About all things unimportant

Ragu had posted a comment about the Elevator adveritsing, added my 2 cents on why it might work and why it may not

Why it will not work 

It is difficult to crunch numbers for captive audience

1)  Lets assume that the average height of an indian commercial/residential building is about 5 floors and there are 5000 such buildings in Bangalore. Assuming that we start operations only in Bangalore and that the captive audience from ground floor to average floor ( 5 in this case ) and the journey time from the ground floor to the average floor would be 15 seconds and the average stoppage time at each of the floors ( people getting off at particular floors ) is about another 10 seconds ( accounting for non peak hours ). Another assumption is that on an average , the elevator makes about 50 trips from ground floor to top most floor and back and that on an average you have 2 people per trip.

You would have realized by now that a lot of assumptions have to be made to even arrive at a rough estimate of potential captive audience. For a more serious analysis you might need to read something like this to get started. We can make some simplifying assumptions by stating that we will look only at Commercial complexes which are more than 10 storeys tall. Who knows, this might just make the business model viable. In fact, there is every chance that viability of this business model depends on following

a) Selecting buildings which are beyond some threshold height ( say 10 storeys )

b) Ensuring that targetting advertisements are  dished out intelligently ( say a short 5 second promo ) if the doors closed and the only storey pressed was 3 ( out of 15 storeys ) and dishing out a longer advertisement of 20 seconds if the storeys that were selected were say beyond a threshold length ( 2 seconds per floor * optimum storey count ( say 7 in this case ) ).

 
Why it may work  

In short we can create the most amazing mathematical models and will still not be able to say convincingly if the business idea would be successful or not. This boils down to an issue of "Bias for action, Bias for analysis" that we learnt in our Enterpreneurship elective. When do you draw a line and say that any more analysis would just make minor refinements in our understanding .. and that the best way of validating this idea is to just jump in and "Just do it".

In this particular case, people who jump in to implement this idea might just figure out a way of making this a viable business.

As for me , my bias for Analysis tells me that "In Elevator advertising" may not work in India because of the shorter buildings and the fact that "Building density" in India is not as good enough to make this business model successful.