The logic of advertising has moved towards one simple promise: if a brand spends a rupee, it should be able to show how that rupee performed. Digital media has made that expectation stronger and easier to articulate, offering marketers targeting, clicks, conversions, search behaviour and a growing list of attribution metrics.
According to the 'State of Digital Marketing in India 2025-26' report, digital advertising accounted for 44% of India’s advertising market in FY2025, at ₹49,000 crore, making it the country’s largest advertising medium. OOH, by comparison, accounted for 3% of the market. Still, at a time when marketers can track what consumers do after seeing an ad, some of the biggest brand-building bets continue to happen in spaces where there is no obvious button to click.
Sprite’s latest move puts that tension into sharp focus. The Lucknow-Delhi-Lucknow Tejas Express is now being branded the ‘Sprite Tejas Express’, making it the first Indian train to officially carry a commercial brand name. IRCTC has awarded Sprite advertising and train-branding rights for six months, with five coaches featuring Sprite branding across the exterior. The association also extends onboard, with Sprite featuring in the passenger food bundle, while sampling and merchandise-led experiences are part of the launch. The train will also be announced as the Sprite Tejas Express at originating and en-route stations. The activation has now also expanded beyond Sprite and IRCTC. Wow! Momo has joined the Sprite Tejas Express as a food partner, adding another consumer-facing layer to the branded-train experience.
The significance of the move is not simply that Sprite has bought train media. Its name becomes part of the train’s identity for the duration of the association, while the branding follows the consumer through stations, the journey and the onboard experience. It raises a larger question for marketers: when digital can deliver measurable actions, what is the value of owning a physical environment that cannot offer a click?
The answer is not to make OOH compete with digital on digital’s terms. “Digital has made media increasingly accountable, but that does not make every medium interchangeable. OOH plays a fundamentally different role in the media mix. It delivers scale, repeated exposure and, importantly, physical presence in the consumer’s real environment,” says Jayesh Yagnik, CEO, MOMS Outdoor Media.
OOH, he says, remains a reach-first medium that builds mental availability at scale. Data and technology are making OOH and DOOH more measurable, but its strength still comes from the combination of audience, context, visibility and physical impact.
A digital advertisement can be skipped or scrolled past. But, a branded train, station or large-format property occupies the environment in which people are actually moving. For a passenger, the Sprite branding can appear before the journey, during it and as part of the way the train itself is announced. Now, with Wow! Momo entering the same environment, the journey also becomes a consumption occasion, adding another layer to the physical experience. The brand is not simply placed next to the experience. It is the experience.
Nipun Arora, Co-founder, OSMO, looks at the same opportunity through the physical setting in which perception is built. “Digital and OOH both offer brands access to audiences, but the environment in which they build perception and imagery is fundamentally different.” That difference gives marketers room to use the environment as part of the creative.
Godrej Enterprises Group, for instance, has used OOH to turn product propositions into situations that consumers can immediately recognise. Its ‘Tested for Handlooms’ campaign showed a handloom saree emerging from a washing machine, while its Eid Deep Freezer and Onam campaigns placed appliances within familiar festive contexts.
“Digital gives us the ability to target consumers precisely and measure their response. OOH if done right, can deliver memorability that is a prized result in today’s clutter. It can also serve as content and drive engagement digitally,” says Swati Rathi, Head of Marketing, Appliances Business, Godrej Enterprises Group.
For agencies, that ability to make the physical setting part of the idea can also justify the premium attached to certain properties. MOMS Outdoor, for example, worked on a Godrej airport baggage-belt innovation in which an otherwise functional, high-dwell environment became part of the brand experience. At Marol Naka Metro Station, its Fevicol execution transformed the Blue and Aqua Line stations with distinctive branding, turning a transit interchange into a branded destination.
For Yagnik, however, the decision to invest in a premium property still begins with the media fundamentals. Agencies assess impressions, audience reach and frequency, visibility, location quality, dwell time, contextual relevance and audience profile. But these numbers do not capture everything an OOH property can offer. “We don't try to force OOH to behave like digital. The question is not ‘how many clicks did this billboard generate?’ but ‘what did this property contribute to the brand’s communication objective?’” he says.
There is, he adds, ‘a qualitative layer’. A property can become valuable because it gives a brand ownership of a moment, route, destination or cultural context. That is where a premium OOH property begins to move beyond being another impression in the media plan.
This applies directly to brands with high recall. Sprite does not need a large outdoor property simply to tell consumers that they exist. Godrej and DS Group similarly have existing awareness to build on. The question is what an unusual physical property can add beyond that familiarity.
Sushaant, Senior General Manager, Marketing, Mouth Freshener, DS Group, says, “Even for brands with strong consumer recognition, OOH plays a distinct role. It sustains salience, reinforces brand imagery and strengthens mental availability. Its value lies not just in awareness, but in being physically present where consumers live, move, shop and socialise. This is particularly relevant for some brands of DS Group, given the strong association with mobility and out-of-home consumption occasions.”
DS Group’s recent OOH work like Pulse’s collaboration with Spider-Man: Brand New Day used adjoining billboards across Mumbai to create a larger-than-life visual of Spider-Man reaching out with his web to grab a Pulse candy, extending the entertainment property into the physical environment.
“For a brand that already enjoys strong recall, the value of a property like this is not incremental reach. It is ownership. Owning a first. Owning a conversation. Owning a moment that competitors cannot copy,” says Yuvrraj Agarwaal, Chief Strategy Officer, Laqshya Media Group.
Laqshya’s Jeep sign on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway demonstrates how such ownership can build over time. The installation, around 25,000 sq ft and equivalent to roughly 30 billboards, has stood for more than a decade and has been continuously refreshed. Its value is not limited to the number of people who see it on a particular day. The installation has become a landmark on the route, giving Jeep repeated exposure over years. In 2026, the sign was rebuilt around the Jeep Wrangler and a QR code was added, giving the physical property an interactive layer.
The Jeep example also brings the measurement debate back into the picture. If someone sees a billboard and later buys the product, there is no straightforward way to establish that the exposure caused the purchase. But agencies argue that demanding a last-click relationship from OOH misunderstands the medium.
“We begin by rejecting a false test. The demand that every rupee tie back to a click, a conversion or a last-minute sale rests on last-click attribution, and last-click attribution, in my view, is a sham,” Agarwaal says.
For outdoor, the journey can begin much earlier, through presence, attention and memory. At the same time, the medium is becoming more measurable. Reach and frequency, audience quality, dwell time, share of voice, recall and brand-lift studies can be combined with search, footfall, app activity and social signals to understand what the property contributes beyond exposure.
Such balance is evident in the approach taken by Godrej. Rathi says the brand looks beyond organic engagement and social sentiment to perception shifts among consumers and trade partners, store enquiries and conversions in the area. Its teams also consider the local consumer base and retail presence when deciding where and how OOH should be deployed.
Arora adds another layer. A premium property may reach fewer people than a conventional network, but its value can increase if it generates disproportionate attention. Consumers may photograph it, share it, discuss it or prompt creators and media to pick it up. Social engagement, video views, earned media and search interest can then extend the life of the physical execution.
The Sprite Tejas Express now provides a particularly useful test case for this broader evolution of OOH. Its value is not confined to the five branded coaches or the visibility generated along the Lucknow-Delhi route. The train name, station announcements, onboard food bundle, sampling, merchandise and the Wow! Momo partnership create multiple points of contact within one physical environment.
Instead of asking whether the train can deliver a click, marketers could look at the combined effect of visibility, passenger interaction, sampling, consumption, social amplification and brand recall. The challenge is that these outcomes still need to be stitched together rather than captured through one neat attribution metric.
And that may ultimately be where premium OOH is headed. The most valuable properties may not necessarily be the ones that deliver the largest number of impressions, but the ones that allow brands to own a space, occasion or journey and build several measurable and unmeasurable interactions around it.
Whether that makes the property worth the premium will depend not only on how many passengers see the Sprite branding, but on whether the brands involved can turn the journey itself into something consumers engage with and carry beyond the train.
