The Six-Day Campaign
On December 11, 2025, we decided to run 100 hoardings across 50 cities and take front-page newspaper ads in every major Hindi-belt publication.
The first hoarding went live on December 17.
Six days.
This is not a story about how we did it efficiently. It's a story about what the pressure of a hard deadline reveals about how decisions actually get made — and what I'd do differently with more time.
Why We Did It at All
December is the biggest revenue month of the year for Testbook. Exam notifications cluster in the fourth quarter. Students who have been considering purchasing finally commit.
We had built our December strategy around standard channels:
- Influencers
- Referral amplification
- Performance marketing
- Internal CRM communications
These were working. The targets were ambitious.
But I kept coming back to one concern: all of these channels talk to people who already know us. Influencer audiences, referral networks, our CRM database — these are existing Testbook users or users adjacent to them.
For a product at our scale — 13 million annual active users, 3.5 million paid subscribers — the next wave of growth has to come from somewhere outside our existing reach.
OOH and print reach people who don't know us:
- Students walking past a hoarding in Ranchi
- A family reading a newspaper in Varanasi over chai
- Not people in our funnel — people who aren't in our funnel yet
The decision to do it wasn't complicated. The decision to do it in six days was.
The Most Stressful Part
I'll be honest: the hardest part was not the hoardings. It was doing everything at once.
The timeline compressed every workstream simultaneously:
- Site selection across 50 cities
- Vendor negotiations in each market
- Creative production — multiple versions for different markets
- Newspaper booking — advance deadlines, print specs, market-by-market negotiations
- Influencer coordination — running parallel to OOH
- Internal communications scheduling
All of this in 2–3 days of actual execution time, because the first few days were consumed by planning, negotiation, and decision-making.
What saved us: Ruthless prioritization of which decisions only I could make.
There are decisions that only I can make — which markets to prioritize, what the creative direction is, where the negotiating floor is. And decisions that can be made by whoever is closest to the work. Confusing these two categories is how bottlenecks form.
I tried to stay in the first category and get out of the second as fast as possible.
The Site Selection Framework
The hoarding site selection was the most technically demanding piece.
We used:
- Population density maps — hexagon-level concentration of government exam aspirants
- Street View analysis — visibility, road positioning, traffic flow, viewing angles
This gave us a defensible framework that also made vendor negotiations faster — we could point to specific reasons for preferring one site over another rather than negotiating on gut feel.
The Moment It Worked
You don't always know in real time whether a big campaign is working. Hoardings, especially, the feedback loop is long.
What we saw in the days after launch was different from what I expected:
Students were sharing the hoardings. Organic photos of our ads appearing in:
- Instagram stories
- WhatsApp groups
- Tagged mentions from influencers we were working with
The overlap between channels created a momentum that individual channels don't generate on their own:
- Hoarding sightings amplified by influencers
- Influencer content reinforced by physical presence
- Internal communications land differently against a backdrop of physical visibility
Physical presence changes how every digital touchpoint performs. That's not a hypothesis — we measured it.
Post-campaign survey results:
| Channel | Transactor Recall |
|---|---|
| Newspaper | 35% |
| Hoarding | 33% |
The Google Trends data showed what we'd seen in previous brand campaigns: a spike in branded search tracking the campaign timing.
Physical presence drives digital intent. People who see a hoarding don't always act immediately — they file it, and when the intent crystallizes later, they search.
What I'd Do Differently With More Time
1. Start site selection earlier. The quality of OOH is almost entirely about location. A hoarding in the wrong place is not just ineffective — it's actively expensive. The systematic site evaluation we did in 2–3 days would have been better with a week. We would have secured better sites in some markets and walked away from marginal ones in others.
2. Separate creative timelines from booking timelines. In a compressed execution, creative production and media booking happen simultaneously — which means neither gets full attention. Creative that has to be approved in hours instead of days shows it. The newspaper ads in particular could have been sharper with more time.
3. Pre-negotiate before you need it. The vendors we negotiated with in December knew we were under time pressure. That knowledge changes the negotiation. Ideally, you're talking to OOH vendors in October about December inventory — before you've committed to a plan, before the urgency is visible.
The deals available before you need something are always better than the deals available after.
What the Campaign Actually Proved
Beyond the specific results, the December campaign settled a question I'd had:
Does physical media move the needle for a digital subscription product?
The answer, clearly, is yes — but not in the way most people model it.
It doesn't drive direct purchase. The mechanism is more indirect:
Physical presence → familiarity → trust → every subsequent digital touchpoint becomes more effective
The influencer video you see after noticing the hoarding lands differently. The performance marketing ad you encounter after seeing the newspaper ad converts at a higher rate.
Physical media is a trust amplifier for digital channels. That's harder to measure than direct attribution — which is probably why most digital-native companies underinvest in it.
But it's real. And the survey and search data gave us enough signal to be confident.
We're planning to do it again. With more lead time.
Dhairya Mehta is Director of Growth and Marketing at Testbook, where he owns the P&L of India's largest exam-prep subscription. He writes about growth, India's developing market, and building things.
Post a Comment