Outdoor advertising in Kolkata.

We do not publish a rate card. It depends on the corridor, the size, the illumination and the duration — and more than in most Indian cities, on the season, because Durga Puja compresses a large share of annual demand into a few weeks. We are not selling our own inventory, so a published rate would tell you what we would like to charge rather than what the market will take; we negotiate against several vendors for every plan. Send the brief and the budget and you will get real numbers against real positions.

The EM Bypass and the Howrah approach deliver commuter volume; Park Street, Camac Street and Gariahat deliver discretionary retail audiences; Salt Lake Sector V and New Town deliver a working professional population; north and south Kolkata are neighbourhood markets that respond to hyperlocal presence rather than city-wide weight. Which of those is right depends entirely on who you are trying to reach, and we would rather establish the audience first and then recommend the corridor.

No. We plan, negotiate and run campaigns; we do not hold media. That means no inventory to push and no incentive to recommend a position because it happens to be empty on our books. The trade-off is that we cannot promise a specific structure before we have negotiated for it, which is the honest position.

Deliberately, and early. Puja is not a seasonal bump here — it is the commercial axis of the year, with weeks of shopping running up to it and a level of public participation that gives brand association a legitimacy it does not have elsewhere. Pandal association, street-level presence in the shopping weeks and daily-changing digital creative all do more in this window than in any other. Availability tightens months ahead, so a Puja plan decided in August is usually a plan that has already lost its best options.

Yes. Hyperlocal planning is often the stronger option in Kolkata, particularly for retail brands with a defined trade area. We work from the catchment around your store or cluster rather than from city-level reach, and a sequence of street-level positions along the approach roads normally outperforms one large arterial site at the same budget.

Longer than most markets. Familiarity compounds here and short bursts tend to underperform, and a run shorter than a monthly cycle usually costs more per day rather than less. We normally recommend sustained presence in a smaller set of locations over a wide, short buy.

More than almost anywhere else in India, and it is the format national plans most consistently under-buy here. This city has an unusually high public-transport dependency: the metro has expanded into catchments that were peripheral a few years ago, and Howrah and Sealdah anchor one of the densest suburban rail networks in the world. Buses reach across the whole city at the lowest cost per exposure of any format. If the audience is mid-market, this tier usually deserves more of the budget than the arterials do.

Yes. Advertising is licensed by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and permission is site-specific and time-bound — and note that Howrah, Salt Lake and the New Town and Rajarhat areas fall under their own authorities, so a metropolitan plan crosses more than one licensing boundary. We confirm permission status before recommending a position rather than after.

Dated, geotagged photographs of every position at mounting and again during the cycle. Monitoring is the part of outdoor most often skipped and most often wrong, and in a market with Kolkata's weather it is also how you find out that a site needs re-mounting before the client does.

Yes. We plan and buy across Bengali and English media, and we will flag where language choice materially changes performance — in Kolkata it usually does, and the Bengali mastheads carry a local standing that an English title cannot transfer. Creative adaptation is coordinated with your agency where you have one and handled in-house where you do not.

With more caveats than the industry usually offers. Licensed audience research exists and we will show you the current figures at planning, but we will not publish them on a website and we will not present a modelled impression count as though it were a measurement. What we can show directly is proof of execution, the catchment logic behind every position, and movement in whatever outcome the campaign was actually bought for.