As the digital landscape continues to evolve, so too does the potential for technology to be a force for good. Through a blend of entrepreneurial spirit and social responsibility, advertising is now a platform to create meaningful connections and drive positive change in the world.
For MARKETECH APAC’s latest Milestone Series piece, we spoke with Srikanth Ramachandran, founder of Moving Walls, to share one of his greatest milestones — employing programmatic DOOH technology to guide charitable initiatives needing exposure on digital screens situated in the real world.
In this feature, Ramachandran shares his journey and experiences in leading the company, starting the Moving Hearts initiative, and working with NGOs to run campaigns in Southeast Asia.
Shifting paradigms and ‘Moving Hearts’
Ramachandran’s Moving Walls is an adtech company that works with out-of-home media owners across the world as an end-to-end enterprise solutions provider.
While working on expanding the company’s reach, Ramachandran and his team were able to reflect on the state of OOH media as a channel for advertising and its effect on the larger community.
With a collective belief in the media’s transformative power that goes beyond commercial messaging, Ramachandran and his team launched an environmental, social, and corporate governance initiative in November 2023.
Named ‘Moving Hearts’, the initiative aims to break through with the power of OOH media to spotlight social and humanitarian causes. By bridging the gap between charitable organisations and community groups with available OOH media slots on short notice, Moving Walls’ ‘Moving Hearts’ provided these organisations with a platform for their philanthropic campaigns to reach a wider audience.
Ramachandran said, “At Moving Walls, all of us, as individuals, believe to our core that the media has an unparalleled opportunity to move minds. So we thought, why not use this airtime—the unsold spot or inventory that would have otherwise gone to waste—to support and amplify positive community causes that do not have the budgets to access high-reach media channels? ”
“You can call us a catalyst for social sustainability. But this was our biggest motivator to connect media owners to charitable causes and bridge the growing divide between amplifying a cause and inspiring action,” he added.
Amplifying social causes one screen at a time
Since its inception, the Moving Hearts initiative has expanded its reach in Southeast Asia. Ramachandran and his team were able to work on several campaigns, leveraging Moving Walls’ advanced technology to match registered charities to available DOOH inventory from supporting media owners.
When asked what was most memorable among those campaigns, Ramachandran shared that he believed each cause was special to him and his team. But among these campaigns, some left a special mark on him and occupied a special space in his heart.
In Malaysia, Moving Hearts was able to support two youth networks with a digital OOH campaign to amplify the good work they were doing. They also ran a campaign to create awareness about free screening and the importance of early detection as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
For Singapore, the initiative helped in securing airtime devoted to dementia, the care providers, and creating awareness of mental health issues. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, Moving Hearts collaborated with UNICEF to carry out a fundraising campaign for Christmas. And in Vietnam, the initiative was also able to support two children’s charities.
“On a personal note, my visit to the National Cancer Society of Malaysia, a cause we’ve recently supported, left me feeling humbled. Experiencing their work firsthand, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of insignificance. Yet, simultaneously, there was a swell of pride knowing that through Moving Hearts, we’re able to make a modest difference,” Ramachandran shared.
Moving Walls, breaking boundaries
Organising an initiative as big as Moving Hearts doesn’t come off as easy and sweet as it sounds. While navigating the complexities of digital OOH technology, Ramchandran has also encountered challenges in engaging media partners and aligning causes with willing stakeholders.
Ramachandran and his team had to deal with a lack of direct media ownership, meaning they had to work on engaging their media partners who possess these assets for them to contribute to the cause.
They also have to make sure they align the causes to be integrated on the OOH platforms of willing media owners and execute the campaigns with as minimal disruption as possible to all stakeholders involved.
To tackle these challenges, Ramachandran invested in a dedicated team that was inspired to make a difference. Leveraging Moving Walls’ programmatic technology, they can automate the process of playing the right content at the right location at the right time.
Furthermore, with the company’s patented DOOH audience measurement, they were able to report to all stakeholders the number of hearts each campaign had reached. This part is important, as measuring a campaign’s reach is critical to sustaining their initiative.
With hard work and dedication to their initiative, Ramachandran and his team were able to hit 3 billion impressions, deploy 8 campaigns, and are Moving Hearts in five markets. This they fulfilled in the last six months only, making this their biggest success yet as they continue to work on the initiative.
Aside from what they’re doing now, Ramachandran also plans to go beyond just driving awareness for social causes to implement best practices for OOH media owners to offset their carbon footprint.
He shared, “There’s a widely held belief by investors that organisations with high ESG performers can drive superior financial results. Moving Hearts plans to address all three pillars of ESG (environmental, social, and governance). To us, social sustainability isn’t simply about looking inward at our organisation’s process; it is also about leveraging a larger ecosystem of our partner’s assets as well.”
Navigating boundaries and moving towards the future
For Ramachandran, building the company first in a market as vast as Asia meant that they had to deal with a lot of unique challenges like fragmentation, a lack of standardisation when it comes to measurement and formats, and a variety of rules for OOH advertising in different markets.
Nonetheless, establishing roots in emerging markets has positioned the company favourably to cater to the rapidly expanding global markets. Ramachandran and his team’s experiences have taught them how to provide bespoke or white-label solutions that address specific use cases for media buyers and owners.
The company was able to set up multiple support hubs, form on-the-ground teams, and provide advice to media owners and advertisers who may be at different stages of their OOH advertising journeys.
Looking ahead and examining the evolution of technology platforms, Ramachandran highlighted two parallel trends that will affect Moving Walls and the advertising space in general.
He pointed out how omnichannel platforms are evolving to support new media channels like DOOH. At the same time, specialised platforms are building solutions to digitally transform traditional media channels like OOH, audio, and TV.
Ramachandran explained, “The key implication for us and other players in our ecosystem is to improve interoperability. Marketers and publishers will have to work with several partners depending on their specific needs, and for them to experience the main benefits of technology—efficiency and automation—these platforms need to be able to work with each other.”
A decade of shaping the future and driving growth
When asked what he considers his greatest achievement over the past decade of leading Moving Walls, Ramachandran said that there is not one single greatest achievement but rather many that he has treasured along his journey.
The company has received numerous external recognitions, including recognition for being among the top startups globally and for having a highly valuable product in 2021.
However, aside from these big moments, Ramachandran shared that a different feeling of accomplishment would fill his heart when he started to remember the company’s humble beginning years ago and the fact that many of the people who were there at that beginning are still with him and the company now.
Being in the industry for the past three decades, Ramachandran has experienced a lot. He has lived and worked in multiple countries for global and multinational corporations and also entered a successful entrepreneurial venture with Knowledge Dynamics.
His experience building an industry vertical product whose revenues are derived from software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been a unique experience that has made him learn and unlearn a lot of new skills.
Reflecting on it all, Ramachandran simply said, “I believe that I have grown as a professional, a leader, and an entrepreneur. Furthermore, I believe that the Moving Hearts platform has offered me an opportunity to apply my time when other capable leaders inevitably take the helm at Moving Walls in the future.”
This piece is published under MARKETECH APAC’s content series ‘Milestones’, which celebrates the different milestones and achievements of industry leaders across the Asia-Pacific region. Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.
