Airport advertising in Bengaluru

Kempegowda International Airport sits about forty kilometres from most of Bengaluru, which makes the trip itself a media buy in three parts. The drive up Bellary Road, the forecourt and the car parks, and the terminals, where the airport's own concessionaire controls what may be put up and where. Three sellers, three sets of rules, one traveller. This page is about what is actually there and who it reaches. What airport media costs in India is on its own page.

Three markets between Hebbal and the terminal

The road. From Hebbal through Yelahanka and past Devanahalli, the roadside sites are ordinary outdoor media. They are permitted by the authorities that govern land beside a highway, not by the airport. It is a long, unhurried, high-income drive with little else to look at, which is why it is priced the way it is. The Bengaluru hoarding guide covers that stretch in detail.

The forecourt and the approach. Car parks, the drop-off, the taxi and cab ranks, the airport bus that runs into the city, and the hotels and convention space that have grown up around Devanahalli. Some of this belongs to the airport and some does not.

The terminals. Everything past the boundary is airport media, sold by the operator's concessionaire on its own terms, with its own approval process for artwork and installation.

Ask a seller which of these three a site belongs to before you look at the rate. It decides who permits it, who insures it and who you call when it is not up on the first day.

Two terminals, and they do not behave the same way

The older terminal is dense and conventional, and the formats there are the ones most people picture: panels along the walk, baggage belts, trolleys, pillars.

The newer terminal was built around a garden and its design is protected. That limits what can be placed, where, and in what material, and it pushes the inventory towards digital screens and built installations rather than printed panels. Approval takes longer and the property is willing to say no.

Which flights use which terminal has changed since the second one opened and can change again. Ask, in writing, which terminal your site is in and which passengers pass it. A brilliantly placed panel in the wrong terminal reaches nobody you wanted.

Where attention actually sits on this trip

Departing, a passenger is anxious and moving. The drop-off, the check-in queue, the security tray area, the long walk, then the gate where they finally sit down and look at a phone.

Arriving, the same person is tired and stationary. The aerobridge and the walk. The baggage belt, which is the one place in any airport where a person stands still and bored for ten or twenty minutes with nothing to do. The arrivals exit, where families wait, some of them for an hour. Then the taxi queue and a drive of an hour or more into the city.

Arrivals is the side most plans underbuy, and it is the side that suits a Bengaluru business. The traveller is coming into your market with time in a cab to search what they just saw.

Who is in this terminal

The domestic short-haul shuttle to Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune, which is the same set of business travellers over and over. The tech corridor's international travel to the Gulf, Singapore and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Families returning in the summer and in December. Students and their parents in the admission months. Workers on the Gulf routes, travelling on a different schedule and carrying different concerns.

The honest description of this audience is frequency rather than reach. An airport reaches a fairly small number of people a great many times. That is exactly right for a name you want a visiting decision maker to recognise a year from now, and exactly wrong for an offer that ends on the thirtieth.

What a business here gets from the airport that it cannot get elsewhere

Property sold to buyers who live abroad and visit twice a year. Hospitals that treat patients travelling for a procedure. Jewellery and wedding businesses catching families as they land for the season. Education consultants in the admission months. Resorts in Coorg, Chikkamagaluru and around Mysuru, speaking to somebody who has just landed and has not decided where the weekend goes. Industrial and technology companies who want the person flying in for a plant visit to have seen the name before the meeting.

If your customer list does not look like any of those, the terminal is a very expensive way to reach the wrong people.

Devanahalli has become its own market

The area around the airport is no longer only an airport. There is an aerospace and hardware manufacturing belt, industrial land, hotels and convention space, and a long run of new housing along Bellary Road and the Thanisandra side.

For a business selling to those companies or those households, the estates and the approach road are the better buy. They cost a fraction of anything inside the terminal. That is the trade nobody selling terminal media will point out.

One location, or a brand people carry home

A single-branch business almost never belongs inside the terminal. Your buyer is thirty or forty kilometres away, and the person reading your panel is on their way out of the city. The exceptions are the businesses whose customer is the traveller: a hotel, a car service, a resort, a hospital with genuine medical travel.

For a brand sold across the state, or to people who fly, the terminal does something no other medium in Bengaluru does. Buy it for cycles rather than weeks, and pair it with search on your own name, because the traveller looks you up from the cab. Airport advertising covers the buying and the property approvals.

What the quotation must break out

• The terminal, the exact location, and whether it is before or after security
• A photograph dated this month, taken from where the passenger walks or stands
• Whether it is departures or arrivals, and which passengers pass it
• For a digital screen, the loop length and how many seconds of it are yours
• Production, installation and de-installation as their own lines, at the property's specification
• The approval process for artwork, and how long it takes
• The concession holder's name and the term of the concession
• What happens to your cycle if the area is closed for works
• Taxes, written out

Keep any Bellary Road hoarding in a separate section of the same plan. Two permissions, two owners, two invoices.

When to spend it somewhere else

When your buyer lives in Bengaluru and drives everywhere. When the campaign has a deadline. When your website, your listing and the person answering the phone are not ready. The airport is the costliest place in the city to advertise a business nobody can find afterwards.

And when the same money would buy you a year on the roads your customers actually use. For most businesses in this city, it would.

What to do next

Look at your last hundred customers and mark how many of them flew in to buy from you. If it is zero, you have your answer. If it is not zero, book the free audit and bring the terminal plan you have been sent. We will read it against the rest of your media before anything is booked.