missing those qualities. Asked about quick-commerce conversion targets, he says the right KPI depends on the advertiser’s needs and brand maturity. His examples of app downloads, bookings and store visits are company effectiveness claims, explicitly qualified by probabilistic attribution rather than identification of a person who saw an ad and then purchased.

AI and the experience behind the fee

Somanathan also describes the difficulty of reaching industry consensus on measurement and billups’ work on richer attention and attribution data. Becoming a founder made him more conscious of startups’ urgent need for access and the innovation they can offer larger companies. For media teams, he sees advantage in combining human curiosity and intuition with technology that removes repetitive work. He encourages younger professionals to invest personally in AI skills while continuing to learn broadly. Discussing seniority, he frames his answer as self-reflection: experience must bring additional context and perspective, supported by humility and continued learning.