Beyond screens: Industry leaders chart the future of high-impact consumer touchpoints

As digital fatigue deepens, some of India's sharpest media and creative minds gathered recently to ask a pointed question: where does consumer attention truly live today, and how do brands reach it?

The discussion surfaced something the industry has long sensed but rarely said plainly — that the measurement frameworks governing media planning for decades are straining under the weight of a consumer who no longer moves in predictable, channel-defined ways. Fragmented attention, misattribution across touchpoints, and the growing cost of meaningful engagement have become structural headaches for agencies and clients alike. Amazon On Package Ads, Amazon's physical media format entered this conversation not as a ready answer but as a format the room collectively stress-tested against these very pressures.

Shashi Sinha, CEO of Laqshya, offered a framework that cut through the noise early. "All kinds of advertising target three kinds of change — cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral," he said. "Formats that take consumers from awareness to action without diluting or attenuating the message — those media formats are better, stronger." The implication was uncomfortable but clear: much of current media investment sits in formats that create significant resistance between exposure and action, without anyone being held fully accountable for that attrition.

Sonal Jadhav, Managing Partner - West at Havas Media, named a structural problem that has quietly plagued cross-channel planning. "The consumer is moving seamlessly across mediums — he's not looking at it as a medium, the way we are. He is moving across formats. Hence, a lot of misattribution tends to happen." She argued that the industry has spent considerable energy on attribution when the more honest challenge is managing misattribution — knowing what a medium cannot claim credit for, as much as what it can.

The attribution problem is particularly acute for physical and non-screen formats. Sinha was candid about the limits of current measurement practice. "Attention cannot be measured. Attention has traditionally been measured by proxy — time spent listening, time spent reading, time spent watching. The journey from exposure to product adoption is so long, and there are so many influences on it. Clear attribution has not been possible."

Vipul Pareek, National Head at Times OOH, framed the industry's evolution bluntly. "Earlier, OOH was a simple vanilla site getting sold. Now clients are asking for ROIs, which were never there before." Post-COVID, tolerance for media that cannot explain its own performance has collapsed. Creative innovations have helped OOH demonstrate impact, but the measurement question has not been fully answered.

Prash Gaikwad, National Creative Director at WPP Media, identified a creative failure that compounds the problem. "We look at it as a medium, which is not the case. It is a medium that is talking to you. How do I make that static media active? The approach should be — talkability, word of mouth, and advocacy." His point was that the industry has been too passive in its use of physical formats, treating presence as impact rather than designing for engagement.

It was in this context that OPA entered the discussion. Shilpi Barkam, GM - India Externalization at Amazon On Package Ads, anchored the format's proposition in the emotional state of unboxing. "Customers are anticipating that package," she said. "Even though you might have bought it day in, day out, there's that moment of gratification — and that is a heightened, positive, receptive state of mind." Jayesh Yagnik, CEO of Moms Outdoor Media Solutions, saw the strongest use case in categories like BFSI, where contextual relevance between the product being ordered and the advertised category could be tightly mapped. Pareek positioned it as a natural extension of OOH. "For every other media vehicle, I have to switch it on. The important USP of Amazon is that you do not have to open anything — it is right there, it is unmissable."

Ramesh Bhaskaran, Chief Creative Officer at Madison Out of Home, and Gaikwad both stressed that creative quality would ultimately determine the format's longevity. Bhaskaran argued that consumer conditioning was a prerequisite. "When Thumbs Up used to do the under-the-cap thing, we used to collect those because there was something in it for us," he recalled. "We should know that every Amazon package has something more to it — a story, a crime thriller to solve. It has to be interesting, it has to engage."

The most candid exchange came around proof of execution. Jadhav raised the core anxiety: "For any outdoor campaign, a client can go and see the live site. Here, he cannot go to a consumer's home and see whether it is getting delivered or not." It is the kind of verification gap that has historically slowed the adoption of emerging formats, and several voices in the room confirmed their teams had encountered it firsthand when pitching to clients.

Deepshikha Bhardwaj of Schbang suggested a 70-20-10 budget model, where OPA fits naturally within the 10% earmarked for innovation and experimentation, a pilot-first, scale-later approach she felt most marketers would find pragmatic. Vikas Nowal, CEO of Interspace Communications, and Raktim Borthakur of Starcom both pointed to relevance and contextual precision as the format's long-term differentiators. "Relevancy and context — these two things would define the success of future off-screen campaigns," Nowal said.

The roundtable closed with a shared sense that OPA sits at a genuinely interesting inflection point: innovative enough to capture attention, but still building the measurement infrastructure that will take it from experiment to line item.