Roadside Mumbai-ism

The recent trend started by an advertising firm to promote Mumbai through roadside hoardings seems to be catching up fast.

The recent trend started by an advertising firm to promote Mumbai through roadside hoardings seems to be catching up fast. HT recently reported how Bright Advertising will be promoting prominent city landmarks and cultural events through their unused hoardings. Now a construction firm, Omkar Realtors and Developers, seems to have joined the bandwagon. The firm has come up with an initiative whereby it will highlight common words and phrases which are part of everyday life in Mumbai and give them witty definitions. One such example would be, ‘Ladies Compartment: Bogies reserved for women, their catfights, gossip and shopping, says Devang Verma, director, Omkar Developers. “The idea is to create a form of visual communication that is amusing and gives Mumbaikars a moment of relief from their hectic schedule. It also offers a light topic of conversation while stuck in traffic.”

HT Image

Currently, the firm is using three hoardings for the project titled Mumbaipedia. There’s one near Vakola (Santa Cruz), one in Andheri East both on the Western Express highway and one in Sion on the Eastern Express highway. Each of these slogans will be displayed for a week, and the project will go on for a year. There are more locations in the pipeline. Devang says, “More locations will be added in the near future. Our in-house marketing team and our creative agency came up with the idea. Similar creative concepts may have been experimented with globally. The idea has been appreciated and has an overall feel-good factor.”

Some of the slogans used:
* Playground: 1 % of Mumbai land that produced one world-famous master blaster.
* Vada pav: Mumbai’s favourite snack — also describes a massage that people endure in packed trains.
* Bai: Powerful women who dictate the lives of working women in Mumbai.
* Flamingo: A tall pink bird that owns mudflats in Sewri, which it comes to visit annually.
* Queue: A formation that takes up 45 minutes per day of a Mumbaikar.