OOH World
Finding and booking outdoor advertising space across India
Out-of-home advertising in India runs on WhatsApp, PowerPoint and spreadsheets. A brand wants hoardings in three cities; an agency mails back a deck of photographs with handwritten rates, and nobody involved can tell you what’s actually available next month. OOH World is my attempt at the boring infrastructure underneath that.
The pieces
It grew into a small family of applications rather than one app, because the jobs are genuinely different:
- Inventory database — the media itself: hoardings, gantries, and the rest, with location, dimensions, illumination, and availability. Bulk import from the CSVs and PPTX decks the industry already runs on, because asking anyone to retype their inventory is how you never get their inventory.
- Map search — Leaflet over the Indian cities, filtered down by state → city → media type. Search starts from a map because that’s how the buying decision is actually made: you want that junction, not a list.
- Booking — availability, holds, and the campaign paperwork.
- Media manager — the deliverable half. Campaign photos in, and a client-ready deck or spreadsheet out, via PPTX, PDF and Excel export. The deck is the industry’s unit of communication, so the tool has to produce one rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.
- Field capture app — a React Native app for monitoring photos with location and timestamp attached, so proof-of-display isn’t a WhatsApp image of unknown provenance.
Why it looks plain
The interface is deliberately close to boring: a form on the left, a map on the right, and a result set that fits on one screen. The people using this are on a laptop in an agency office comparing four sites against a client brief. Anything decorative in that layout is something they have to look past to do their job.