How to advertise to IT employees

An IT park is one of the few consumer audiences in India whose movements you can put on a timetable. Thousands of people arrive between half past eight and half past ten, eat in the same food courts between half past twelve and two, and leave between six and nine. They are reachable at the gate, in the lift lobby, on the cab ride and in the food court, at hours you can predict to the quarter hour. You can set a watch by it. The mistakes are almost always in the schedule, not the creative: the wrong days, the wrong shift, and a radius that quietly buys the whole of Outer Ring Road.

Buy the days, not the month

Hybrid working broke the old assumption that a campus is equally full all week. Tuesday to Thursday is when the desks fill. Monday and Friday are lighter in most large campuses, and a schedule that spreads a month evenly is paying full rate for two thin days.

Ask the vendor for footfall by day, and be suspicious of an annual average. If nobody can answer, the answer is available for the price of standing at the gate on a Friday morning.

Know which shift you are reaching

A campus is not one audience. The day shift leaves at six. The people working US hours are at their desks from two in the afternoon until eleven at night, and the ones on the late shift walk out at three in the morning to a waiting cab.

That changes everything about the offer. A restaurant advertising a nine o'clock dinner slot is reaching the evening shift, not the crowd that left at six and is now stuck in traffic in Marathahalli. A gym advertising six in the morning is talking to a small and very specific group. A salon open until ten catches a queue nobody else is serving.

What the money looks like

Salary lands on the last working day of the month for most of this audience, and the first week is when the spending happens. Appraisal letters and increments arrive in the first quarter for a large part of the industry, and variable pay lands in defined months rather than randomly.

For example, a furniture rental company running a campaign in the first week of the month and a second push in April finds the same creative performs differently in the same campus, because one week has money in it and the other does not. The figures will be your own, and the rhythm is dependable.

Where a tech park budget leaks

Newspaper. This audience does not take one, and the ones who do read it on a phone.

Cold calls from an unknown number. It will not be answered, and a bulk SMS will be reported.

A lead form promising a callback. They will not take the call at work and will not remember by evening.

Brand-building creative with no address. The person seeing your board has eleven minutes between the gate and the desk, and needs to know how far away you are.

And a five kilometre radius around a campus, which in Whitefield or Electronic City buys a hundred thousand people who commute in the other direction. Keep it tight, exclude the areas you do not serve, and check the location report in the second week.

Getting inside is worth more than getting near

The gate board is the outside of the campus. The stall in the atrium, the wellness day, the festival mela and the vendor desk are inside it, and they put you in front of a captive audience with the employer's implied approval.

This is a permissions job with the admin and facility team, not a media buy. There is an application, a security clearance and a slot calendar that fills months ahead. IT park advertising is mostly that paperwork. The reward is that a stall at lunch in a single campus can produce more in three days than a month of boards outside it.

Two things this audience will not forgive

A false address. A board that says "opening soon near you" and turns out to be nine kilometres away gets a public review saying so, and this is a group that writes reviews.

A hard sell at the food court table. Sampling works, a stall works, a QR code on the tray mat works. A person standing over somebody eating a twenty-five minute lunch does not, and the facility team hears about it.

The residential half of the same audience

Because part of the week is worked from home, the campus is only half the audience. The same people are in Whitefield, Bellandur, Sarjapur Road, Electronic City and Hebbal on Monday and Friday, ordering lunch, booking a haircut and taking the dog out.

Run the apartment complexes and the neighbourhood high street on those days, and the campus media midweek. It is the same person at two addresses, and treating it as one budget stops you paying twice for the same pair of eyes.

What to do next

Before you book anything, spend two days establishing which campus your customers actually come from. Ask at the counter, look at the delivery addresses, or simply check where the cabs drop at eight in the morning. Then buy the three days and the two hours that match. If you want the schedule built and the radius settings checked against what you actually serve, book the free audit.