Branding on the move: Manjari Upadhye on why context is the new currency in automotive OOH

Manjari Upadhye, Chief Marketing Officer — Auto at Mahindra and Mahindra Limited, took centre stage at the e4m OOH Conference 2026 for a fireside chat that cut through the noise around out-of-home advertising to offer a sharply practical perspective on how automotive brands can build narratives beyond screens. The session was moderated by Kanchan Srivastava, Senior Editor & Group Editorial Evangelist, exchange4media.

Upadhye opened with two principles she described as foundational to any effective OOH strategy. "If you look at outdoor, all categories can leverage from it — from airlines to all bin, everything. The two big vectors are context, and that's absolutely critical, and the other is the call to action that you really want your consumers to take," she said, setting the tone for a conversation that kept returning to both.

On the question of context, Upadhye was pointed about where automotive OOH tends to go wrong. Using RWA elevator lobby advertising as an example, she asked the room a question worth sitting with: "If you are standing in your society building near the elevator and you see an advertisement of a car that's talking about space and great interiors, and then you get into your elevator, has it done anything to build your context?" Travel retail, she argued, was the far stronger alternative — a space where audiences are primed, aspirational, and receptive.

She was equally direct about what the medium can realistically deliver. "It could be just like people consuming empty calories — just empty impressions," she said of digital OOH placements that prioritise scale over relevance. For feature-heavy or technology-led communication, she maintained that customers are "most appreciative of it when they take a test drive and experience it on their own." The implication was clear: "Getting the walk-ins into the dealership is the main task, whether it's a highway or it's a travel retail or anywhere else."

Upadhye pointed to Mahindra's commercial vehicle vertical as a proof point for what contextually sound OOH can achieve. Stands-based outdoor — where transporters gather to move goods — had delivered measurable booking numbers through 30-day hoardings, outperforming even television. "Stands outdoor is the maximum ROI delivering element. More than TV, more than any digital," she said.

On the future, her optimism was unguarded. "At some point in time, outdoor will be able to tell stories that we tell through digital in places where customers are waiting, or in places where traffic jams — and that would be the beauty of that coming together with digital that I look forward to leveraging," she said.

Asked finally which creative challenge was harder — building aspiration in a 30-second film or a three-second glance at a traffic signal — she did not hesitate. "30-second aspiration is still more difficult. To build aspiration in 30 seconds in today's automotive world — find their interior comfort and to talk about all of that and tell a story — it's a very difficult task."